Recently made one. Was on the cheap side (with a scope that goes along with).

Given I did not pay myself a salary on this particular project (or at least, not one up to industry norms) it would likely be best to speak 'hours' and not '$'. Took me 320 hours for that personal project.

That being said, I actually worked on Yu-Gi-Oh BAM! a while back, and though I can't speak about the specifics, that game was of a much larger scope (you can still see some of it on youtube or through the waybackmachine now that the game has finally been put to rest).

Recently made one. Was on the cheap side (with a scope that goes along with).

Given I did not pay myself a salary on this particular project (or at least, not one up to industry norms) it would likely be best to speak 'hours' and not '$'. Took me 320 hours for that personal project.

That being said, I actually worked on Yu-Gi-Oh BAM! a while back, and though I can't speak about the specifics, that game was of a much larger scope (you can still see some of it on youtube or through the waybackmachine now that the game has finally been put to rest).

320h at 11usd is a very doable price! that's the price range that is appealing to me haha. Also, I just wanted to know the round about cost of just having it coded. I would just use placeholder graphics until I could pay an artist to do that portion.

Hmm, on a realistic level im not sure that any industry worker for like Game development or any software engineering would take like $11 an hour? May be wrong but over here in the UK like basic junior salary is like $14 - $16 ish per hour where I live, might go as low as $11 elsewhere in the country, but either way.. that kinda wage is absolutely entry coder.

And as Sloper mentioned, the 2 months quoted by Orymus was for creating a more simplistic game, and was a programmer well above entry level, who has as mentioned also been involved previously in that style of development.

So as an overall goal, I would push that $11 up to at least what.. $40 - $50 (going up a lot more depending on the skill level) an hour to get a decent level of coder fairly cheaply, and increase the 320 hours by... well depends just how complex of a game you are looking at

Hmm, on a realistic level im not sure that any industry worker for like Game development or any software engineering would take like $11 an hour? May be wrong but over here in the UK like basic junior salary is like $14 - $16 ish per hour where I live, might go as low as $11 elsewhere in the country, but either way.. that kinda wage is absolutely entry coder.

And as Sloper mentioned, the 2 months quoted by Orymus was for creating a more simplistic game, and was a programmer well above entry level, who has as mentioned also been involved previously in that style of development.

So as an overall goal, I would push that $11 up to at least what.. $40 - $50 (going up a lot more depending on the skill level) an hour to get a decent level of coder fairly cheaply, and increase the 320 hours by... well depends just how complex of a game you are looking at

I was hoping to create a point of reference, but I feel that, in the process, I've inherently misguided you about the scope of your project.

More 'involved' TCG projects I've been involved with had basically 2-3 full time developers over the span of a year, so closer to 6240 hours (dev only) and though I can't quite reveal exact numbers, it would be realistic to think that the average programmer that can pull this off wouldn't charge south of 40 as an employee, or 80 as a freelancer.

So 200 - 500k for programming alone might be a realistic figure.

That's assuming you'd do the art, project management, game and content design, QA, marketing, community management, publishing, audio, etc. all on your own, which is a lot of hats to wear (art alone would likely need 2-3 guys with one person focusing exclusively on UI/Interfaces).

The most critical part of headline titles such as Hearthstone is that they're very iterative in nature. They don't have a set plan, they experiment, see what works, redo and remake the game over and over until it's good enough for publication. So 'AAA'-level CCGs end up costing a lot, because there's also a lot of content to make.

While I don't think it would be realistic to aim for that level of product, it is feasible (but nowhere near easy) to make a CCG game in 2 months, but as with my case, the design needs to be fixed, and of a small scope. I have an established paper prototype to work from, which helped immensely with work planning and avoiding iterative work.