investing 4000$ in game .

Greetings all , i want to create a very nice game , unfortunately i dont have a team with me at the moment .
lets say i would like to hire an artiest or designer or small team can 4000$ dollars get me somewhere ?

i mean is it enough to create a very nice game ( graphically , idea , music . )
or i need higher budget for that ?

( i noticed most of the free lancer artiest ask for lots of money imagine some of them charge 200$ for single 2d character )

 

Depends on what kind of game.

3d characters rigged and pbr textured are generally 1000$ - $4000. 2d pixel art would be much cheaper.

 

lets say i want to create game like Ori . or child of light . is 4000 enough ?

im willing to invest money to create really nice games .

 

4000 is no where near enough to hit the kind of quality you see in Ori, not even enough for a vertical slice of that.

 

I played Child of Light, very nice game, everyone should play it.
There could be 1 million dollars worth of game there.

Oh look what I found on Google.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-11-20-child-of-light-turns-a-profit

$4000 might get you my attention for 1 month if I dropped my rate a bit.
Its only 48k per year. For being self employed its just a couple thousand more than break even.

 

so besically i cant invest mony to create nice games =/ i need milions other wise i cannot seek quality games

 

Realistically speaking you may be able to hire a tiny team (1..2 people top) of exUSSR developers for a very short amount of time (few months top). You'll also have a very hard time finding that team.

Looking at screenshots of child of light, I think you'll be unable to afford the whole game using this sum, no matter how you could your expenses -> IF you intend to hire other people and expect them to be professionals.

Investment usually means you expect returns. Game development is not the best source of getting returns on your investment.

You can spend $4000 paying to some people, but most likely it won't give you the whole game, unless you do a lot of work on your game yourself.

I wouldn't say "millions", but you'll need to add one or two zeroes to that initial sum of yours.

 

Correct. ( reply to that other guy)

You can try to get others to help for free, but that doesnt always work out well.

Or you can learn all the things over the next 20 years then do it all yourself, like me

 

It all depends on what you mean by "nice game" and "quality game". If that to you means only games that require hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars worth of "time & materials" then no you cannot.

You can get a bigger chunk done than mentioned so far IF you choose skilled people living in places with a much lower cost of living. Your $4k can result in very different results depending on who you hire.

Mainly you need to focus small. Games like ORI are not small. And certainly not for a solo Indie. I think even this game was made by a team.

 

Make a game, any game, with prototype models/sprites. Make it work and work well, then shop around for assets you can afford.

 

You could create Flappy Bird for $4k, yeah. Or simple 2D games without a lot of art or unique levels.

 

We need more information to assess the full price, but 4000 is clearly dead on arrival.

 

You don't need millions of dollars, but like @neginfinity mentioned you're missing one or two zeroes. We had a thread a while back where I mentioned the development costs for a few games. I'll just mention them here again.

Braid was mentioned by Kotaku to cost $180,000 but some sites are claiming $200,000.

http://kotaku.com/5037392/jonathan-blow-says-he-spent-180000-on-braid

GeneForge 4 was $120,000. Keep in mind though it's a sequel. Jeff said if he had to make everything from scratch it would likely be at least 50% higher which would bring it up to the cost of Braid.

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2009/03/so-heres-how-many-games-i-sell.html

Undertale had a Kickstarter campaign that raised a little over $50,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undertale

By the way according to Wikipedia Flappy Bird took about two to three days to develop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird

Working off the following sources of information, hiring a developer costs roughly $150/hr. If we take the original development time of Flappy Bird and do the math (8 hours times 3 days) we end up with $3,600.

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/hourly-rate.636/
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/209170/how-much-does-it-cost-to-develop-an-iphone-application

 

This! Even if you're experienced - which doesn't seem to be the case for the OP - starting a fresh project by dumping your available savings into it is asking for trouble.

It's like buying a $4,000 lottery ticket. It's not impossible to win, but I sure as heck wouldn't plan on it!

As with anything else you consider an "investment", do your due diligence first. In plain English, that means you need to do everything in your power to check that the thing you're putting money into has value before you put money into it. In the case of a game, that means a bunch of stuff, starting with:

• Can the project be completed and commercialised with available resources?
• Is there an audience of people who want to play it?
  
• Is that audience willing to pay money for it?
• Do you have available means to deliver the game to that audience once it's completed?
• Can you communicate the game's existence to your audience? (ie: marketing)
  
• What are the risks to the project's completion, quality, and commercialisation? What can you do about them?

A prototype is a solid early step towards investigating a bunch of these.

 

Make a kickstarter! Keep your money.

 

You could get some content from the asset store as a base. Then hire someone to modify that art to make other things. Then if you can find a template / kit on the asset store that is close to what you want to make you can hire a programmer to modify it. I think doing this you could make something much larger than Flappy Bird. Possibly something sort of kind of like ORI. All depends on the stuff you start with.

Ironically a few months ago I decided "I need to get a lot of money very quickly so I can just be free". Thought about options including game dev and lottery tickets. Chose lottery tickets. So now each week I "invest" in those. Budgeted about the same amount as you have to work with... but spread out til end of the year. I can say winning the lottery is probably the most challenging goal I have ever set. Probably should have went with buying & selling but I'll stick with the plan.

