1-1/2 years have passed

[tourmaline]

Holy Moley - a real life update, since "how long does it take?" is a popular question for people just getting in.

I've been working on my game for just about 18 months. I've written a ton of code, have a good database layout, a thoughtful redis cache, threejs, socket.io, nodejs as the main, and jquery for ease of development. I've cleared up a lot of my initial security concerns for a web based game, have all my socket/cookie/session issues covered and solid up to this point, moved some code to stored procedures and have done a small round of refactoring.

What I have: register, login, planetary travel (session and database without error, no visuals), initial inventory and calculations/weighting/character mods, dynamic universe map functionality, disconnect and lot's of security checks, and some cheese graphics. What I don't have? Anything playable.

Granted I've been doing this part time, but I've really been pumping through sections of functionality and correcting the unexpecteds. I feel that my pace is reasonable and I'm putting in above average hours for a part time endeavor (I have no social life and I work 40-55 hours a week at day job). I am at a milestone though, where I can now spend much more time on the game and game mechanics.

Funny thing: I started conceptualizing my game board with threejs in the beginning, then moved on to other things. Probably 9-12 months later it was time to re-insert the threejs. Well, the threejs crew changed so much in that time I had to almost rewrite everything I wrote prior. Huge unexpected.

So I think I'm going to double my estimate and say that it will take 6 years, instead of the initial 3 year estimate to have something very playable, and possibly monetizable. I just hope my choice of tools hold on that long.

Edit to add:
I may have spent some months interviewing the Unreal engine, Urho3D, and some C/C++ coding related to a client/server setup before falling back to node, socket, html5.

[hallsofvallhalla]

Wow awesome update and good for you to keep at it!