Budget
Sep 07, 2015
During last week's podcast, I asked Gary and David what scares them the most about the project. I find this a useful exercise to do with the team to see what they are worried about. The answer always changes as the project progresses and new worries come and go.
The common theme from the three of us was the amount of work there is to do. It's daunting. But as I've said several times on this blog, that's normal. I've never not been daunted by the amount of work facing me on any game I've done. If you're not daunted by the amount of work, there's probably something wrong and you need to be pushing harder. Be daunted and push yourself right up to the point of being overwhelmed.
During the podcast I mentioned my concern about money and seeing the bank account go down each month. This was somehow turned into "we're running out of money", which is far from the truth. I am worried about money, anyone running a project should be.
The thing is: I worry about things so they don't become problems, and worrying about money is one of those things. If we didn't worry about money everyday, we would run out of money. It sneaks up on you.
Seeing $500,000 in your bank account can make you cocky. It can seem like an endless supply of cash and more money than most people (including me) have ever seen in their bank account. But you have to treat that $500,000 like it's $5,000 or even $500. Every dollar matters.
It's why I like to have a budget.
It is one of the advantages of having a publisher, they will poke your budget full of holes and challenge your assumptions. The downside is, they will also push your budget down and it's not uncommon for developers to then fake the budget so they get the deal (which their studio is often dependent on to stay alive). It's not malicious, they (and I have done this as well) just convince themselves they can make it for less, and that's often not true.
I want to know where every dollar is being spent from here until the end of the project. You start putting line items into the budget and you instantly see your money starting vanish. A few line items later and you're out of money. It's sobering and a necessary process. It really makes you appreciate spending anything.
We had budgets back at Lucasfilm, but we were very isolated from the gory ramifications of those numbers. I could make a budget and if I went over by 20%, I might get a stern talking to, but it's not like people weren't going to be paid. When you're running your own company and project with your own money and you run out, people don't get paid and they don't like that. In the real world, they stop working.
I do a first pass budget before I start designing. I often know how much money I have and I want to see how many people and how long I have before that money is gone. If I know I have 15 months and can afford 5 people, then that helps me in scoping the design. If I have 24 months and can have 100 people, that's another scope.
Once I've done the preliminary budget, we'll start designing and then enter pre-production, all the while, adjusting the budget as I know more. When pre-production is done, we can look at the amount of work and do a final budget based on the schedule. Budget and Schedule are two different things that feed into and help refine each other. You can't do one without the other, but they aren't the same thing.
A schedule lists everything you have to make and who is going to make it and when. A budget takes all those people and how much they cost and tells you what the project is going to cost.
Below is the current budget for Thimbleweed Park. It's what I like to call a living budget. You'll notice that the first monthly column is October, not the beginning of the project. Money spent is "water under the bridge" and is only relevant for historical and educational reasons. What I want to focus my attention on is how much we have and how much we need to spend going forward.
Anyone who has a real background in accounting is probably having spasm right now. There are much better ways to do this, but I'm not an accountant and neither are most indie devs. This is a much simplified way of budgeting and it works for me.
Each month I look at what we spend versus what we expect to spend then make any adjustments to future costs. I then remove the current month column, look at the projected total and the bank balance. If there is more in the bank then we're projected to spend, then we're OK, back to programming and designing.
Let's go through the budget.
First up are the people. Gary and I are working for peanuts (honey roasted). Neither of us can afford to work for free for 18 months and we're making about a quarter of what we could get with "real jobs" but we do need to eat and pay rent.
Everyone else is working below what they could get, but I do think it's important to pay people. I don't feel getting people to work for free ever works out and usually ends badly (and friendships) or you "get what you pay for." The reality is that when someone works for you for free, you aren't their top priority. They may say you are, they may want you to be, but you rarely are and you end up dealing with missed deadlines and hastily done work.
It's important to have team members that can work as professionals and you pay people that are professionals. You should respect people's time and talent and pay them for their work. It's what the Kickstarter money was for after all.
