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Art doesn’t actually take that long once you know what you want to make, what wastes time is figuring out what the game is going to be–for example, Bioshock Infinite took 5 years to make, yet probably half of that time was wasted because they changed their minds. There was a huge amount of work that didn’t get used. For an indie it’s more about managing scope, you can’t make something as big as GTAV, but you can make something of the same quality if it’s smaller. And people have done some extremely high quality work with very small teams.
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You said it - managing scope. Managing scope == not making AAA game, which also means BSP levels would work much better for indie production than AAA pipeline.
You can sure make 1-level game that is a size of average Quake 1 DM level, and make it look like Gears of War 1, but you will spend a few years on it. Will you recover the cost? No, you will not. Not to mention any expansion you will do now have to look at least as good as your initial game.
I don’t think you actually made a game, from scratch. Not a mod, not a show case for UE4, but actual game. I did and working on another one and I can tell you that it takes me less time to script something than actually make art that is driven by that script. Concept (whether drawn or imagined) + high poly + low poly + baking + texturing + setting **** up takes much longer than wring code.
Even going by pricing for contract work, a lot of gameplay stuff cost less to make (and takes less time to make) than a single static model. Don’t even get me started with animated models and characters. And to make actual playable level, with models, would probably cost as much as simple gameplay of entire small game.