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
