Give me a quote please

Community Got Skills? Looking for Talent? Job Offerings
1

Hi,

I am looking for people to give me a quote ($) via PM on how much it would cost if a person would work on my project completing various small tasks that I myself cannot handle mostly due to time constraints. Generally, the tasks are not demanding and as far as I can tell do not require C++ as they can be made with blueprints. Many of them are akin to Unreal starter example content levels so not particularly complex. Basic 3D modeling skills are required to fix lightmap issues on existing models. Besides that, no other skills are demanded. I estimate that an advanced student can basically handle the tasks and certainly long experience of advanced Unreal work is not necessarily required, however this is just my estimate. This is not an official enlistment of work ad but we absolutely need a quote so we can better estimate the finances of the project. Of course, I will keep you in mind when the development moves forward! Some of the features can also be purchased from Marketplace so you would just need to implement them (ie, save and load feature)
The list of work that needs to be done is clarified below:

Game Menu (New Game, Load, Options, Credits, Exit)

Optimize graphic settings applied to game from menu.

Save / Load feature

Optimize for Mac, PS4 and Xbox ports.

Simple random mission structure (the game selects mission based on predefined random chance, adds numerical “reward” per completed mission).

Simple AI on premade animated model (search player, shoot, die when shot)

Implement simple missions to one level which involve flying a drone, pushing objects, watering a garden, cleaning stains and similar simple missions. The amount of the missions varies between 5 to 10. All models and levels are made.

Make a simple death system for player when shot.

Create an oxygen system where the player dies after certain time when wearing a suit.

Make a computer within the game. When the player uses the computer, the camera concentrates on the computer. Within the computer, player can type, scroll and choose through options which can trigger external actions.

Make a simple letter and book system within the game. The player can scroll through pages of a book or hold a postcard for example to examine them more closely.

Optimize first person perspective body for the player (ie. when the player looks down so it’s not just a floating head). Only hand and leg animation needs to be set. The model will likely be pre-purchased.

Make a very simple inventory system. The game has no UI so the items are just displayed in front of the player in his hands. There are only few objects within the game so this system can be rather simplified.

Make a very simple game within this computer (ie, very simple arcade style sidescroller).

Correct lightmaps on several 3d models. No modelling required, only correcting.

Optimize levels lighting and reflection capture. One a bit larger level which takes a bit more time, others are much smaller and take little time. Levels are generally small!

Optimize level streaming on one level, add so that when a mission begins, a new object streams to level which then leads to another to opening of another level when entered.

Make levels “talk” with each other (actions triggered in one level carry a simple effect in the other).

Create a simple random shader for an object, shader is ready made, needs only to be configured to change randomly between these (three variations).

Create a gravity system on two levels where gravity is draws towards spherical planet like object.

Create footstep sound fx system roughly for 4 or 5 different material types. All sounds are already available, the system just needs to be made.

Optimize support for virtual reality headset.

Roughly 30% more of tasks of similar level are likely to occur during the development but which cannot be pre listed completely.

In addition, it is not required but it’s a big bonus if you are also able to some degree of gameplay content creation, ie, create simple missions within the game. It’s always great if you want to more part of the project also content wise!

Additionally, 3d modeling skills are a plus as roughly three more models are still required. An external modeler can be used but its a plus if you have skills in this area too.

Again, C++. sound editing, graphical artistry or other type of work is not asked.

2

Some of those “simple tasks” are not that simple. They range from around 4 hours (one evening) to weeks. So I would say from hundred of $ to thousands.
And I am assuming a bit higher than McFlipburger hourly salary rate.

All tasks alone seem to be very simple, but then you need to connect it to growing game, more you add more you need to test, and add more connecting code. This stuff does not grow linear with size of game , its in many cases expotentional.

3

Many of these are simple, but very time consuming, others (Building a PC-esc machine inside a game, making another game, and Optimizing models) are full jobs in themselves. The other problem is that many of these can be lumped into different pursuits, the coding focused aspects need a different kind of person than the level design, which requires another person for model optimization. You will have difficulty finding someone with the time and knowledge to do all of these. If you find someone who can do all of this they will be expecting to be paid a lot, as they won;t have the time to work on any other project. You may have a better time by posting a few tasks as a single job or buying the script off the marketplace.

4

No offence, but do you really have to be sarcastic?

5

Yes i need to be, many people do not have idea how much time it takes to make seemingly simply task like for eg. setup my character so it has all walking, crouching crawling and wall climbing animations. They think it is just 2-3 hours (yes it is when you perfectly know what to do), they also think (in many cases) that somebody who know how to do it all will work for less than minimal wage. Problem is that somebody who knows how to do all that stuff from op list will not be cheap, ones that are cheap do not know half of those things, they also will need much longer time to accomplish them, so even working for minimal wage it may turn that total amount is higher than hiring professional.

Sarcasm transfers that that message best over internet. And i have suspicious feeling that OP does not have that much money to pay for everything listed, else he/she would simply state hourly rate and how long it should take to complete each task.

