Bent Spoon Games has put up a postmortem budget post on their most recent game Girl With a Heart of. It’s always nice when developers open up their numerical experiences because it gives people entering the industry a good framework with how to move forward.

I’d love to see more detail in how the PR was spent, but for assets and everything else the breakdown is rather clear.

For example, for art I spent: $8,080 on characters, $4,485 on backgrounds, $1,705 on portraits. Outside of art: $1500 was spent on PR, $775 on music, and $600 on dialog editing. Ideally, you can come up with these rough breakdowns before you start producing any assets. And once you do start paying for assets, be sure to keep track to make sure you are not spending beyond your means. Here is a quick calculation I did to make sure I was staying within budget:

Budget left: $17,000

Primary characters’ designs and skeletons: $90 * 11 = $900

Primary characters’ animation: $10perFrame * 12fps * (9chars * 5anims) = $5,400

Portraits: 10chars * ($70 + $40 * 3) = $1900

Secondary characters’ designs and skeletons: 14 * $40 = $560

Secondary characters’ animations: $7perFrame * 12fps * (14chars * 1anims) = $1,176

Creature design and skeleton: $90 * 4 = $360

Creature animations: $10perFrame * 12fps * (4chars * 5anims) = $2,400

Backgrounds: $85 * 48 = $4,080

Total: $16,776

Read the full post-mortem.