Building a 3d platformer with 2-5 hours of playtime in 1-week

[MeisterMo]

How much experience does one need in Unreal to be able to build a decent 3d platformer with 2-5 hours of playtime in 1-week. Is it reasonable to expect to build a complete game within a 1-week (i.e. 60-80 hours of dev time)?

This is with the assumption that game assets and Sound Effects are bought online.

Thanks!

[Mind-Brain]

Hey @MeisterMo! Welcome to the forums!

So it’s hard to state how fast one could put together something like that- although I will say minimum 2 hours gameplay within 1 week is a HARD ask even for someone that is very experienced based on the amount of busy and repetitive work required, unless you simply copy and paste (which I wouldn’t call gameplay if it’s the same thing over and over) or use random generation for your levels- which would require tuning of your algorithms alongside the capabilities of the player’s character.

Another thing to consider would be how much planning can be done before that 1 week crunch period.

Platformer content is often burned through at a somewhat fast rate compared to design time, you can artificially inflate that time by making it more difficult and forcing a restart. This is also assuming simple gameplay - run, jump.

I guess the answer would be that a relatively experienced person could throw together 2 hours of gameplay within a week of hard crunch if you’re starting from absolute scratch- but the chances of anyone enjoying those two hours of gameplay would be slim because of the bad design practices that would typically be utilized to meet the deadline. Also, this is assuming any assets would be supplied.

Hope that helps!

[dZh0]

The content will eat your budget.

Characters, animations, textures, VFX, sound, music - all take incredible amount of time and talent. You can give me 5 years and I still wont be able to come up anything resembling music.

Oh! Don’t forget the levels themselves - If one screen/level takes you 5 minutes to go through on average - that’s 24 levels. With 80h that’s almost 3 hours and a half to build and playtest each screen.

We haven’t mentioned the actual gameplay or the game feel or the UI or the actual mechanics.

So… No. I don’t see it possible in any decent capacity. Maybe 1-3 levels with a jumping box and spherical enemies.