This Render is brought to you by Coca Cola..=)
But in all seriousness.. 1-2 hours depending on how much stuff is shown and your hardware...So you're basically always ahead and you're constantly waiting for your renders to finish so that you can move on and piece everything together.. I can totally see now why people get fed up with this after some time and say "fuck this" and abandon their AVN..Too much time investment for unknown benefit..Unless it's a real passion project for somebody of course...
It depends on your speed (and more importantly, how much time you actually spend) but yea, it's pretty common to be "working ahead" - and depending on your PC, that often means you either render, or build, but never both. I commonly get up to a queue of 100+ images that need to be rendered, at which point I just leave my pc alone for a few days while I do other stuff.
The top earners tend to have dedicated PCs just to run renders pretty much 24/7 (and some have multiple going at once), but the majority of us just have to choose - also, when you only have 1 pc, you're extremely limited in what you can do on it while rendering... basically anything that uses the video card is off limits.
And yea, it's a *massive* amount of work, much more than most people think. I have personally put already well over a thousand hours into my game, between the writing, coding, design, etc. Quite possibly over 2k. I've definitely made less than a dollar an hour off the game, and that's the reality for most devs. Of course very few people are willing to work for that little money, which is a big part of the reason SO MANY games get abandoned so quickly.
I'd say (depending on where you live of course this will vary a LOT) anything less than 1.5k-2k a month makes doing this not financially viable at ALL. Some places can make due on less (as little as 500/mo is decent in some counties) others more (some places would require upwards of 3k/month). When you look at how many devs don't make anywhere remotely close to that... well...
Pretty much anyone making less than that who makes it past a few releases, either really does enjoy what they're doing (and it's usually as a hobby and nothing more, so you'll usually expect updates to be slower than some games), or is holding out hope they eventually "make it" - and eventually they'll likely abandon too at some point when they realize that isn't happening (or isn't happening as quickly as they hoped).
All in all it's a brutal business, one no one should ever get into unless they honestly enjoy the work. But... every now and then someone comes along and creates something really good, and you think to yourself "If I can do that... If I can pour myself into something, that people will really enjoy, then maybe it's worth it".
Or you spend your profits on jack daniels.
