How much would it cost?

[EralpB]

Hello, I am a coder by myself but I am busy with other things at the moment. So I am looking for some guidance about the cost of making a 2D java game (which should be running as an applet).

Leave aside the graphics for now, I am just interested in the coding.

Game will be top-down 2D and characters will be circles, there will be other circles with which players can collide. I'll add the logic afterwards.

The main thing is that this should be online! Not like a MMO but there must be a lobby-server which contains all online characters and there will be some rooms in which players can join. A room should be handling like 10 players at most.

Server must be the decision-maker, so players can only send key presses&chat messages.

The packets must be time-stamped, so the actions that are received must be processed according to their timestamps.

How much do you think something like this would cost?

If there are some important issues which may affect the price, let me know

[fletchergames]

Well, what you need is website hosting that supports servlets.  You get hosting + servlets for about $10/month from Lunar Pages ($4.95 hosting, $4.95 servlets) unless they've changed their prices.  There may be other cheaper services.

[EralpB]

Sorry for not clarifying enough, I meant how much would it cost to hire a coder for this application

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Gudradain]

First, do you actually plan to make a game or you are just curious about how much it would cost?

Second, you mention that a player (a circle) can collide with other circle. Does these circle are other player? If yes, that's pretty hard to simulate in an online game. The problem is that you can't really simulate physics collision between 2 player in an online game. You could always use the server as the decision-maker but the simulation on each client would need to be corrected very often so it would be messy. It's not for nothing that in MMORPG you simply pass through the other player usually. Well there is always exception, for example racing game.

Third, would you be able to code the game yourself?

Fourth, the cost always depend on the type of game you are making. You didn't give enough precision about what you are planning to do. If you only want to have a circle running in an empty map it wouldn't cost too much but it would be kind of boring. But, for any decent game, expect it to cost a couple thousands bucks (do you know how much time it require to make a game and how much programmer are paid per hour?)

You should probably make most of it yourself and delegate are bit of code to other people.

[Eli Delventhal]

I charge at least $50 / hr, usually more. Sounds like this would take about 40 hours (1 week) of work to write both client and server code, set up a box with everything running, debugging, etc. That makes $2,000. Then I would charge 1.5x for the usual extra crap / requirement change buffer, to make it $3,000.

Then again, I'm a professional living in the San Francisco bay area. It's absolutely not unheard of to charge $100 / hr or even more on that, depending on the field.

I would recommend doing it yourself or going with a library like Game Gardens.

[EralpB]

Thank you both for your input! I really appreciate it.

I wrote one in c++ which implemented a chat system, game creation and join system, as well it handled in-game collisions but it was a side-scroller. So I should be able to code this too.

I am now aiming to code one for facebook in java, so yes I am actually planning to make a game, I wanted to see if I can pay someone for that but I guess I can't afford it

[fletchergames]

I don't think Facebook supports Java anymore.  I think you have to use Html or Flash for Facebook apps.

I don't know if that really applies to what you're doing, but I saw you mentioned Facebook.

[ra4king]

@fletchergames
You can put Java applets on Facebook, but by using PHP or iFrame.