Everyone is budgeted in at 5 days a week and 8 hours a day as we're trying to keep normal hours. I have no doubt these hours will go up towards the end of the project, but I try to never budget crunch time, it's a dangerous precedent. It's a cost we will have to manage down the road, either by hiring someone new, spending for extra time, shifting resources or cutting content. There is enough slop built into the rest of the budget to cover some of this, but I never want ink to paper, because then crunch becomes real.
We do have two additional artists budgeted and yet to be hired. We don't know if we'll need both of them, but I've budgeted them just in case. We might need help with animation and there are also a lot of close-ups (telephones, control panels, bulletin boards, etc) and ancillary screens that aren't on Mark's schedule right now.
There is a line item for an additional writer. We made the decision to go with full Monkey Island style dialogs and I don't feel confident I can get all those done with everything else I need to be doing (like budgeting).
Testers, testers, testers. One of the most important and often forgotten roles in a game. It's money well spent because not testing will cost you down the road in emergency patches, dissatisfied players and crappy review scores. The original budget had 3 testers, but I added a 4th when we added the Xbox. I over budgeted for testing and it's an area that will probably come in under budget (ass, prepare to be bitten).
It's important to distinguish between testing and beta testing as they serve very different functions. The paid testers on a project are there to (primarily) find and help squash bugs. This is a paid role because it's grueling work and, quite frankly, not a lot of people are really good at it. Testers don't just "play the game". They are "testing" the game and that often involves countless hours of playing the same 5 minutes over and over, trying to get an elusive bug to appear. Testers need to write clear and concise bug reports and endlessly regress bugs to make sure they are fixed. It's a hard job. Good testers are worth every penny.
Beta testing is different. Beta testers (an unpaid role) are still finding bugs, but what you're really looking for are big picture issues, like puzzle complexity, game flow and story clarity. You want beta testers to "play" the game like normal players will and get feedback (mostly through silently watching, analytics and debriefs). You want to turn 50 beta testers loose and see where they go and what they do.
Next we come to Music and SFX. Musicians usually charge by the minute, so if you're going to have 15 minutes of unique music and they charge $1000 a minute (not uncommon), then your budget is $15,000. That $1,000/minute includes a lot of exploration and revisions and mixing. If you're saying "Hey, I'll do your music for free" you need to ask yourself if you're willing to spend weeks exploring different styles and tracks while getting constant feedback, then spend months composing it all, then additional months of making little revisions and changes, then producing 3, 4 or 5 flawless mixes. It's a lot of work and all the while, you have to hit deadline after deadline. And this is all for a relatively low budget game.
Next up on our journey through budget land is Translations, Voice Recording and Mobile. I'm kind of rolling the dice on these. I don't have a good idea what these will cost so I've padded the hell out of them and I expect this is where a lot of the slop will come from to fill other leaks. I got bids for voice acting and translation then added 30%. I have no idea on iOS and Android. I just chose a big number. This is where the voodoo of budgeting really plays out. If we had a producer, they would be spending more time nailing these numbers down. I've added enough extra that I feel comfortable.
On to Events. This is for stuff like PAX, Indiecade, E3 and other events we might want to show the game at. All this is really marketing and PR. It's also where we will pull extra money from if we get in trouble down the road. Not showing the game will screw its long term hopes, but not finishing the game is worse. Plus, it's a number we can scale up and down as needed and it's far enough down the road that we'll have better idea of how we're really doing.
Then it's on to the really exciting part of the budget: Legal, Accounting, Software, and the always important Misc. Assuming we don't get sued, these are fairly predictable and fixed expenses, but don't forget them.
And finally, the Kickstarter physical rewards. We have a fixed budget that was based on our final Kickstarter pledge numbers. It's probably around 25% too high, but that gives us some flexibility to make a better boxed copy or use the money elsewhere on the project. Or, we might have estimated wrong.
At the bottom is a total. I look at that each month and look at the bank balance. So far, we're fine. But that's because I worry.
One thing that is not on this spreadsheet is the money that is currently coming in from Humble Bundle and new backers. It's not significant, but it's not inconsequential either. I choose the leave it off the budget calculations because it provides this small margin of error.
