I have began to start making my own assets since I figured it would be better in the long run since they will be mine and I won’t have to worry about copyright. I will also gain experience. My question is for game developers and how much time they spend making just assets, not the coding or anything. Let’s say it’s a 3 year long development, Jan 1st they got the green light for their art, story, and whatever. Then 3 years later on Dec 31st they are done completely and will be releasing it digitally. How much of that time is spent on the assets, characters, weapons, environments, etc.
That’s an extremely broad question, asset creation depends on what you’re creating and how many people are working on it and the skill of those people.
If your making a game and assets that matters then time can not be accounted for as in most cases it’s an “art is never finished but abandoned” concept. As part of the consideration is not just the time it takes to build the asset but what are the implantation requirements of say a character model that could take up to a year to develop the first that sets the pathway of the rest to follow. One can not excluded the coding requirements as it will and should always be about making the asset work with the code and not the other way around.
Once you have a pathway of how things should be built and where it has to go so even though the first player model could take a year it would be possible to do up dozens or more depending on the “system” design.
Another consideration of how fast a game can be developed in 2017 is the availability of ready made assets that can be modified for a given project. As an animator I already have a large library of motion capture data that I can retask for any project I’m working on so the “time” spent could be weeks instead of years to develop the same amount of required assets using tools design to make that task faster.