How long does it take to create a video game?

A common question about video games is how long it takes to develop one. But the answer to this is very disappointing: it depends on a lot of variables. And even though we want a short answer, the time will change depending on the type of game, the designs, and the teams required.

If we had to say a number, for example, big-budget games can take from three to five years to develop; while mobile game apps can take only a few months.

So let’s take a look at some of the elements that impact game development time and how many months or years it may take for big games, mobile games, or indie games.

Factors that affect video game development time

Some of the things that can affect how long a game will take are:

Game design
Game engine
Coding
Game art
Music and sound effects

Your game may not require all these elements, and obviously, the more things the game needs the more it will take to develop.

Game engine

The first thing to take into account when developing a video game is the engine. You need to know if you’re going to build one from scratch or to build your game on top of existing libraries.

Game engine development can take anywhere from a couple of days to years. And the process of building requires a considerable amount of expertise added to your game development. If you decide to build on top of an existing engine, your time and costs will drop. But the possibilities for your game in terms of what you can add to it.

Game design

In case you don’t know this, before the actual coding and building, you need to make a game design document, which is the ideal way of planning your course of action for your video game.

The good news is a good design document should take only a few hours for a simple game. And for a more complex game, it might take a bit more, maybe half a day. But for an RPG (role-playing video game) it may take several weeks because you will need to write the whole story first.

Coding

Again, coding time for a video game is very relative to the features you want to include in the game. For instance, if you want to include firearms, that’s a feature. If those guns have bullets, that’s another feature. If the bullets kill some aliens, there you have another one. And if then those aliens’ corpses form a different monster that’s another feature.

Each feature is generally small enough to program and implement in half a day of work. But then you have to triple that to find out how long everything will take. And this time will depend on the expertise and skills of the developers.

Art

While the coding time depends on the number of features, the time for artwork depends on how much art there is in your game. And this you should specify beforehand in your game design document.

For instance, every character, every gun, every scenery, house, wall, food, or tree will need an artist to create it. And for some complex games, this can be a huge chore, specially for new developers. Every single thing adds a lot of time to the creation time. And the amount of time is not as easy to predict as programming, because art and creativity flow in different ways.

But some artists say they can take up to a day for one character. But keep in mind this includes the character with all its animations. And in a small game, you would have around 12 characters, plus monsters and backgrounds, sets, and so on.

Sound and music

Music has the same conditions as art, although you can re-use a lot of music for most of the game, depending on your plans. Complex and orchestral music will require a lot of time, while simpler tunes will be faster to produce and add. The simpler version will take around one day per track for a professional musician.

Sound effects are a different story. Usually, they are easier than music, unless you have very specific needs for specific things, like a laser gun or a monster. You may take a couple of hours per sound.

What about types of games?

AAA Games:

These are the big-budget games, the ones that can cost millions and millions in development, with large marketing teams behind. For instance, games like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto V, and Assassin’s Creed are AAA games.

In most cases, these big-budget games may take from three to five years to build, assuming the company is starting from zero: from the initial design stage to the part where they start getting profit from it.

Some games release new versions every year, like Call of Duty or a lot of sports games. This is possible because these big franchises have multiple studios working on different releases of the game. For instance, one will release their game one year, and the second one launches the next. Besides, most of the assets and gameplay mechanics are already there from the previous versions of the game, which makes the development a little bit faster.

Mobile Games

Most mobile games are relatively simple, even the ones that are famous, like Candy Crush. This means the development time was short: no more than a couple of months.

Nevertheless, there are some bigger budget mobile games that may have the same times as AAA games, but those are exceptions. Most companies know that they can launch a game in months and still potentially make a lot of money, so they rarely bother to spend millions in development for a mobile game.

Indie games

Indie games tend to be very unpredictable in development times because most of them are made by part-time developers and they usually are working with limited staff. But we know that many indie games are passion projects and hobby-like work, although there are some clear exceptions.

This type of game can take around a few months to years to be fully developed, and again, this depends on all of the elements of the game we have reviewed here.