We are planning on some new stretch goals in the next few months, and those are also not in the budget because if we don't make the goals, they won't become expenses. If we do, then all the numbers will be adjusted to account for the new work.
It's also possible that we'll move resources around, spend less on an artist and add a programmer. Budgets are living documents.
One thing to note, and I'm sure it will raise some eyebrows, is the monthly burn rate. That's a lot of money to spend each month. No one line item is very large, but they add up and can catch you by surprise. This is a pretty barebones project (but not scrappy) and it still costs $20K-$30K a month. It why when I look at other Kickstarters asking for very little money and they have a three page long team list, I get skeptical.
I hope this was informative. There are a lot of ways to do budgeting and I'm sure there are better ways, but this has always worked for me.
Please be respectful that we're sharing a lot of information with you, not only to be transparent, but also to educate and inform. This is how games are made, they take time, cost money and it's a very messy process.
- Ron
PS: You have weird insults and even weirder compliments.
Yes, I know it was a joke.
If I may ask, can you give examples of "rent equipment"?
Also, looking forward to read about the new stretch goals!
No, really, I've thought countless times about recruiting a team of aficionados to make a graphic adventure and avoid the money problem.
Guess what? So far it never worked, people are (rightly) needing money to work properly.
It's as easy as that: passion and love are not enough in the real world, people need to eat food.
Should be a badge, by the way. Oh, and wear a sailor cap with your name on it for authenticity.
Obviously TP is being made no matter what because of the success of the first kickstarter campaign, that's what the kickstarter campaign was supposed to be about, to make the game exist. There's nothing wrong though with trying to make the game even better than it's already going to be through a 2nd crowdfunding campaign, since it already is a much more ambitious project than originally advertised primarily because of the addition of Mark Ferrari and his awesome art style.
Anyway though, thank you for the very informative blog entry, I think this is the first detailed report of it's kind that a game developer has ever given!
Also this whole thing shows the different perspective: Ron, as a professional game designer & developer, has a different view of the project as us the fans. While we want primarily the "GREATEST GAME EVER!" with no compromises - which is of course a legitime wish for a fan! Go hype train ;-) - Ron has also to face business reality and make sure the game doesn't vanish in a cloud of wishful thinking. This is what makes a developer a good developer: Delivering a great game within the constraints of the real world.
Of course I was hoping to see it at PAX South because I most likely will be there.
I also hope that this project is way more fun for everyone involved than other projects if you're taking a serious paycut. Especially the totals columns for you and Gary look awfully narrow so far.
I'm also curious if the money that Microsoft presumably paid for the exclusive covers the costs of the port in your current budget. (I'm really just curious, not secretly critical. I trust you, Ron.)
I do wonder if I am reading it correctly, though. Are you really paying David and Mark only 176 $ per month?!
ok. i know, you just pranked us with that numbers. but funny anyway.
Hat's off to that!
Great post, anyway. :-)
Testers will probably work in sessions or days as the hours are always multiple of 8.
The not blurred numbers are days or costs not directly related to a person. I think it's fair to not disclose how money are shared at this point, the important number is the monthly cost of developement.
(And now I suspect even more that many other Kickstarters do not do any realistic budgeting at all, unfortunately)
A few words about localization:
As a French, I can tell you that a good localization is costly. :( Especially for games like yours with high litterary qualities.
For a professional localization done by a real writer, cost is usually 0,15 or 0,20 $ per word. For a talky point & click game, the total is often 5000 $ per language - in Latin alphabet: twice the price if translating into Arabic or Chinese. Monkey Island games were of this quality - and even sometimes you could see the English sentence behind the translation or the wordplay, but there was also creativity so the foreign speaker can feel his own language, which is primordial for the immersion.
You have to translate a style, emotions, humorous puns into another style and other humorous puns, not just UI instructions like "load" and "save". And respect technical constraints (French takes more words than English to say the same thing). And knowing the context where a phrase is pronounced. Many English-speaking developers don't understand that, unfortunately. They are tight in budget and think that a cheap or misinformed translator or even, at the worst, a Google translation, will be enough. Result is horrible as you can guess. Often, indie p&c are translated by free volunteers. They are passionates and sometimes really efficient but it's always a bet.
