It definitely takes passion. Commercially, there isn't a lot of chance that the game will earn more than 7 years worth of earnings...
How to take 7 years to ship a beta
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#12Reminds me of [this game](http://tobiasgame.co.uk/about.php) which also took a quite bit(13 years).
They also have video presenting great tips for prolonged development such as ‘different mechanic for every rooms’ and ‘stick to your original plan’.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#13> Bonus temporal adjustment points can be obtained by posting retrospective parody articles to Hacker News the day before your game comes out.
Some highlights:
365 days of pixel art
109 points eigenbom 3 years ago 34 comments
(https://medium.com/@eigenbom/365-days-of-pixel-art-f6131f280...)
A game whose source code fits in one tweet
162 points eigenbom 3 years ago 51 comments
(https://github.com/omnus/tiny-twitch)
I'm 2 years into development of my sandbox game, Moonman
128 points eigenbom 5 years ago 71 comments
Ask HN: What are some poorly written but very successful open source software?
35 points eigenbom a year ago 32 comments
3.5 years of open development for a procedurally-generated adventure game
15 points eigenbom 3 years ago 4 comments
(http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21997.0)
Moonman: 3 Years of Solo Gamedev and 2 Left to Go
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011787
13 points eigenbom 3 years ago 8 comments
I'm a dad
11 points eigenbom a year ago 9 comments
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#14Loved the sarcasm, hilarious.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#15I've been following it for a while, and the game turned out really well (even ignoring the fact that it is still in beta). Images and movies don't do it full justice, but the game is quite beautiful.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#16Ha, amateurs. The Haiku operating system project is almost seventeen years old and still hasn't shipped a beta.
Finding excuses is vital, but it's important to have both excuses for not shipping the beta and excuses for why beta is almost here and there's no need to think the past history of delays bodes ill for the project.
Here's a HN comment back in January where the poster says Haiku's beta will be out "this quarter" (Q1 calendar 2018), I laugh at that, and another HN poster says OK, but definitely by _next_ quarter (Q2 calendar 2018).
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#17This mirrors a lot of what the guys who made Retro / Grade [0] said about how they made their game after quitting their day jobs. Although from this post it seems like he had a better time doing this, than they had.
[0]: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017963/Obsessive-Compulsive-D...
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#18Ha, amateurs. The Haiku operating system project is almost seventeen years old and still hasn't shipped a beta. Finding excuses is vital, but it's important to have both excuses for not shipping the beta and excuses for why beta is almost here and there's no need to think the past history of delays bodes ill for the project. Here's a HN comment back in January where the poster says Haiku's beta will be out "this quar…
even E17 did finally end up releasing despite all the jokes
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#19> I was a freshly baked postgraduate in Melbourne
Oh man I knew this was going to be a disaster when I head they were going straight into a grad degree.
I'm still on the fence about if CS students can actually program before working in industry, but doing a grad program that isnt paid for by Industry was a major red flag.
On the bright side, it sounds like OP learned tons and tons and tons. While the game flopped, I bet they could throw together a top notch program in a year with their lessons learned.
Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta
#20Just 7 years? That's surprisingly short in game development terms, especially where certain examples of vapourware/overly ambitious titles/indie games are concerned.
I mean, this guy took 13 years to make his dream game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b0tSu0QDQ0
Duke Nukem Forever infamously took 15 years to make.
And well, as Metacritic shows in this list, 5/6/7 year development times are not too uncommon in general:
http://www.metacritic.com/feature/games-that-shed-vaporware-...
It gets all the more insane with mods and hacks too, since fan projects don't have any real pressure to get released at all, so overly OCD creators can spend decades on projects without having a publisher telling them to hurry up.
Mushroom Kingdom Fusion started in 2007 and only got cancelled in 2015, with the last demo being version 0.5. Brutal Mario had its first known demo released in 2006, and is still (presumably) in development in 2018. May be longer, said first demo was actually number demo 6.
In the Doom community, Mordeth apparently started in 1997, and was (probably) still in development just a few years ago. If it ever does get finished, it would have been in development so long that Duke Nukem Forever would have started and finished its own development in the middle of this game's dev cycle.
Really, games can take a really long time, especially if you don't have much in the way of monetary pressures or nagging publishers. And hey, who knows what projects will turn out to join that list in future. For all we know, thousands of people may have been working on games since the 90s, with their finished product only being released sometime in the next few years.