how to spend $20k on your VN?

[jikkibot]

one more topic for speculation and fantasy before I conk out for the night.
what if I had USD$20,000 - USD$25,000 (about AUD$27,000 - $32,000) for my VN budget.
It's not a big budget by any means, but I'm not wealthy enough to blow it on bad budgeting.

I'd love to read advice regarding budget allocation.
I'd especially love to hear from experienced members who have completed VNs, but also any other members who are currently planning budgets.
How would you spend 20k - 25k on your VN?

- legal,
- writer wages,
- GUI artist wages,
- sprite artist wages,
- CG artist wages,
- sound track composer wages,
- voice acting wages,
- programmer coding wages,
- marketing...

Assuming I haven't missed anything, that's already a long list... i think 25k would disappear quickly.

[TheJerminator15]

Here's an interesting article on VN funding written by one of the members of Love in Space (who are most famous for their Sunrider series) on their website regarding VN funding and general budgeting: http://sunrider-vn.com/behind-the-scene ... g-your-vn/

It's not the most in depth article naturally, but due to my inexperience in the field (working on writing my first VN currently) I doubt I could offer more help on top of that, barring some general common sense that people budgeting already typically know.

[Divona]

Here is where the budget most likely to go to, from top to bottom:
0. Voice Acting
1. Arts (sprite, background, CG, etc)
2. GUI / Website / Marketing materials (graphic designer)
3. Programmer
4. Sound / Music (sound designer, composer)
5. Writer

From the list, voice acting is the most expensive. Following by marketing, which is subjective to how far are you willing to go with marketing. If you talk movie, it would be around 1/3 of overall budget for marketing.

Most budget would go to sprite and CG arts. Follow by sound designer, composer and graphics. Then again, it totally depending on the caliber of the artists you will be working with, and the price that you all agree. Writer could charge by word count, or advance and royalty fees.

It really all depending on how you organizing the budget, and place them to where you think is most important, to get that final product that close to what you want to achieves.

You could spend $10 in McDonald or $300 at fine dining restaurant for dinner. In the end, it's your call. Also, the more you pay doesn't always guarantee that it's equal quality either.

On a side note, it's also depending on the script. You will have to breakdown the script first before begin to start calculating the budget.

[Katta]

I totally disagree - the writing costs are the lowest only if you're doing writing yourself. The minimum for paid is considered to be 0.04$/word and you'd need at least 120-150k nonrepetitive text for a decent length. And you can totally get a nice sprite for 50$ or even less. Of course if you want a new cg every 100 words the art will cost a lot, but the thing is if you use art wisely you can have less of it.
Or you can add play value not by text but by gameplay, then the payment goes to the programmer. But you can reuse it later for your next games of the same genre.

[firecat]

i would spend it all on marketing, my game is free so i only need to worry about getting a good review in. I can do the music, writing, coding and sprites or backgrounds are available in CC forums.

[aeri]

I can tell you right now for a commercial game...if you are making a fairly extensive game (180k+ words) and are looking for pretty high quality art, you can easily spend 25k on the art assets alone.

I agree with Katta on the writing cost...some writers even charge upward of 5 to 10 cents per word...the other positions i am not 100% on but if you can buy licenses instead or use free commercial or noncommercial bgm instead of custom making everything, music can be cheaper than everything in the end...

It really depends what you are doing for the project...and don't forget if you're doing merchandises with the game...you should take the production cost as a part of your budget

That was my two cents on this

[Caveat Lector]

It really depends on:

a) which assets are most expensive,
b) of these expensive assets, which ones are absolutely worth it, and
c) which ones do I absolutely need right now, not just for progress' sake, but also for marketing purposes, to have something to show my potential audience?

I would start off with at least getting the visuals off the ground, since I'd need those to begin to promote the game with something attractive, followed by gorgeous and amazing music by various musicians. GUI, backgrounds, and originally commissioned songs can be and are the most expensive parts of the budget, but if you can find the right artists/musicians for all of these, it's worth it.

[Rinima]

I think everyone has covered most of it but I just want to pitch in with how I personally budget.

1. Fix the budget
2. Plan the game, figure out how many assets I need (aka, what exactly I need in terms of art and music, down to a T.)
3. Start shopping around for people that a: fit the style I'm looking for and ask for their prices, then, figure out how much you would need to pay them for all the work you require off them
4. Once you've done that, compare how much the budget is to how much you would need to hire all the people you want to hire
5. If the amount you need to hire the people you want is within budget, they you go!

I generally spend more on art rather than music, but I've gotten very good at scouting out composers. Also, try and keep to the same artist, as consistency is usually though as a bonus, feel free to mix and match composers tho, and for marketing, make sure the person/people you hire are good at what they do. I highly recommend Barzini viewtopic.php?f=66&t=28875

[SundownKid]

If I had $20k to spend on my VN, I would easily be able to find a use for all of it.

I might actually use some of the money to hire a coder and make my game in an engine such as Unity, so I could add more of a gameplay element to it and better animations. Of course there would be the typical artist, musician, etc. And I would also spend part of it on marketing the game.

[Tempus]

Yeah, $20,000 is unfortunately not much if you're contracting a lot of people. Let's say you want 25 BGs which, while maybe above average (it seems?), isn't an absurdly huge number. At $200 each (also not absurd for decent quality BG art, depending on where the artist lives) they'd be $5000 in total which is a quarter of the budget already. If I had $20,000 I would skip voice acting lol. Huge risk, huge cost, and disproportional payoff to reward ratio. Sounds bites would be a decent compromise though.