Edit.
Op should contact Ironbelly studios, see how much they would charge for those tasks (they are quite cheap for service they provide).
Workload to finish those tasks is about 6month of fulltime work for 2 programmers, that is if you want something better than bunch of scripts that do not work well together. So cost would be about year salary of programmer.

6

if you aren’t a company with good budget you can’t afford pay for that work unless you are rich. That tasks are not “small task” at least the major part.

7

The first and largest problem is going at this as if there can be some sort of estimate or fixed price attached to the work outlined above, much of it is too vague to really budget in any real sense and anyone that is going to give you a set price for work like this is either going to swindle you outright, ask you for more money after they miss their deadline or overcharge you so much to cover their *** that you might end up paying 2-5 times the actual costs.

What you want to do is get an estimate on how much time/money it would take to plan, design and document out all of the work above in order to produce a rough estimate of what’s involved. For that I would budget anywhere from $1000-$2000 for a programmer to sit down for a week or two and produce technical and design specs for everything involved. Once that is in a final state then you can break this down into sprints and give each of them a budget and a schedule with the understanding that at the end of each sprint you could very well be looking at 20-50% higher costs because no matter how well you plan things out there will always be surprises along the way. But at least with a proper foundation of TDD’s, GDD’s, LDD’s, UDD’s and 2-4 week sprints you can get that uncertainty down from 1000% to 20-30%.

Just my 2 cents

8

I have to agree with Ironbelly. I might be able to produce a quote for some of these things, and even super generic and expandable versions of certain things, but your list is too vague. You also mention a saving system from the marketplace; depending on the one you mean it’d be nearly useless for a programmer. So you need to see if it’d be a waste to buy certain items. You’re going to have to bring in somebody to make proper documentation to get this on the road. I think you could do this in a few days, but only if the idea is fully formed. Regardless, you need something better than “30% more tasks” at the bottom.

9

Even if you know perfectly what to do, you mustn’t forget to add extra time for testing. It’s not enough to test something in isolation, even something as basic as an animation, it needs to be properly tested in a range of scenarios. When you add a lot of jobs like the OP has requested, testing becomes exponentially higher because each system affects the others in some way. Every new feature you add may require regression testing on existing systems to make sure you didn’t break something elsewhere. I normally find that implementing something is the easy and quick part, it’s testing it and fixing all the little bugs that takes the most time during development.

It’s something that really creeps up on you and it doesn’t prominently feature in your head until you sit down to test the game and realise how complex the interactions are and how many ways it can break. It is something that will bite you in the backside if you don’t give it proper respect however.

10

40 minutes top if you have the animations ready and there’s no strange physics…?

I mean state machine and animation blueprint are among the easiest and most documented/tutorialized things on UE.

Let’s be real: 60% of his requests could be done by a beginner willing to do the minimun required of research.

For the other half, as you said yourself the range is huge there are easily tasks that can take months.

11

Price a depended from quality very often…

for many ppls 100$ in per hour its big price and seeking about rate under 3-4 $/h

I dont understand why this ppls did it, posts like this… and wasting time many ppls…

sorry ok, some tasks really easy… always depending from exp indeed (=

my channel
http://.youtube.com/user/frostyden
C++/UE4 Blueprints programmer
denbaster@gmail.com

Appreciate it anyway. Cheers Guys :cool:

12

And then you are asked to replicate some animation over, so all guys on all clients do same idle, or better you are asked to sync all animations because aiming guns depends on them. Then you discover that for some reason unreal crashes every time you try to add replicated variable in animation blueprint.

Next task is to do dedicated server for game. What can be easier than this, just build dedicated server binary, maybe add few authority checks in hud. Well not that simple, because dedicated server refuses to calculate any animations correctly. So your “boss” idea of aiming driven by animations is quite undoable in 40 min.

That for eg. happened in my todo list over weekend, luckily am my own boss there, but imagine that situation when you agreed to do those tasks, told your “Boss” that each should take 4 hours, agreed on payment. But they take much longer time due to interactions between.

I was not talking about single tasks from list. I was saying that stuff like in above example happens a lot, and it will happen more when you add more interactions. Indeed that list of tasks is easy when you do each task as separate one, problem grows when you want create game out of it and put them all together.

13

Ok, he wants a price quote and is just vague in his requirements. You can discuss forever , but it wont lead him nowhere.
So is my quote based on programming only (no matter if BP or c++): 2 to 3 digit thousand dollar range, so from 50.000$ to maybe 500.000$ based on the details/complexity/interconnection of the tasks.
I hope this helps to end the discussion and gives a number he can digest.

14

I can do that cheaper between 49.000$ and 499.000$

15

74,34€ -174,87€ i think
:slight_smile:

16

I imagine anyone serious about this actually complied with his request to PM him.

17

Thanks for the many people who PM’d me with a quote and additional info. It is true that some of these are somewhat vague but with further discussion the exact details will of course be narrowed down and I’ll end up probably doing a some of the simpler stuff myself as the community is very knowledgeable should I need advice.

18

that is quite an accurate exchange rate from dollar to euro :stuck_out_tongue:

/offtopic.