This thread is clearly evidence that this is a conversation that really needed to happen.
...But it still makes me sad that being honest spawned what may be the worst thread on GAF.
Wonder why more devs don't post openly here? You're looking at it.
I fully expect people to be ignorant of how this stuff works, which is why I provided the breakdown I did. It's one thing not to believe me, but I'm really confused why people are doubting Seth Killian and David Lang?
One question that does arise from the cost breakdown is what exactly is the deal with Hit-box Contracting? I ask mostly because I have never heard of a Hit-box Contractor before. That seems like an overly-specific job for a contractor.
These are the same people that helped us out with hitboxes at Reverge. They're hand-picked friends of Mike's, and fighting game players themselves. They do it in their free time over the course of a few weeks while Mike implements the characters.
Hitboxes are an important element of the design, and really time-consuming, because you need to precisely tune them on 1500 frames of animation. If Mike had to do this himself it would make it hard to do the stuff only he can do, which is implementing and balancing the character, and probably significantly increase the development time of the character.
What people don't seem to understand is that you use contractors to
save money by eliminating bottlenecks. Because Mike is free to focus on the things only he can do, that is time we don't have to worry about paying the rest of the staff.
This is essentially money to get their entire operation up and running again, basically starting an entire new studio. If they were already set up and working on other projects, simply diverting time away to make a single character doesn't really cost that much for such a non graphically intensive game. That said, if their only purpose was to make a new character this should still only cost a few thousand through a smaller dedicated team with contracted work for art and not renting studio time (honestly there are certainly cheaper alternatives to renting professional studios, and voice acting from low level voice actresses is cheap unless you're in the middle of nowhere) to do voice work. People are essentially kickstarting this developer's whole operation.
Yeah, no - these are our actual costs.
There is virtually no overhead in those figures, because we don't have an office, no one is getting health benefits, and everyone is using their own computers. We're all working from home, tracking the project online. And during the development of the game, Mike and the artists frequently worked 80-100 hour weeks.
Some are necessarily estimates, but they're educated ones. For example, it's impossible to know what testing will actually cost, and I budgeted about half of what we spent testing the first patch. And I'm honestly concerned that it's not going to be enough.
In meetings people that actually know what they're talking about say that we are incredibly cheap and efficient. Out of the 100s of animations we made for Skullgirls, only 3-4 went unused. And, as RagingSpaniard can unfortunately attest, we pay our animation contractors very little - about half or less of what some other studios do, and I wish we could afford to pay more.
And, to the people saying "just test it yourselves" - that is not how reality works. We have to pay
Konami's QA department test the patch for us so we can submit it and, hopefully, get it through on the first try.
The rewards are budgeted for what we perceive could be the "worst case scenario," like if we funded it entirely through some of the higher tiers with a higher cost of goods for the rewards.
So what did the entire game cost to make then?
It's clearly stated in the Indiegogo campaign - the budget for the core game was $1.7M, and the cost for individual characters was between $200-250k at more normal (but still below industry average) salaries.
Also, that actually only really covered development of 7 characters, because Filia was already basically completed when we signed the project with Autumn games.