Developing a slide game (sliding puzzle)

phillyjoe

Hello,

I'm a graphic designer and not so experienced with App-developing software.
Me and a friend developed an idea for a sliding puzzle game. 

THE IDEA
The puzzle contains of colored squares. 
A colored circle has been placed on each square. 
The color of the square and circle doesn't match with each other. 
The player is only able to move the circles (horizontal, vertical or diagonal). 
When you move one circle on another circle, this two circles swap places.  (the JPG-image gives an example). 
The goal of the game is to place every yellow circle, on every yellow square; every orange circle on the orange squares, etcetera. When all colors match the game is finished.

QUESTIONS

• We wonder how difficult it is to develop our game for people who are not experienced in programming (we're only professionals users of Adobe Creative Suite)
• Which software would you recommend (Gamesalad or some other program lie Unity). 
• If we decide to hire some professional programmer, how much work (hours) will it take to write this game?

We hope that you help us with this questions.

Thanks a lot!

Jan

tatiang

GameSalad is a great tool for app building, especially for people without prior programming experience. It's quite doable to build that app but it will take time. It's hard to estimate how much time it would take you. You would have to include coding time, sure, but also time spent watching many YouTube tutorial videos, pulling apart demos and templates to see how they worked, asking questions on the forums, etc. I will say that this is one of the best communities I've ever found online; people are very helpful and generous with their time. So if you want to take the time to learn how to make this, you've found the right place.

To hire someone, well that depends on other factors as well. Just to make the mechanic you describes is probably 6-10 hours of work, depending on what else is happening on the screen, how large/complex the puzzle is, etc. But if you want a full app with scoring, saving high scores, GameCenter integration, animation, sound effects and volume controls, etc., you're looking at more like 20-30 hours of work, minimum. And that assumes you are supplying the artwork and sounds.

Anyway, welcome to GameSalad!