How many hours on average per week would you say you spend on a given project?
In regard to Quest 1, I generally worked full days for 2 months to build it, plus a few more weeks to do things like music and get help with a little programming. It took that amount of time because it was the first time I ever used ZQuest, so it starts with the very first screen I ever made and follows my learning process from there. Now, I could probably make a quest like that in a week, plus a little extra time for testing, but I'm not interested in doing another quest in that style, so that won't happen because my head's in a totally different place when it comes to design these days.
To be clear, I was unemployed during that process - I had just graduated from college that summer, about 2 years ago now, so that was kind of my full-time job for 2 months.
In regard to Quest 2... well, it was for a 24-hour contest, so, that was one long 24-hour stretch Per contest rules, we were allowed to assemble resources before the building process began, so that took maybe another 4-6 hours to organize my tiles so that I could make my quest combos from scratch in an optimal manner. Then I made my 36-hour update for the official database release a few weeks later, so that was an additional 12 hours.
These days I'm mostly working on a tileset, though I have to design test rooms to be sure I have the necessary tiles for all the overly-complicated stuff I want to do, so I jump back and forth between tile work and design work. I started it over a year ago, probably Feb or Mar 2016, and it's continuously taken longer than expected. When that happens, I begin to lag because I feel like it'll never get done, so some days I'll dabble for an hour or two, some days I'll do totally different stuff, and other days I'll get carried away and work a full 16 hours.
So I guess I'd say an average week is equivalent to an average full-time job.
That'll probably change soon though. Too many other things need to be taken care of.
What's the general spread of your time spent on a project? Like, how much time is spent designing screens, writing scripts, planning dungeons, play-testing etc?
When I did the quests, it was pretty much screen design and testing. I'd guess that 80%+ of the time was building the screens and maybe 20%- of the time was play-testing it.
I spent a lot of time play-testing the first one, because again, it was my first time using the program, so I was paranoid about getting everything just right. I didn't do much planning other than copy/pasting dungeon room templates into overall dungeon shapes and setting up the doors as I went, if you call that planning. I only ever sketched a few things on paper, things that I needed to keep organized, like the multi-entrance dungeon, the freeform dungeon, and the 7-floor dungeon with 20-some stairways.
Quest 2 I generally sketched the areas while making it, because I didn't have time to dabble in general ideas, so I crapped out really quick sketches and hurried to make them in the game.
Do you have a specific goal you try to hit when you open up ZQ?
Not really. Just do as much as I can, as fast as I can.
When building an area, do you take it one screen at a time, or do you generally outline the whole area first and fill in the details later?
As above, my first dungeons were cutting+pasting the room template into a general shape and setting up the doorways as I went, except for the freeform one. I wish I had known about aliases for that one.
I can't stand to do square rooms anymore, so yeah, a lot more pre-planning was necessary when I did the 24/36-hour quest because I don't use templates. And when I do rooms using my newest stuff from those tiles I've been making, it takes a very detailed plan and a lot of trial and error to get a decent room done, so those are definitely done room-by-room because the end shape of one room determines where the next rooms begin. I can't say I'm making a quest at this point, but since I built so many test screens in the process of making sure I had enough tiles for all these different situations, I've basically got enough screens designed for 2 fully functional dungeons and then some.
Overworld and caves are much easier to simply throw some stuff down and work it a little bit until it looks natural. I can design that stuff exponentially faster than dungeons, and with little to no planning either, so I generally take that screen-by-screen as well, but in a much different way, treating the entire map more like one big screen regardless of the way ZC/ZQ divides the screens.