Good luck and good work for Thimbleweed Park !
I guess what I’m trying to ask is, how good are translations to your native languages generally? Do you feel they are usually well done and are necessity for good gaming experience or more likely they are just something done in hurry, feeling like something is missing in translation and you’d rather play the game in English? I don’t mean to insinuate TB would have such problems, I’m just curious in general about the games which are not solely based on graphics but text also.
Oh and thank you Mr Gilbert, Winnick and Fox for this incredible blog, it just keeps getting more and more interesting post by post.
My favorite German version is Grim Fandango, which also has a very good dubbing. I like the German voice acting even more then the original. That quality is very rare, unfortunately.
The LucasArts adventures are all good translations, imho. I usually still prefer the English version, though.
The Telltale games' translations are rather poor in comparison. I always play them in English.
Games with only English voice acting available, I prefer to play with English subtitles rather then German subtitles.
It would be great, if Thimbleweed Park could get German voice acting in the quality of the LucasArts games, too. But I guess, foreign voice acting isn't even on the budged, right? Even many LucasArts and Sierra games didn't got German voice acting.
Translations are always a tricky business. I deal a lot with translations, and usually we find two pitfalls:
1. The translator isn't a copywriter, i.e. the translation is not creative, which often results as poorly translated content. The language can be impeccable, but awkward.
2. English is short. Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Italian etc. are not. It's often very hard to squeeze translated content into space reserved for English copy. With Thimbleweed Park, I guess the Occult Book Store titles will be especially difficult. It was difficult to fit them in required character count even in English.
So we had a tradition of excellent localization and VAs in the 60's-70's-80's and were raised in this. We all discovered Star Wars and Indiana Jones in French. Didier Dorval's voice made Stallone even more iconic in French - we only know him with this voice. Guybrush in MI3 and 4 had the same voice as Aladdin's French VA. And Murray was awesome.
Quality has dropped from the 90's, though. Since the VA's strike. And there are more production restraints in the cinema. And production has been democratized so it's difficult for smaller studios.
AAA like Mass Effect have a Hollywood-quality voice acting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXSW6wYS23s (ME3 ending) and are enjoyed as they are. Planescape Torment's French version was great as it unforgettably adapted the slang language in French. Most games are good. Some have problems. Baldur's Gate 2 Imoen's voice has stayed infamous. More and more often translations are almost word-to-word and you can read it no problem but you don't feel as it had been the primary language.
It's actually a very complicated question. There are several theories of translation (fidelity or transparency ?). I'm a huge supporter of transparency (a translated noir novel should feel as if it has been written by a noir author), but the debate is still open.
Hey, I even install most software that does have -presumably- decentlanguage packs (windows, browsers, iOS,...) in English. Makes it easier to find back stuff online. And even simple translations do seem awkward when you're talking about IT. More in general, I always watch movies in their native language (with subtitles) but I prefer reading translated books over reading the English version. Although it becomes weird if , e.g. in Game of thrones a name such as Jon Snow gets translated... Ugh!<shivver>
I would love a (good quality) talkie version in German (the one for Monkey Island 3 was great, for example) but as far as I can see it's not budgeted.
"Wie passend, du kämpfst wie eine Kuh" :-)
Couldn't you hire a part time producer to hand off the budgeting/scheduling burden, and dedicate your full attention to what you're a world class expert at?
If it doesn't exist yet, that's a job that must be invented (BSaaS, that's rad on a business card). I'm sure you're not the only project in this situation.
I´d also do the german translation for free... :)
But I won't turn the talkies on anyway, since I will enjoy that game as old school as possible.
There is incomprehensible amount of lines to speak, and these lines take more than one take.
There has to be people to do the voice planning, directing and sound editing, which is a lot of work
The final edited lines (huge amount of them) need to be managed as well.
Voice recordings has to be done in a proper studio, and the hourly cost for those are not cheap either.
This translates to big bucks.
Some people like to think, that when a project is funeded the problems have been solved. But that's the moment when the real problem solving really begins.
