Aren't you lucky that Sunstone Games makes all their finances public!
The studio has taken $200,000 in bank loans (lines of credit actually, so we only pay interest on what we actually use - if we can exceed our $100,000 Kickstarter goal that means less to pay back in interest.) Kickstarter + CC fees take 10% of funds raised - so our minimal working capital as of Jan 1 is $290k.
Engineering: licensing Spigot from Pipeworks: $25,000. Engineering support from Pipeworks: $75,000. (6 months, spread through the 9 month production cycle.)
Our engineering needs (and thus costs) are incredibly low - because we're using an engine which was literally designed for us to build exactly this sort of game.
Animation + Modeling: $80,000 - this is mostly an internal cost, but we might dip into some outsourcing of animations, because "more monsters" is the first addition people will want.
Environments: $5,000 - we're staying away from earth cities initially - we'll focus on those in a later release. Very possibly our second.
Kickstarter rewards fulfillment: $22,000 - all that original monster meeting & concepting time ends up costing us a bunch.
Community maintenance: $2,000 - forums, website, and admin costs.
Software licensing: $5,000 - mostly video & modeling software.
Audio FX & Music: $15,000 - internal
Particle FX: $5,000 - internal
UI: $5,000 - internal
Monster Assembly & fight engine development: $30,000 (this is what I pay myself)
TOTAL: $269,000. So we have a $20,000 buffer, plus whatever we raise over our baseline budget.
Hopefully that makes our value proposition a bit more sensible!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/14214732/kaiju-combat-giant-monsters-awesome-fighting-onlin
And our forums are always a great place for questions, or to reveiew the current design discussions:
http://kaijucombat.com/community/index.php
