Catch the Monkey game. Playable alpha 6 weeks; 11 more months to complete. Reasons given:
the publisher wanted so many different versions of the game. It’s a 2D
sprite-based game with thousands of frames of animation. When we were
required to create a Blackberry Playbook version (if you actually remember
what it was!) we didn't have to deal only with a different screen size, it
was a totally different aspect ratio. And Video RAM is handled differently
on the various operating systems. Then there was Kindle Fire, then Nook,
then Android phone with its 14 different kinds of resolutions. Then there
was Android’s new requirement that a game package can’t exceed 50 Mb, and
ours was 70 Mb. Marmalade’s framework didn’t support the Google OBB file
streaming, neither did Nook because they had their own store. So I had to
write my own http file streaming processor that would work on all these
various platforms. The one thing iOS has going for it is a very tightly
controlled OS/Hardware environment. Once you leave that, it’s a total gong
show! But all of the non-iOS builds is where Marmalade really shines, and
so their motivation was to get Catch the Monkey on as many different devices
as they could.
Second debacle: A is for App. First, I think it's a stupid idea. But beyond that, it almost looked like the guy learned: They had a salable stable ios build in 2 months. Great! Ship! Nope, this time, this guy dicks around for 7 months (AGAIN), adding 3rd party iap features on five platforms.I mean, I don't know what to say. Thomas claims to have run a consulting shop, and I really would have assumed that experience would grind project scoping and bounding into you. But he let the scope of two different projects just wildly explode, from alpha in 1.5 mos -> shipped in 1.05 years, and done in 2 mos -> shipped in 9 mos.
It seems like building 2 projects in 4 months and then either quitting while they were behind or banging out a bunch more tightly scoped projects would be the optimal way to go.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic, but you just have to control project scope. He's going to have the same problem on mac/pc: do you want to be a single person indie? Then you have to figure out how to make a game in 1-2 years, scoped to a single engineer + contract art. Do you want to be mid-tier? Then you have to figure out how to make an awesome game with 3 engineers and maybe an artist in 2 years. And so on. But you must pick which tier you are in then design and scope accordingly.