Annihilation. Not Planetary. Better.

*yawn* Medium campaign takes a week to prototype (16-18 missions), adding all necessary scripting events (which are only 20 of them tops) gonna take approx. 1 week as well,UI will be just TWO screens(have you played Total annihilation? Like AT ALL?) which are gonna be intermission start and post-mission scoring and mission select screen, and that gonna take 1-2 days for initial design and 1-2 days for finalazing it. Then it gonna take month to fill in all the gaps in maps by a team of 5-6 map developers, while voice actors and game designer along with writer figure out and polish fluff and storytelling elements (which, as in original TA will be restricted to pre-mission narration), WHILE 3d artists render video scenes they've been ordered to. Then it gonna take another month for playtesting and finishing touches. So. quarter of the year tops.
That if we're talking about Total annihilation-like campaign+mission cutscenes for each mission.

If only everything about game development would be as easy as it is in the mind of the critics.

... http://picturesque-games.tk/

And that is what exactly?

That's my site. I am a game developer as well.

Now, If only site moderators would've stopped being self-righteous, all assuming <censored>.

How much of the game have you completed, and have you had to deal with all of the stages you've outlined thus far?

So I've really tried to find your references on that page now, can you link me your best work so far? Something that qualifies you to talk about multi-million dollar projects with teams that go above 30 people?
I mean something that would qualify you to have a better idea than me about game development on that scale? I've build a few little games myself in the past, but I would not call myself a game developer because of that.

Let me shorthand it:

• Prototyping - S-
• Pre-production - B-
• UI design - B+
• Game design - C+
• Map making - D to B (depends on genre, quiet nice with rts, a bit worse with first person, quiet poor with platformers and general 2d-based gameplay)
• Voice acting - i would say - D
• Music composition - C
• Rocket science - B
• Sound design - C
• Modelling E to B(B at basics, C at advanced, E at living objects)
• Texturing - E to B (same)
• Spriting C
• Block punching - A
• Testing - A+

Did that answered your question?

The fact that i am jack of all trades game developer and constantly polish all of my skills and analyze how gamedev cycles go on living and finalized examples on daily basis constantly, puts me beyond "guy which built few little games myself" position, i think.

You're free to think that and I hope you're doing well in your business, but I am not impressed so far from what I've seen, so an opinion from you is still not as meaningful to me as a statement from the devs at Uber or other devs that have worked on games that I've played for hundreds to thousands of hours.
Many of those devs worked on TA then on FA and now on PA and they are telling us: Campaign costs way too much money for us to be a reasonable investment. Trusting them on that seems reasonable.

I mean at least show me a game that you made that I am gonna think "Okay that guy is above my level". Because quite frankly all things I can see on your webpage are either very raw screenshots with no playable game or that unity webplayer thing. Nothing on the level of PA. When I look at PA I see game where I think "okay this is something I could not do myself any time soon". None of your projects create that feeling.

Falling back to last line of defense "don't critique if you haven't achieved" statement. SHAMEFUL.

Well read my edit, but that "line of defense" is not shameful at all. Why would it be? I have my own understanding of game development, based on my experience as professional software developer who has written a few games in his free time for fun, and I have what the "famous" devs wrote about this stuff in relation to games like PA. I agree with their statements and those statements say: A single player campaign is damn expensive.
You're free to critic that and claim it is not expensive, but to get me to believe it you'll need to bring arguments bigger than my own software development experience and also bigger than the words of veteran devs that made the games I played since I was a kid. You've shown nothing that would make me reconsider so far.

I should also point out that you tried to say how cheap a TA-like single player campaign would be, while contradicting the answer that a TA dev has given on the subject. Are you claiming to know more than a person who not only worked on TA, but has been in the game dev industry since '93?

I am pretty sure they had more modern rts campaign in mind, which yes , would be expensive. Stuff which i described is not. After all - starcraft 2 already has few player-made campaigns which can compete with 98-2002 level of rts campaigns (oddysey mission(minus voice acting), starcraft subjection (with full voice acting)) and those took only 1-2 years for a small 3-5 people teams. I am pretty sure 30 people team can handle delivering TA-like campaign in 3 months.

Those games already had in place everything needed to build a campaign. PA would need to build the infrastructure first too, and even then I think you are underestimating - you can't always throw more people at a task to make it go faster. Things like adding new UIs would take far longer than the 1-2 days of design and 1-2 days of implementation you suggested previously, and involve designers, artists, coders and testers. The rest of the estimates given are equally far too small.

Even still, a quick calculation of 30 people x 3 months = $600,000+ in salaries alone (assuming an average salary too, nothing special). Given we aren't talking newly graduated "average" developers here, that figure is far too small, and doesn't include all the other costs of running for those 3 months. $1 million is not an unreasonable estimate, and is more than half of the original entire budget for this game.

Nope, because that's all skills you do yourself (which, as someone in a similar position, is incredibly admirable). I'm on about the team management, recruitment, logistics thereof, etc . . . which you don't seem to have done yet. And that's the part you're repeatedly criticising.

Why doesn't ZeroK have a single player campaign if it's so easy?

Because nobody bothered with it and demand for it were quiet low? I mean there is a mission tool, but community is just not that big. For sp there needs to be at least 1000-2000 players online daily, so making sp campaign would not be entirely pointless.

Most of us are multi-player oriented as well, and the others are often content with skirmish battles.

At least PA has some for of single player and story (basically just lore), ZeroK has basically nothing, yet you hammer PA and praise ZeroK even though ZeroK is lacking something PA at least sort of has...

I'm saying this as someone who really likes ZeroK, it's fun! But like- man you just ran yourself into a hole, and show quite obvious bias.

"Guys, Starcraft 2 - a game made by one of the biggest development behemoths in the world - has custom campaigns and a map editor (which is basically just an advanced Warcraft 3 editor). Why the hell doesn't a large-scale RTS with spherical maps made by an indie team of about 20-30 people have a campaign? Also, here's a webpage of some tiny games I made"