I realise I’ve been pouting and yesterdays PC gamer was more a realization that I’ve been doing so. I was less mad at the magazine and more at myself for failing to move forward with the project and instead putting it further and further away. Well I can’t do that anymore. It’s been an entire month and I have nothing to show for it but words a promises. Well that ends today.
First I’ll address the fact that this is not me compromising the project or an act catering to the publics misinformation. I’ve decided to severely cut the budget down for two reasons. The first is that due to the revised scope I wouldn’t need the amount of resources required to finish the game or the time seeing as it’s a significantly smaller project I’d merely need a year to complete the game. The second came after some very long hours of meditation and some significant conversation with trusted sources, that the amount I was asking for would still require a significant amount of people to back the project and it’s unlikely that many people would be willing to do so.
this is the new budget, it should solve both issues and still leave me enough to complete the project in one year, or at least get it to a complete state. I’ve already begun to publish the roadmap so you’ll be able to see what will constitute that conclusion.
By far the most expensive part aside from the assets I’ll need more than a high end gaming computer and a tablet to complete the task. I’ll require at least two workstations that have serious power under the hood. One for game development and one for rendering and modeling. Each of these will no doubt cost around 5 - 7 grand without peripherals and I’ll likely need to complement these stations with serious hardware. The peripherals would be around 2 - 3 grand, giving us a total for the workstations to be 10 grand.
I won’t need much in the way of sound equipment but I will need some speakers headphones and an effective external sound card and board. 2 grand is more than adequate for the project.
Storage is a constant battle and I’ll need to be prepared, I don’t know how much I’ll need but some commercial grade systems can cost upwards around 5 grand. I don’t want to compromise on storage but I don’t feel I’ll need more than a regular NAS as well as an off site backup so I’ll keep the budget at 5 grand.
This is almost a complete unknown as models and materials can range from a collection for less than a hundred to thousands for one. I’ll have to be very carful since I’m making this 8 grand.
books, tutorials, and contracted features may mostly be free, however there is a lot of information that is invaluable behind a paywall and It would be foolish not to have a budget for this. 1 grand.
At this point this only covers the T-shirts and since I don’t know how many I’ll need I’m putting 2 grand to that.
UE4 for a year, maya, adobe, landscape software, texture software, and any other software I’ll have to purchase to create assets for unreal. I’m gonna put a high budget for this at 4 grand just in case cause some of the licences for commercial use can be comically large.
That all comes to 32 grand, that’s still a lot but doesn’t cover the cost of shipping the game and what kickstarter takes. that’s why the final budget is now 42 grand total. The extra 10k is there for those extra expenses. I don’t think I can make the budget any smaller than this, it’d be tight but it also means if by some miracle we get more money we’ll be that much more comfortable during development.
I’m also going to reiterate I’m not trying to make a company with this project, I like making games for fun and profit is always nice but I don’t want to end up losing control of just creating art for the sake of art.
