The honest answer is that the schedule is agreed per commission rather than published as a fixed number, and that is not evasiveness. A single-level build for one person and a full production with a cast of a dozen are different pieces of work by an order of magnitude.
What is useful, and what this article is, is where the time actually goes. Because knowing that tells you what makes a commission faster, and almost all of it is in your hands rather than ours.
The stages
The brief. You send photographs and a description. This takes as long as it takes you, and it is the most common place a schedule quietly loses a fortnight.
Art direction. Deciding the style, the palette and what each location looks like, from what you wrote. This is where a detailed brief pays off directly: specific places can be designed immediately, vague ones need a conversation first.
Artwork. Characters and backgrounds. This is the bulk of the work and it scales with cast size and number of distinct locations. It is the single biggest variable in any commission.
Level design and build. Laying out the game, tuning it, assembling it into the finished file. This part is comparatively predictable, because the engine already exists and works, which is the argument in the honest way to build bespoke games repeatedly.
Testing. Playing it through, driving it automatically to confirm it can be finished, checking it on a real phone. Short, and not skippable, for the reasons in proving a game is actually finished.
Delivery. A file and a link.
Which stages are predictable
The build and the testing are. They are the same work every time and the engine has already had its problems found.
The artwork is not, and it is not because it is creative and uncertain. It is because it scales directly with two numbers from your brief: how many people are in it, and how many distinct places it visits.
Each additional person is painted separately, in each pose they need. Each additional location is a background that cannot be assembled from parts of another one without looking like it was. That relationship is worked through in why one game is 104KB and another is 20MB and it drives the timeline as much as it drives the file size.
What actually causes delay
In practice, almost all avoidable delay is waiting.
Waiting for photographs. The commission begins properly when they arrive. A brief submitted without them starts a clock that does not run.
Waiting for answers. A question about whether the dog should be in it, sent on a Tuesday and answered the following Monday, is five days that cannot be recovered.
Changes after the artwork exists. Adding a person after the cast is painted is more work than adding them at the start. Changing the setting after the backgrounds are done is considerably more.
None of those are unreasonable things for a customer to do. They are simply where the time goes, and knowing that lets you avoid most of it.
What makes it faster
Send everything at once. Photographs and a detailed brief together, at the start.
Be specific about place. A vague brief needs a conversation before anything can be designed. A specific one can go straight to art direction. What that looks like is in how to write a brief for a custom game.
Answer quickly. Even to say "I need to check with his sister" rather than going quiet.
Decide the cast at the start. Adding people later is the most common change and the most expensive one.
Reduce scope rather than compressing quality. If a date is tight, a single-level build at £99 that is finished properly is a much better outcome than a multi-level build at £349 rushed. We would rather tell you that than agree to something we cannot do well.
If the date is close
Say so immediately, in the first message, with the actual date.
It is the single most useful piece of information in an enquiry, because it determines what is possible before anything else is discussed. A tight date does not necessarily mean no; it usually means a different scope.
What does not work is discovering the deadline halfway through. By that point decisions have been made against a different assumption and unwinding them costs more time than the deadline had left.
Why we will not publish a fixed number
Two reasons, and both are in your interest.
A published turnaround has to be either the worst case, which makes every commission look slower than it is, or an average, which means some commissions miss it. Neither is useful to somebody with a specific birthday in mind.
And the honest variable is your brief. A commission where the photographs arrive on day one and the brief names three specific places moves at a completely different pace from one where both are still being gathered a fortnight later. Quoting a fixed number would be quoting for a version of the project we cannot control.
Ask, with the date, and you will get a real answer for your actual scope.
What this means
Send the date in the first message.
Photographs and brief together, at the start.
Decide the cast early. It is the biggest lever on both cost and time.
And a smaller build done properly beats a bigger one rushed.
The rest of the process is in how commissioning a custom game works, and the pricing in how much does a custom video game cost.