 

A slightly worse investment than booster display boxes of Magic:the Gathering cards

 

4K gets you scammed in PMs before you end up a forgotten lament on a Les Mis extras disc.

 

It still baffles me how people can see games like Child of Light and Ori and assume that an artist would create hundreds, if not thousands of assets of that quality for around an average month's salary.

You could get a main character with some nice animations for your 4000$ though. If you're lucky.

 

Using cut-rate Asian pricing (not pro Asian artists who know what they're worth, i.e. resistant to exploitation) that could get you as many as 8 characters with a few animations. But then you're being a git, and you're part of the problem.

But most of the time even artists from poorer countries/areas will demand saner prices for their work, especially ones who know the popular game engines. This is ideally what you want if looking for 3D models too - a somewhat technical artist who can rig characters for standard skeletons in Unity/UE etc. is well worth the money. The less you pay, the more frustrating it tends to be working with them.

(I think American McGee might have a few stories on the subject.)

 

You don't need millions, but generally speaking that's correct. Games are big projects like buildings. You can't build a beautiful building for 4000. Unless you are yourself a skilled craftsmen, and you pay in your time, which would obviously be worth much more than 4000. Ori grossed over $30 million dollars. What industry do you come from where you have a shot at getting a 30m dollar return on 4k? If you could make a game like Ori for the price of a used car, don't you think everyone on earth would be rushing to do that?

 

TIL that I seriously undercharge for contract work.

 

You COULD make everything yourself. You know the basic rule; "if you don't have the money, trade the time".

 

As a contractor you should be charging more than you would make with a salary. Since you have to account for taxes, providing your own benefits and money to feed yourself during possible lulls between work. To the client they wont see the difference since they would pay roughly the same to a company anyways. As a freelancer you have overhead to pay for just like a company.

 

But I thought everyone is rushing to do that. Isn't that why we are all here?

 

Part of the problem is that it is possible to have a shot at a large sum of money with only a minimal investment in the game development industry. You just have to have the right game at the right time with the right attention being focused on it.

 

Take a look at the games in my signature. Just talking about art alone, and not counting my own time.

"Coldfire Keep" cost me roughly $5000USD (I did most of the environment art myself).

"The Deep Paths" was closer to $10000USD (I did none of it myself).

Might give you some idea... of something.

 

I think this is a very helpful post. Obviously not AAA but those games look quite nice within their style and for a pretty good price.

For that kind of budget you might be able to get yourself:

- a very simple but releasable mobile game from a cheap area of the world
- pixel/vector art for a 2d game like a top down shooter or platformer with somewhat limited scope

But the question to ask is why are you doing this. Are you trying to make money? Do you want to build games for the love of making stuff? Are you trying to get some experience for a future career in traditional game development studios? Do you want to create your dream game? Something else or some combination of things?

 

There are exceptions, but teams that pull that off are often made of industry veterans and the right time and place was found by watching trends and trying to get a head start on things.

 

In a perfect world, yes. But in the many years I've been doing Unity contract work part-time and finding clients on these forums, I have never ever found or heard of anyone willing to pay more than $45 US an hour. The average is around $30 - $35 US it seems. Anything over $35 is ignored most of the time.

People are just not willing to pay anything more as long as there's a swarm of other Unity devs willing to charge less.

 

That's really impressive work there. Congrats dude.

 

There is definitely work out there paying more than that. I suppose its a bit different when its not your main source of income, if I don't find any contract work for a few months it's not a problem; I'm sure it would be different if I was relying on it!

Edit: That said in some parts of the world $20USD or even $10USD an hour is a good rate.

 

... I think I seriously need to team up with someone.

 

Where exactly?

The only work I've found that pays more is working locally doing web dev contracting. Even finding that remotely seems to be a challenge.

 

Maybe you should invest your time rather than your money. I have learned the hard way that programming, design and gameplay is not what people want from a game. What they want from a game is good music and visual graphics (such as sexy girl models, or just characters that look cute.) And then even those people turn off the music and sounds and listen to modern music files and discs.

You can get some cheap music from the unity3d asset store, and the music is pretty good. There are also other places to get cheap music, and the music is good stuff.

Coming up with game designs is fun and easy, but does have some challenges. This one is easy, and you can even build on existing designs, such as zelda or final fantasy.

Sound effects are hard to get, and hard to make, but you can get them cheap when you find them. Unity3d asset store has them.

Now comes the one that everyone fails at, models and environments. A 3d model can cost $300.00 to $10,000 dollars. I know it takes years to learn how to make good looking graphics, but if your poor like me, then you need to get on this train while you still got some time. Especially learning organic modeling.

Blender has what you need to learn what you need to become a good indie game developer. Blender has become mature, and people who left Maya now use blender. And it can replace ZBrush, although I would like to put $160.00 to get it, except it will not run on linux. You can try sculptris if your interested in it.

Now the hard part with learning to draw and make models is getting the tutorials on learning how it's done.

I recommend ctl+paint to learn how to draw. Drawing is something that is needed for creating 3d models. You can get krita rather than photoshop. Krita can do the same things, and uses the loved layers.

cgcookie.com has the tutorials that can teach you how to make 3d models, starting with the usage of blender. I recommend them for starting out. Digital sculpting is the future of modeling and needs to be practiced. The idea is to sculpt the model, then use retopology.