I've just read an article in PC Gamer that cites six months and six people to program a
cell phone game, Orks & Elves 2, with a little help from famous game programmer John Carmack. They were limited to 300K (not M or G), though I'm not sure whether that was storage space or RAM.
Absolutely, although this is not to say that lone-wolf game development is impossible -- as examples, see Jenova Chen's "flOw", Jonathan Mak's "Everyday Shooter" and Jonathan Blow's "Braid" as examples. These games did take several years to develop, but all were one-person efforts (and all are quite excellent games).
ReplyDeleteStill, note how constrained they are in comparison to your garden-variety AAA title, especially in terms of graphical complexity and amount of content.