[Parataxis]

I would probably start by commissioning a really nice and extensive soundtrack. Because I am a sucker for music and let's be honest, even if the production fell through, just having a really awesome musical score for this idea in my head would be just awesome! The highest size I've ever estimated for a soundtrack is 71 2-minute tracks. Let's use the estimate of $50 per minute of song which seems on the moderate side price wise. (Individual musicians would of course need to be contacted to their estimates but you get the point) That's $7100 right there, which is over a third of the total (Never said I was smart!) but let's continue with the more conservative estimate of 100 total minutes where some songs are omitted and/or shorter so $5000.

Then, I would probably turn my attention to art. I am the primary sprite artist and therefore CG artist for the story due to my stylized character drawing. (I would be lying if I said I was like, a good artist, but I haven't found a drawing style which which feels more suited than mine so I am just sorta going with it and trying to shore up where I can.) But I would immediately hire some one else to do the backgrounds. The person I originally commissioned to do some backgrounds has complex backgrounds at $50 a head. So let's say I wanted to commission every possible background for either a resize or revamp and that all of them are complex, that's 43 locations/variations on locations, or $2150. That makes our remaining budget either $12,850 or $10,750.

At this point the next important piece of the puzzle is GUI/Logo stuff. It seems fairly standard for a nice set of GUI to run you like $500 and the logo to be an additional $150. This brings us down to $12,200 or $10,100.

Now what remains? Writing-wise, It's me, my sister and a friend, who will all be likely doing this for writing credits/cut of any profits since we all have more stable incomes at the moment, with time being our valuable asset. As I said before I am doing a lion's share of the art, but I might hire a colorist, or a character designer to help me tweak my designs. Maybe I would hire a programming assistant? But I actually don't mind programming so much as I am just a little limited in my skills. I still might hire some one to polish up my code (though I suspect that might be cruel and unusual) and export the final game, perhaps doubling as an editor, but hell if I know how much that would cost let's set aside $1000 for it.

This leaves me with 9-11K to spend, but let's assume we have 8k flat to leave some space for things to be expensive/go wrong. The only two aspects left to consider are voice acting and marketing. Now, I really do consider voice acting to be a pretty big luxury and would probably leave it to the very end--for one thing I know very little about the actual commercial voice acting industry and would need to do research. But let's say for argument that I allot 3k to marketing and 5k to voice acting. This is definitely not enough for full voice acting for what will probably be a pretty long game (if you couldn't tell from the above) but I would probably be more interested in partial voice acting, specifically of the "handful of important scenes" variety. There are between 13 and 18 chapters depending on how you count them and let's say that each one has a 1-2 page scene voice acted, with some variations totaling 26 scenes. I am going to assume that each scene takes 1 hour for each actor to record, with an hourly wage of 20$ that's 100*20= $2000. Now of course that's far from the end of it, for one, I would probably like to hire a casting director and pay them for their time (let's call that $1000) and also pay the different actors a flat fee in addition to the hourly rate. (I have no idea if this is standard, would probably ask casting director.) I would potentially like to hire 13 voice actors so from my remaining $2000, let's say on average $100 per actor with some of the principles getting a bit more. This leaves $700 which can be used for either actor upgrades or additional scenes as they become necessary. (Perhaps, for instance, a scattering of single voiced lines.)

And that would be the whole of the 20k, with a dinky emergency fund and probably definitely not enough on marketing. But most of this post has probably just gone ahead and shown how clueless I am about business and money so I probably should have budgeted for an accountant, hahaha.

[jikkibot]

hey thanks so much for contributing your thoughts. I really appreciate it.

The recurring point that many of you made was that even $20,000 isn't much for a VN project. It's an amount that most of you said/suggested would need to be very carefully budgeted, or it'll be burned through very quickly. Good thing I have a bit of experience with this from the company here. Still, it's disappointing that $20,000 is kinda insignificant.
How much money might begin to be sufficient for a 100,000 word VN..? USD$40,000? USD$80,000..? I definitely don't have money like that to blow on a game hahaha...

Also, sorry for my slow reply. It's "wedding season" here, and we're super busy with shooting during the weekends, and busy editing our work throughout the week.
Wedding work will soon slow down temporarily, thankfully, and I'll be able attend to the VN project

Thanks again everyone. I'm enjoying this community more and more

[SundownKid]

How much money might begin to be sufficient for a 100,000 word VN..? USD$40,000? USD$80,000..? I definitely don't have money like that to blow on a game hahaha...

While you can definitely USE $20k or $40k on a VN it doesn't mean that it has to be that expensive to produce. First of all it depends how much of it you can do yourself, and how much you are willing to compromise.

While 20k is kind of insignificant if you are going for "best quality everything", I wish I had that kind of budget and I still managed to make a 100k word VN.. granted I used a ton of my own free time in the process worth at least that much and more.

[jikkibot]

Good point. I think, perhaps... maybe... I would budget something like this:

$? - legal,
$0 (me) - writer wages,
$2000 - GUI artist wages,
$8000 - sprite artist wages,
$5000 - CG artist wages,
$0 (wifey) - sound track composer wages,
$0 (not included) - voice acting wages,
$5000 - programmer coding wages,
$? - marketing...

I need to start contacting potential crew for quotes...

[SundownKid]

$5000 is really a massive amount for programming a visual novel. It would certainly make sense for your typical video game with tons of action and gameplay aspects but Renpy script is significantly easier to handle. In fact you could probably learn narrative coding by yourself easily, and screen language would only go into the hundreds at most - so would GUI art.

The Sprite art definitely goes into the thousands typically, though $8000 is still a pretty large estimate unless you perhaps wanted to get them all fully animated.

Also keep in mind your first... or second.. or even third game probably won't make a ton of money so it's best not to spend it all in one giant game trying to hit it big. Better to build up small and keep releasing small titles.