In the last couple of streams, Casey has mentioned something along the lines of 'we're in our second week' of coding if you were to map progress into normal real world programming working hours.
That piqued my curiosity, so I did some napkin math to get a sense of how long this could theoretically take.
Assume an average game programmer gets in 5 solid hours of programming on a normal work day. Maybe that's conservative, but between meetings, interruptions, time off, sick, etc., it probably balances out. Plus it makes the math to convert to streaming weeks simple!
This means a streaming week (5 one hour streams) roughly equals 1 real world day. However, Casey has also mentioned that he's probably 3-4x faster when working normally, as he doesn't have to explain everything, and can be far more focused on what he's doing. That makes total sense. Let's be conservative and say a normal Casey would be 2.5x as efficient/effective as a streaming Casey.
That means:
becomes
I'm curious what Casey would guess the time frame for a game like Handmade Hero would be if he were working under normal full time conditions.
6 months seems reasonable to me, based on other game schedules I've seen. If anything, that's probably a bit conservative for a single programmer, especially since we're writing everything from scratch:
:woohoo:
I was figuring a year or two, but....wow! Maybe as we get further along progress will speed up?
That piqued my curiosity, so I did some napkin math to get a sense of how long this could theoretically take.
Assume an average game programmer gets in 5 solid hours of programming on a normal work day. Maybe that's conservative, but between meetings, interruptions, time off, sick, etc., it probably balances out. Plus it makes the math to convert to streaming weeks simple!
This means a streaming week (5 one hour streams) roughly equals 1 real world day. However, Casey has also mentioned that he's probably 3-4x faster when working normally, as he doesn't have to explain everything, and can be far more focused on what he's doing. That makes total sense. Let's be conservative and say a normal Casey would be 2.5x as efficient/effective as a streaming Casey.
That means:
1 | 1 work day = 1 Handmade Hero streaming week |
becomes
1 | 1 Casey work day = 2.5 Handmade Hero streaming weeks |
I'm curious what Casey would guess the time frame for a game like Handmade Hero would be if he were working under normal full time conditions.
6 months seems reasonable to me, based on other game schedules I've seen. If anything, that's probably a bit conservative for a single programmer, especially since we're writing everything from scratch:
1 | 6 months at ~20 working days per month = 120 days |
1 | 120 work days = 300 streaming weeks = 5.8 years! |
:woohoo:
I was figuring a year or two, but....wow! Maybe as we get further along progress will speed up?
Edited by DSmith
on
This calculation depends heavily upon the idea that he's n-times faster when working alone(3-4 times faster is just wishful thinking, IMHO). If you make that factor 1.2x or 1.5x instead of 2.5x, you get a more realistic 2.5 - 3.3 years.
I would assume there is no way it will take less than 2 years. There is no question that I am _at least_ 3x slower on the stream than in normal programming (I mean think about it - there have been _entire episodes_ that were nothing but me explaining things, no coding at all!), but Handmade Hero is well scoped in terms of what it is doing (no 3D, no networking, no editor) so I am hoping that would allow us to finish in the 2-3 year timeframe and not the 5 year timeframe, since I think I could make the whole game on my own in a very short time, probably 3 months.
- Casey
- Casey
cmuratori
I would assume there is no way it will take less than 2 years. There is no question that I am _at least_ 3x slower on the stream than in normal programming (I mean think about it - there have been _entire episodes_ that were nothing but me explaining things, no coding at all!), but Handmade Hero is well scoped in terms of what it is doing (no 3D, no networking, no editor) so I am hoping that would allow us to finish in the 2-3 year timeframe and not the 5 year timeframe, since I think I could make the whole game on my own in a very short time, probably 3 months.
- Casey
You also assume that your brain is completely off Handmade Hero while you're not streaming, which is a physical impossibility. The fact that you take breaks actually makes you faster (as in, reach sane solutions earlier) than if you were streaming full-time.
sol_hsa
You also assume that your brain is completely off Handmade Hero while you're not streaming, which is a physical impossibility. The fact that you take breaks actually makes you faster (as in, reach sane solutions earlier) than if you were streaming full-time.
I seriously doubt that. In order for that to actually be true, there'd have to be a lot more "hard problems per hour" in Handmade Hero than there are. I agree that having time to think on things is very valuable, but an hour a day is far too low to actually generate those things at a usable rate. I find at least 4 hours a day is a minimum amount of time you want to actively program and not waste brain capacity. There's that much "typing work" to do, at least. Whether 8 is too much, well, that's getting into "we'd need to measure it" territory :)
- Casey
I love seeing people code, as I am starved with that, so from my view if takes 5 yrs, then it be twice as good.
Maybe you should change title on twitch, to say: "Handmade Hero - hour 66", instead of day too?
Maybe you should change title on twitch, to say: "Handmade Hero - hour 66", instead of day too?