Ahem.
Graphics are hard, yes....
If you're talking good, modern style 3D.
There is a market for sprite-based graphics, it overlaps with the fantasy/KH-style audience quite a good bit, and that particular art style will be the easiest to add to BGT, even starting with an audio-focused framework.
Easiest, but not easy.
I could do it if I had (1) an artist and (2) a pair of eyes. ... Ur, and (3) a wrapper that exposes one of the lighter graphics engines to BGT, and (4) more conscientiousness (that's all I wanted for Christmas, but did I get it? ... That and a bluetooth keyboard, but that's neither here nor there.).
This style game?
Yes, it's a toughy.
No, it's not as hard as people make it out to be.
No, it won't be as quick as you'd like.
And big one: finding people to give you the quality help you need, for things like voices and graphics... that is usually quite hard. Maybe you'll be better at it than most of us, and we'll finally get one of these.
But, let me bring up the JF IM Adventure again. (Yes I hear the groans, for I can hear across the world... And in the future. Maybe.)
It only took me a few months, I think? To put the whole thing together and release the first version (which covered the entire storyline--later releases were bug-fixes and improvements, but not so much on additoonal content). But let me check my files/post history (and edit that in; it'll take a while. ETA: From the creation of the main game file to my first post about it was 6 days, but really I'd been working on it over the past two months in other files).
It built on things I'd made over the previous years, though. The map and character engine came about in 2009 (in between listening to someone playing Kingdom Hearts while I made maps on my PACMate, actually). It draws more than you might expect from a completely different, simpler engine I'd made in summer 2008: I actually converted some 2D characters into 3D for this game. There's something of a loose metaverse, here.
When it came to the game itself, and not background materials, it was quick and simple--something I could do between classes and over the winter break. (The PACMate was a huge help, here. I didn't do much code, other than making characters, but it was great for maps, and I could work just about anywhere. THen I copy them to my main computer, put them in the code, and test and clean up.).
This game is shorter than what you want, I'm pretty sure. In my early test runs, I could finish it in 4 hours; I think I'm down to considerably faster, now (There's one particular section I'm much better at, where I'd made the mistake of leaving narrow areas to walk when you first enter, so there is lots of noise from enemies that you can't really find.). In contrast, Kingdom Hearts was the project of much of the summer (Actually, we never beat it. No patience for level-grinding, so got stuck at Chernabog.).
I'm pretty sure you can manage what you want, and it's much less daunting than it's been made out to be. The Planning Fallacy is still a bitter foe, nonetheless. For all that I blazed through the game I mentioned, I've tried others that were not so successful.
Longer ago, I tried something similar--with multiple characters, each with their own storyline, even. The overall design had problems; I didn't make it realtime, but tried to fake it in places, so it was a mess, and that's just the start. I finished one storyline, and was making great progress on the next, when my computer crashed. My data was fine, but I had been in the middle of working on a map that had taken quite a while to design, that I was rather fond of, even though it was a minor part of the game over all. I kinda rage-quit at that point, then other stuff happened to make the rest of that year unrecoverable. No, I'm not posting the storyline that I still have; it isn't worth the effort trying to make it work today (Trust me, I've tried). But, the important part? Most of the work on that completed storyline was done in my last semester of high school, which was not the lightest semester ever.
While the lack of people and costly resources stings, what really bothers me is my own lack of conscientiousness. If I could have more months--not days, but months--like those? Sure, I'd put out more bombs like the JFIMA, but I'd learn from them quicker.
And you seem to be picking things up much more quickly than I did (unless you have background experience you've kept secret ).
It won't be easy, and it will doubtless come with stumbles and failures, but I think things look much more hopeful than they sound.
Well, for people whose minds still half obey them, anyway.
(Might edit this more later. Have to run, now.)
看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
George... Don't do that.