I have one month to make an MMO: END

Unfortunately I have to close out my month a day early due to some unforseen car-related issues (ironically directly related to working on this MMO for a month: I didn’t use the car at all during this time and now its battery is flat!)

The final total on time spent is just short of 200 hours on this MMO, over 1 month.

If we subtract the 4 days of vacation, and the 4 days between sprints that I took off for resting and planning, I averaged 9.4hr of work per work day. Which means this has been quite an intense month.

I can’t say that I made it through in one piece, there were a couple of days when I really struggled to pull in the hours. On the balance I don’t think this pace was sustainable for me, and had I continued on the long term, I would have had to dial back the hours a little bit more, and have more days off, or have a bit more variety in what I was doing.

Goals achieved

A month ago, I set out to create an MMO in a month. I didn’t know what scope I wanted to achieve, and I wasn’t sure what kind of challenges I would overcome. At that point I’d only created very small, what I called “mini-MMO” for practice during game jams.

Today, after a month of work, and almost 200 hours into the project (though more like 160 when subtracting all the blog writing), I have the answers to those questions: not enough, and many.

The biggest lesson to learn in all of this, which most experienced game devs know implicitly, but which players often don’t, is the sheer amount of time it takes to create a game. I thought I was quite a quick developer, and was able to leverage my experience and existing codebase to quickly put together the game. But after a month of work, I’d barely scratched the surface of what would need to go into the game.

The MMO as it stands has bare minimum account management, basic inventory, NPC behaviours, and dialogue. It has no combat or other interesting mechanics. I is also entirely devoid of content, but it does however have a nice set of content creation tools: the map editor and dialogue editors. Sprint 5’s blog post actually has more details about what was

So I guess it would be more accurate to say this is perhaps half to three quarters of an MMORPG base framework from which MMOs of more character can be built.

The cost of development

An interesting thing to do at this point is work out how much this development would have cost in monetary terms. I’m working on this as a fun personal project, so it didn’t directly cost anything to me, but my time has value! Just because I spent time on it, doesn’t mean I can say “I did it at no cost”; I could have spent the time working on a paid commission instead, so that’s opportunity cost I didn’t take.

Here’s a breakdown of what if would have cost if someone had hired me to do this task. Let’s say we took only the 160 hours I did on development work, and ignoring the time I spent on writing the blog.

Let’s say I can demand $50/hour. This is high but it’s not crazy; backend architecture is a pretty specialized job, and this particular project involved working across 3 languages, multiple frameworks, includes modifying or being inter-operable with existing software, and setting up and running server infrastructure. Similar scope work across other software industries at major tech hubs in the US can easily demand more than that at a senior developer or architect level for example. This 160 hour project would therefore have cost around $8000.

Let’s say, for sale of argument that the task wasn’t actually that hard, and I demanded half that, at $25/hour. It’s still $4000. A value that might surprise some people.

I estimate that this project would take many multiples of this to finish, I would not be surprised if it took a man-year to finish (perhaps with the work spread over a few different people from level designers to artists).

The future of this project

I need to start my new job now, and return to full-time work. This leaves me very little time to work on this project, particularly with a new non-game-dev related side project to take up my spare time too. While it is unfortunate that the end result is not playable as a stand-alone game (well, it is, but it’s not particularly interesting to play), I will continue to work on this project, perhaps spending a day on it here, a day on it there. Hopefully one day to actually release it.

Thank you all the people who followed me on this little journey, and gave words of encouragement, or accusations of my insanity. I appreciated every bit of it.