Hey guys, doing a little research for my Games Development course. Can I possibly get some quick information?
I need to know what sort of development time and budget is expected of typical XBLA games development, and what sort of content level is expected of what MS Point price level.
Thanks in advance for any information you can offer.
Hmm that’s a pretty vague thing to ask - the collection of games on XBLA is pretty varied.
They have some really simple games on there that wouldn’t take much to develop - take geometry wars, for example. The game is awesome, and it no doubt took some serious time to develop, but the time was most likely spent fine tuning the “Flow” of the enemies, and the content is very light.
But they have some very content and development heavy games on there too - even a few using the Unreal 3 engine - which would probably make the budget go up just a tad. =)
And take Castle Crashers - a really awesome game, which took a good while to make, but also had a really small team that was dedicated to their vision.
It’s pretty all over the place - if you have a small, light, quick to make game you can probably prototype it out, or even fully develop it, with XNA at home, with pretty much no budget other than lotts and lots of your free time. (So…priceless…)
If you fill in more information about what you’re looking for information about, for example: art style, intended audience, multiplayer / singleplayer / both, length of one playthrough, amount of replayability expected, 2d or 3d or both, genre of game…anything like that - and I’ll bet you’ll get a lot more useful information.
Alex
I agree with Obsidian’s post… it definitely varies based on scope. Our company has 3 released games on XBLA, Screwjumper! (let’s not talk about it ;)), Elements of Destruction, and Zombie Wranglers. Most budgets ranged from $180k - ~$400k and consisted of teams from 5-6 core members (peeking at 9-10 devs certain milestones). Timelines ranged from 8 months to about 15 months.
Average Metacritics:
Screwjumper! 40%
Elements of Destruction 65%
Zombie Wranglers 49%
While I agree with a lot of the reviews that have gone out, they’re still going to take you down a notch further than you want. Our worse rated game, Screwjumper received it’s highest review of 70% from Official XBox Magazine, whearas our highest reviewed title of the three Elements of Destruction got a measly 40%, so that’s a taste of how consistencies are non-existent in many cases.
I learned a lot on all projects, SJ being more or less lead art (we had like 6 people and the company had just formed so the art staff more or less consisted of myself and and 2 interns which went full time half way through the project), EOD art and was lead designer, and ZW was on another project so I only jumped in to help when I could.
All of these titles featured multiple MP/SP modes for each, as most publishers strongly emphasize both existing.
I’d call this a very mid/low budget approach, whereas Penny Arcade (I believe) shifted towards $1-2 million. I know a few other projects in the work right now that are in the same range. The ports could obviously be made for less… and go figure have a higher turnover rate.
That definitely had a little post morteming in there… wasn’t trying to hijack 
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hi
i work for a indie Game development company here in India and we are currently developing 3d Hack and slash kinda game for XBLA using our in house engine coded with XNA Framework the development time is projected around 10 -11 months and we are 6 people working on the game and its pretty heavy in terms of characters animation involved since its an action game :D: i cant tell you the exact budget (NDA) :): hope this might be helpful to you DrLilo:):
Regards
Mayur