Hello everybody! I have about $12 000 and I want to spend it on making a game! A 3D low/medium-poly space racing game, something in the vein of Zero Gear but Wipeout-ish:) It will be multiplayer centered with in-game lobby and matchmaking. Trouble is I have no frame of reference if the money is enough, or how to lay a financial plan. Personally, I won't dip into the money, I got a part-time job that covers that. At the same time I feel they aren't enough to start a (minimal) physical studio and start paying some people full wages and dental plans. I will be lead programmer and designer, but I must out-source pretty much everything else: the assets (be it graphics or audio), additional programming, testers, a bit of promotion later on, hardware resources, licensing of software (but about 80% coding will be based on LGPL stuff starting with Ogre 3D). Where do I start laying a more detailed financial and fesability plan? How do I find wages and prices for artists and designers? How should I go about recruiting people? Any good books on the subject?:) Any postmortems for guys who already tried/do this? Thanks in advance! Valentin Galea

Hi Valentin,
$12K is most likely nowhere near enough.
Read these articles for starters (they address many of the questions you asked:)
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/finances.htm
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson16.htm
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson29.htm
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/416/the_game_industry_salary_survey_2007.php
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/article60.htm
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/lesson39.htm
http://www.sloperama.com/advice/article58.htm

Well, if its $12000 USD that's more money than it sounds like in Romania.

I don't have any real business experience, so I won't speak to financials directly, but if I were in your shoes, here's what I'd do:

Commit yourself to working regularly on your own time. Be realistic about your level of skill and whether it is sufficient to complete your vision. Set short goals, and meet them. Don't plan more for your game than you can complete in a year. Find one good person to handle the artistic side of things, and pay them some kind of salary commensurate to the amount of work they do. Contract or work with volunteers and/or deferred payment for other resources, such as audio or extra help on the graphics/programming. Reserve some of the cash for hardware, software licenses, incidentals, etc.

You should be able to stretch 12k pretty far if you're frugal. If you don't quite get there, you should at least have something to show, which could get you more funding, or give you an idea of whether its worth putting additional money into.


All this, of course, presumes you've already determined that there is a market for the game, and that its worth investing in in the first place.

@Tom Sloper:
Thanks, I'll catch up on reading all your stuff, and try to raise some more money:)

@Ravyne:
Great motivational words, thank you! I'll try to make the best of them!

For professional salaries/rates, it won't go far at all. But you can find people who charge a lot less... advertising on sites like RentaCoder will get a bunch of low bids from Asia in particular, as long as you are able to give detailed clear description of exactly what you want, this could work.
You might also be able to get people who do this as a hobby to work for low rates... students who would rather earn $10/hour doing game art than working in a bar. When you consider how many people work for free to build a portfolio, they could be a good resource if you can offer a non-trivial payment.

For reference, I was recently bidding on an online poker/casino project. I dropped out as it seemed there were several (genuine) bidders able to take it on for $35-40K (using a normal programming company might cost $100-200k). Another project I looked at was to create a solitaire world game, with online score tracking component. I think the winning bid on this was $10K for presumably the entire project, code & art.

I think you can get a lot for $12K. Maybe not top quality, but but sounds this would be an acceptable compromise on your project.

To clear something up:
I'm not dreaming to have a full, releasable, greatly-polished game within that sum.

I want - like someone already said - to get to a polished enough, presentable, beta with some solid community around it, so that I can show around to publishers, try to get a deal, hope that Valve allow Steamworks on it, etc...

Quote: Original post by valentin-galea
To clear something up:
I want ... to get to a polished enough, presentable, beta with some solid community around it, so that I can show around to publishers, try to get a deal, hope that Valve allow Steamworks on it, etc...

I still have my doubts that $12K will get you there. You should include in your budget travel to game conferences in Europe and the US and Asia. Those trips could well eat up half your $12K right there.

I wonder what was the budget for Dylan Fitterer's Audiosurf, which resembles (at least in the racing part) with what I'm trying to achieve...

Didn't find any specific references just these quotes from interviews:

Quote:
DF: My wife Elizabeth did game usability at Microsoft for a couple years and that experience was very helpful. We hired testers from our neighborhood to help find the sticking points and tune the difficulty. We also hired freelance help with graphics

Quote:
My wife, Elizabeth, is a feasibility engineer, so she did a lot of hiring people in the community for $25 for a half-hour

Quote:
So it's distributed?

I guess it's just a matter of expanding the team when needed.

I sent him an email just in case:)

Well I got a wonderful reply from Dylan where he encouraged me, said the money was well enough, the important thing is to code code code, prototype ideas, see what works best and build from that.

So there!:)

I would suggest that you buget it wisely and instead outsourcing assets, spend about 1k on learning to do your own assets online.There are a bunch of free types of game software out there so you could use those.The game creators web site (http:/www.thegamecreators.com) has a lot of cool things including GILE'S, a dynamic lighting engine;SFX,a very good dirt cheap sound engine;and action3d ,a polygon reduction software that would be perfect for a high speed racing game.Lucky timing,Havok phisics has just recently made their products free.irrEdit is a good world editor (http://www.ambiera.com/irredit/index.html).









The rest is up to you.