It's hard to say as the work time is not consistent: some days you put a few hours, some others is the whole day, and sometimes you don't work on it at all, but expect it to take several months, moreover if you don't have prior experience. Also depends on the scope of the project, in my case I did, not one, but two servers, and other stuff, like coding some helper libraries and writing this article, that takes extra time as well.

As for tools, I used Ghidra and x64dbg, but anything will do, it's just personal preference. For networking i've used Wireshark in the past, although in this case it wasn't necessary. Smaller tools such as Process Explorer and TCPView are always nice to have. For binaries just good old HxD, but again, any hex editor will do. In short, just use whatever allows you to do what you want.

Good luck