Remember when those mean ol’ poopyhead teachers used to force you to write a four-page double-spaced paper as a final project and it just destroyed your life for the two months they gave you to do it? That translates to about a thousand words typed. That’s what everyone used to complain about endlessly because it was just so much work. And half the time you didn’t even have to type it so it was significantly shorter.
I write and publish at least two of those a week on Devil Monkey Games nowadays. Plus all the background stuff that goes into the archives and nobody ever sees.
This week it was closer to three of them because the two major posts went long. Next week is probably more of the same. My average is ~2000 words/week posted, but since I try to work ahead I’ve done ~10,000 word weeks so I could focus on other things for a few weeks. That’s what I plan to do for the rest of September. I’d like to have the Wednesday and Friday posts at Devil Monkey written and scheduled for the rest of the year by mid-October. That’s 29 posts, each at least a thousand words. I already have the rest of September, all of October and a little bit of November planned, and half a dozen of those are at least partially written. Call it 28,000 words in aboot a month. So ~7,000 a week. I’ve done more with less preparation.
At that 10,000 words a week rate I’d be writing a short novel every two months; NaNoWriMo’s definition of “novel” is 70,000 words, but they also cheat. Their word count rules are pretty fast and loose — it amounts to “if you write the word, it counts even if you delete it,” so you could possibly end up with a 40,000 word “novel” that also included 30,000 deleted words.
Going by those rules and including outlining and prewriting, I’m probably cranking at least 2,500 words on an average week; I’ve had thousand-plus word posts that started with ~500 words of outlining and notes that were deleted and expanded upon.
The game dev end is a lot harder to quantify. Sure, I could go by some arbitrary “X models/scripts/GameObjects/whatever a week” standard, but there are so many variables involved in any of them that such a system is meaningless. The square plate I made a while back took all of fifteen minutes, most of that spent screwing around to get the dip in the middle just right. Compare that to a fully-articulated giant robot made up of a dozen separate 3D models that could take weeks to get right.
Same thing with scripts. The player hovercraft movement code was just a modification of the rokkit movement code, with some tweaks added later for testing purposes, and the “AI” code that drives the non-player hovercraft is just a variable for the amount of thrust and code to make it apply forward thrust constantly. I made that by stripping down the player hovercraft code to remove any input from the player and the ability to steer. I think it took five minutes. Those goofy cardboard standups I use in the FPS test took a few hours to do the AI and animations so they swing their hammers at the appropriate time. Call me weird, but that’s a pretty significant difference.
And most of it is invisible. Let’s say I make a major change to how the FPS handles damaging actors. That’s all under the hood where nobody but me sees it. A player might notice “something is different here,” but unless I explicitly describe and publish it where they can see it they’ll have no idea exactly what changed. How does that get quantified?
On top of that, all of these activities are largely creative endeavors. A good chunk of the process is indistinguishable from “sitting around drawing pictures” or “staring off into space getting ideas and hashing them out.” People think it’s weird that I carry at least two notebooks around pretty much all the time. I do it to make sure ideas get written down as they show up. Just how do you quantify any of that outside of time spent? I don’t bother tracking that anyway because I’m usually doing other things at the same time, which adds a whole other level of difficulty.
Then there’s research for the design end. Because the Big Project is a full RPG, a lot of the behind the scenes work is basically just designing a GURPS campaign in its own world. Which means I have days where my job consists entirely of “thinking about an imaginary world” or “thinking about stories set in said imaginary world.” Aside from setting some weird “create and publish an adventure in the model of those old-school D&D adventure modules every so often,” how do you quantify that? Especially when the vidgame end of said adventure uses rules humans can’t play on the tabletop and the tabletop end of an adventure is system-agnostic so you have to leave out all the parts dependent upon whatever system is being used and different systems use such wildly-varying assumptions some encounters simply wouldn’t work in certain systems?
Then you have the OJT end. Devil Monkey Games by its very nature forces me to be constantly improving my skills. You’ve seen what the big studios are putting out. Hell, you’ve seen what the better indie developers are making.
“Be a game developer,” I said. “It’ll be fun,” I said. “It would be like goofing off as a job,” I said. Gah.
Have I mentioned I used to ride the short bus?