A comment on our last status update mentioned our budget. Our plan is to make a new game for a lot less than it cost to do King of Dragon Pass. Hopefully our experience (with KoDP and games in general) will let us do things more efficiently this time. We will likely do a lot less reworking of certain elements than we did the first time, since we have a better idea ahead of time what should work. And automated testing will let QA concentrate on bugs only a human can find.

The pie chart shows where we expected to spend our budget shortly after starting. The bulk of the expense (44%) was projected to be art.

Note that this doesn’t include any sort of overhead (like development machines, internet access, etc.). And I’m not directly expensing my own time. In other words, this is just what we expect to pay our freelancers.

This was just a plan, and once we were far enough along to see how things were working, we realized had to do more writing and art. So the final percentages will end up a bit different, though art will predominate.

(And yes, the title of this post is an excuse to watch OK Go.)