Btw, you fight like a dairy farmer.
Thank you again so much for making this game for us!
Question to Ron: why don't you budget hours for you in the months besides October and December? Do you plan to stay the remaining months until the release on some carribean island :-P ?
Maybe a question for the artists too: do you track any metrics on how long it takes to produce art of different types (to help project leads to budget and schedule the work) ? Perhaps this would be better left for the Q&A thingie actually.
A good way to do a budget, is to divide things into smaller chunks and define them individually. Also, as Ron wrote, scheduling is part of this. If you do a good schedule and commit people to it, the budget is almost done. I think this is the same with any project, even if they are completely different. "What will we do, and what is the cost, item by item".
If one is in any way responsible for a project, one should do time tracking. That is the only way to have any reasonable base for budgeting, as all we have in life, is finite time.
http://mariancall.com/kickstarter-math-is-weird/
(Don't worry, this is the very very last time that I mention doing a 2nd kickstarter campaign for TP lol).
Can you give us more info yet on these new stretch goals you mentioned in this blog entry or is it too early to say? Are you planning on doing a 2nd crowdfunding campaign for TP that focuses completely on stretch goals to enhance the game to it's fullest potential (just show off Mark Ferrari's art for an easy win and explain that while the game is absolutely being completed regardless of how the 2nd crowdfunding effort goes due to the success of the 1st KS campaign, but that you want to the game even bigger and better) or are you talking about something completely different in regards to these new stretch goals?
Very educating.
This blog gets better at every post.
PS: Make sure you keep enough money for the shovel and the 'map' with the big X.
$250 x 12 = $3000 (not $2750)
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-09-08-monkey-island-developer-ron-gilbert-breaks-down-the-funding-of-an-indie-game
http://kotaku.com/what-a-video-game-budget-looks-like-1729412796
I'm still disappointed of "Broken Age" and have never played through the second act although I paid $110.
Was the huge success on the one hand, but also the huge difference of what the DoubleFine Adventure promised and what it in the end delivered on the other hand, a motivation for you to make your own kickstarter and do a "real" old school adventure?
But seriously i absolutely love this blog. If i was a millionaire i would give you million for this blog and another one for the game, and maybe one more just to drag Steve Purcel and Michael Land into the project.
In fact millions all around!!
I've done interactive writing (which included a lot of event scripting) for an open-world indie game (westerado) and writing changes were happening right up to release.
I'm interested to know how that works for professionals who actually know how to plan out games.
Out off topic... Since you all have changed the graphics in a better way, why don't you change the upper image of thos blog?
I think it could make people who know nothing about the project to get some interest... We have follow all the proces and see the new ones, but someone who enters for the first time...
http://kotaku.com/what-a-video-game-budget-looks-like-1729412796
Also: I was listening to Monkey Island opening theme all the time while reading. AWESOME!!
Btw, I didn't find it mentioned in comments but I use YNAB (You Need a Budget) as budgeting tool, and it works almost as your spreadsheet, but with lots of tool to adjust, analyze, budget, and make recurrent expenses and income automated.
I use it for my personal budgeting and also for small projects! :)
Disclaimer: I don't work for YNAB I'm just an enthusiast :P
Writing your own engine sounds like a great choice for this project (and, ahem, future project).
But I'm curious - how drastically different do you think the budget would have been if you used and possible extended an established engine?
Im just happy to see that there is being put so much thought into the budget. Not to write a long story. But i kinda feel like Ron and Gary should have been there to help with that stuff on Tim's broken age, not sure what went wrong there. But making games is expensive, no matter how you cut it.
On another note, im definitely one of the people that would like to upgrade my pledge and throw some more money at you guys for this great project, give you some more leeway and money to work. This is one of the few out of the 100's of projects ive backed, that i have absolute 110% faith in. You guys are doing a great job. Keep it up
Recently I wrote some code to help take results from OCR library to try to get it recognize some numbers but even then the results weren't reliable enough. The I figured that as there was a relation between the numbers, I could only figure out some numbers and brute force solve whether the other numbers were in line with expectations.
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