[davidsiems]

Just as a reference point, in this article [http://whatgamesare.com/2011/02/you-need-four-coders-product...] the argument is made that you need four coders to make a game.

I think formula being followed for these articles lends them to being a little...exaggerated. (You NEED X to make a game)

I successfully shipped an XBLA game with one other programmer on my team. It took us 14 months, and we delivered on time, in scope, and on budget.

We had two designers writing scripts, so I _guess_ you could say we had four coders, but there was a vast gap in programming talent there. I had to go back through near ship and rewrite most of the scripts to fix all the bugs.

What you need, is to be smart about how you work (make tools to make making the game easier) and be realistic about what you can accomplish in your given budget/time frame.

I'm not saying gamedev is easy, it's hard, and it takes nearly as long to polish the game as it does to get it up and running. But there are so many target markets out there at this point that saying something like you need 100k/4 coders/100 hours of gameplay is foolish.