[casual_games] How many hours does a programmer need...

[Joe Pantuso]

Crash course in programmer wrangling;

- Accuracy of time estimates is proportional to developer experience.  Even
(especially?) highly skilled programmers with only a few years of
development work under their belts will see every problem as simpler than it
really is and wildly underestimate the time required.

- Productive time at programming (time spent adding useful code) comes in
bursts while in a state sometimes referred to as 'flow'.  From the point of
a cold start or starting again after being interrupted for a conversation or
something of only a couple minutes, time to flow is 15-45 minutes depending
upon the complexity of the problem.  This means that length of blocks of
time available and environmental distractions or lack there of can have a
dramatic effect on actual productivity without actually affecting the hours
spent.

- As the number of programmers on a project goes up the amount of time spent
keeping in synch climbs logarithmically.  This introduces a hard limit on
the number of programmers that can work effectively as a unit of 6-10.  I
will assume though that you won't be able to muster more than about 3, at
that count they shouldn't be getting in each others way enough that they'd
be less efficient than 2, but even at that low number it will depend on how
well (frequency and quality) they can communicate and how experienced they
are working in a team.

- Many lesser programmers are very proprietary about their code, and when
other developers make changes or additions to it they get territorial.  This
is a clear sign of a 'B' or 'C' class player but you won't know about it til
possibly too late.

- Your best path to efficiency and knowing how much trouble you are in as
early as possible is to use the Sprint/Scrum method of scheduling and
working.  I highly recommend you google on those expressions and read up on
it.  In a nutshell the programmers agree on a set of functional code that
can be produced in 1 calendar month, they talk very briefly each day about
their progress the last 24 hours, what they expect to accomplish the next 24
hours, and any obstacles that are in their way.  They also estimate how much
of their month goal they have completed and have remaining.  It becomes
obvious quickly if people are estimating poorly, and cutting the project
into 1-month chunks allows you to change direction rapidly if conditions
warrant.  This is a baseline 'agile' coding methodology everyone should be
aware of.

- The level of ability of programmers varies dramatically.  This phenomenon
is sometimes described at the high end as 10x programmers, i.e. the most
effective programmers are 10 times as effective as everyone else.
Unfortunately this is not only generally true, but the 10x programmers are
at least 10x as rare as everyone else.

For your particular project the prior experience of these programmers will
have a dramatic effect on their ability to be productive on this project.
You don't say what these guys do for their day jobs.  If they have no game
programming experience, you are in for a rough learning curve.

Good luck.

-J

On 3/27/06, Ryan Sumo <endlessthirteen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> How many hours does a programmer need per week to finish a game with a
> dev time of 6-8 months?
>
>   I've been talking to some programmers about a game I want to make and
> been asking them the hours they could spare if they did it on the side.
> I've been getting answers ranging from 4-5 up to 7-10 hours a week.
>
>   I was just curious how past developers who worked with people who did
> it on the side fared.  Can I compensate by having more than one
> programmer?  Because as far as I can tell from working with them the more
> programmers on a piece of code, the more muddled up it gets.
>
>   Just to give you guys an idea, the game would be about as complex as
> diner dash, or a little more than that.
>
>
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