Well... that's kind of like just asking how long it takes to get from point A to point B on a map. The reality depends on a lot of suff. Are you walking, driving, flying? Are there geographic barriars in the way? Can you make a straight shot or do you have to follow extranious routes? You get the idea. So how long will it take? It entirely depends on the complexity of what you are trying to build, your level of detail, your motivation toward working on it, and overall, what you are ultimately trying to achieve. LASSIE will (hopefully) take the majority of the work out of physical development time (sprite layout, interactive scripting, defining object behaviors, etc.) considering the application essentially does that for you. But alas, there is no such thing as a magic bullet for making games, you still need to manage dialogue, media files and the like, which are the real time consuming tasks. The best advice I can offer is that no matter what tool you decide on, figure it will realistically take longer than what you'd initially excpect/hope for. Such is the nature of creative work. Either way, good luck!

If you had all the art and sound files and whatnot and all you had to do was place it into LASSIE and script the TIMes AND you had nothing else to do for that whole week, I'd say MAYBE you could get it done.

someone who is an expert in scripting with LASSIE, could probably script, -*test*-('") and debug a 1 hour game in 2 weeks providing the scaling, the backgrounds etc are right first time I'm no expert with lassie, nor have i completed a game with it, but from using other engines and done a few games, the concept is very similar, its normally the -*test*-('")ing, fine tuning sprites, adjustments and debugging which takes the time, theres a saying... think of the time you think you can do something.. double it and then add an extra 30mins for each day, then you won't go far wrong! what you could do is use daft drawings for the rooms, sprites etc and work on the script while the artwork is being produced to buy some extra time, plus if the walk areas don't look right or the character hides things its easier to fix good luck with the project... do we get to see the finshed artical?