Shannow said:
More than 3 years for ca 30 people to do a 15 hour mod sounds very slow to me. I'm aware that they don't "work fulltime" on it but still, single guys made whole games like Eschalon or the Spiderweb games. Hell, Adam Miller made a campaign for NWN1 in 6 or so modules that had at least 40 hours of gameplay and it took him "only" 5 years or so.
Since my own modding experiences only boil down to changing some scripts and dicking around with item and troop editors in M&B for a week or so, I'm really not one to judge. In fact I do not judge, I'm just saying that it seems very slow when compared to some others.
What is important to recognize is that there are endeavors whose difficulty increases linearly with scope and endeavors whose difficulty increases exponentially with scope.
The most significant constraint on the speed of progress on doing a total conversion mod like Purgatorio is the size of the team necessary to accomplish the task itself. You have to have members of the team that can do music, VFX, rig, animate, texture, model, script, design levels, write dialog, create UIs, etc.
Now your team is 15+ people, but they are all part-timers at best, and many of them won't be very good and some of them will be negative-useful. Now you have to be in a constant state of recruitment to satisfy the goals of the project, and now the most talented modders, who naturally assume the positions of authority in the project don't spend any time modding anymore, now they are managers and producers, and so you start trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
This makes managing the scope of the endeavor critical. You must shoot for a narrower slice of high quality content to make success achievable. You must decide which features are essential and which are not.
Now you are, for all intents and purposes managing a full game development team, but none of them are trained, none of them have any experience and none of them are paid. Now you say, okay, let's make something reasonable, let's get to a point where the team can achieve success -- but wait you are constrained by what some blowhard said 3 years ago about the length of the module, so no matter what you do you will be considered a failure -- etc.
Once you create a project that crosses every discipline, and does so deeply, rigging, animation, environment art, character art, music, SFX, dialog, etc. -- you must accept that these things all cost. You can't escape the iron triangle, just because you are a mod team.
Cost, time, scope, quality -- one of those things has to give. In the mod team environment cost is free, so time and quality take the hardest hits. Scope management is something seasoned professionals are bad at too, so its hard to expect a mod team to do that well.
The mod teams that successfully manage scope are the ones that produce playable content.
Scope is not equal to game length; that's a rabbit hole. Scope is about the totality of the feature set, including the generation of assets to support that feature set.
Wyrmlord said:
Hey MLMarkland, if you can give a reasonable estimate of development time for a game...
how long would it take for one person to make a computer adaptation of Gary Gygax's Tomb Of Horrors module, based on 2ed rules, using simple 2D graphics a la either Ultima top down or Wizardry first-person?
How long would it take you?
Once you go older style graphics, you can get things done a lot faster because your talent pool expands dramatically. There are a lot more people who can reproduce those graphic styles you mentioned than there are that have the capability to produce 3D models with hi-poly sculpt normal map renders, weighted to a skeleton, rigged and animated (which is the kind of challenge facing a big mod team doing a TC).
I remember playing that module, but I don't recall enough details of it to give a clear estimation of scope. Am I starting with an engine? Am I starting with some game layer? Do I have to code all of these things myself?
I hate it when people won't give answers to straightforward questions because they are afraid of being wrong.
If I was a one-man team, and I had to code everything from scratch.
a) 4 months to learn XNA and C# well enough to get the job done
b) 4 months of production -- generating art assets, content, etc.
c) 4 months of post-production -- audio, polishing, iterating
That's a wildly rough estimate, but I would guess from 0-60, on a reasonably sized adventure module (2-5 hours), it would take me a year.
Monty
EDIT - my estimates assume I am doing this in my spare time and on weekends and I am super dedicated. If I could work on it full time, I would cut production time in half, and prepro and post by a quarter, so around 8 months full-time.
Pre and post don't scale as well as production because knowledge acquisition (pre) doesn't scale as well as general content-creation and polish/iteration (post) doesn't scale as well as general content-creation.
decline of Warden?: 
