#downsides are i dont do a posting schedule so there's no telling how long it will take to finish

[satancopilotsmytardis]

I think I'd prefer if you dropped it all at once? Like, I love all of your multichap fics and I love getting new updates, but you already have multiple WIPs half uploaded and I don't want this to add to the stress of that?

Though in the end I'd be happy with either option.

I appreciate the sentiment! But it is literally no more or less stressful for me to upload a new big fic or to upload a multi-chapter fic!

[rinnepegger]

Octavinelle general NSFW

i feel guilty for not posting any works in such a long time so i decided to just cram this in my schedule since i dont feel like studying i swear im doing all the matchups once the exam period is over just give me time AAAAAA anyway i hope u enjoy this? idk it just randomly hit me while i was laying in bed.

TW/CW: NSFW MDNI, mention of blood, GN!Reader, not proofread :>

Azul Ashengrotto

Relatively gentle in bed but if you do something that manages to agitate or rile him up further, you better start praying. Despite his submissive demeanor, he can get rough and demanding in bed. He'll have you bent over his work desk as he pounds himself into you, one hand holding you down by your neck and the other leaving marks on your thigh.

When you're the one in control however, which is more often that you think, he may even be too embarrassed to face you while you bounce up and down on his embarrassingly hard dick. He's too embarrassed to initiate anything like playing with your nipples or dirty talking and the like, so you have to guide him along the way. He wants to please you that's for sure, he's just not entirely sure of what would feel good and what doesn't.

He's really bad at keeping his boner in his pants tbh, though he won't outright admit what he wants and when he wants it; he much rather go with the flow. When it comes to quickies, he's terribly afraid of getting caught especially when you're bouncing up and down on his lap in an empty classroom, but too lost in pleasure to stop you.

Very vocal, always whining. He's into dumbification, up until the point where he can't think straight and the only thing leaving his mouth is a string of incoherent words and desperate whines and grunts. Always very needy but too afraid to admit it; it's not like you can't tell anyway.

Floyd Leech

Extremely rough and dominant, he always makes sure he gets what he wants. Be it quickies in an empty closet or behind the drink bar of the Mostro Lounge; the very idea of getting caught in the act pushes him to go harder on you.

He's very obviously going to use his sharp teeth and nails on you, how naive of you to think that he wouldn't. His favourite place to bite is your shoulders. His teeth so sharp, occasionally drawing out a little blood while he flicks his tongue over your wound. Of course he apologises for hurting you, but it's not like he cares that much either; watching you writhe under his touch is more than enough to push him over the edge.

He never starts slow; he's going to be so rough on you that slow, sappy, romantic sex will never be enough for you to reach your climax. He's going to make sure that you can't walk the next day, constantly clinging onto him for support as he teases you about what happened.

However when it's you who happens to be needy instead of him, you better prepare yourself because he's going to make you beg and work for what you want. Good things never come easily, haven't you heard? Having you bounce on his lap isn't merely enough for him, so he's going to have you under him in less than a minute.

Never goes for just one round; who do you think he is? He's going to make you orgasm at least 3 times in one session before stopping, of course no breaks in between. He has no particular kinks, but he really enjoys when he asks you questions but knows damn well you can't give him a proper answer. He also really enjoys edging you and fucking you to tears.

"What's that? You want me to stop? You have to use your words, shrimpy~♡"

Jade Leech

His style may vary, but safe to say that this little mer is completely and utterly sadistic. Tying you up in ropes as you struggle against the dead knots, cuffing you up to the bed to restrict your movement; you name it, he'll do it.

Similar to his twin, he likes making you beg and work for what you want, one downside of it though is that he's very patient and good at controlling his desires. It's not uncommon that he's the one laughing to himself about how you're all over him and how you wet your underwear.

He's a teasing little shit; he touched your waist and inner thighs in the middle of class for whatever reason. As much as you hate to admit it, he knows your body better than you do.

In the bedroom however, he's not as vocal as you'd think. Too focused on pleasing you, he's not prone to moaning, at most letting out the occasional grunts and groaning. He likes whispering innuendos into your ear and watching you shudder under him, hot breath tickling your ear. It doesn't matter whether or not whatever he whispers to you is shocking or not since he never fails to catch you off guard.

He likes flicking his fingernails over your hard nipples and kissing your inner thigh teasingly, leading up to your sex but stopping right as he reaches your sensitive spots. Loves the feeling of you clamp around his girth as he slides himself in and out of you, working his fingers all over your body.

"We aren't nearly done yet, I decide when you have enough. Sorry, doll~"

[imsocialshit]

idk if you have specific ships ya like or any ya dont, but consider davekat, post game. if hussie wont give us epilogue then the duty is now yours congrats

I accept this honor and job! Also I love Postgame Davekat I got some shit for this!

Dave and Karkat live together which is hella sweet for both of them, but Karkat gets really annoyed by things Dave does. Dave finds it cute sometimes.

The worst one though is the fact that Dave doesn’t store food in the kitchen, he just won’t it’s an old habit and it’s not dying.

“What the fuck Strider? Who the actual fuck keeps swords in a goddamn nutrition block!?”

Karkat doesn’t sleep much and since he shares a room with Dave this has led to a few small disagreements.

The most common is that Dave needs to sleep but Karkat is just like reading a book, which wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t make out-loud reactions to things that happened in the story.

But when Karkat does sleep Dave finds that he can’t, he’s just used to the noise now.

They both have really bad dreams but for different reasons, Karkat’s dream-bubbles sometimes are flashbacks to really upsetting things, and Dave has a lot of flashes to when he was a little kid with bro and to the deaths of alt timeline Daves. Both usually wake up shaking and checking themselves for injuries or calling out the names of people long dead.

The worst one’s are where Dave sees alt timeline deaths of others, you’d be shocked by how many dead Karkats they’re are out there.

Often he needs to wake up Karkat just to make sure he’s okay.

They’ve both gotten into the habit of just hugging the other while they sleep, when they wake up it reminds them what’s real and what’s not. 

They cut out the middle man and just sleep in the same bed now, it’s easier for them to find the other.

They also make sure non of the dream injuries are real as Dave tends to scratch himself on accident a lot when he sleeps and Karkat has very sharp nails.

Dave and Karkat volunteer at one of the first school together. Dave teaches music, and Karkat teaches honors English. Both are under-qualified but at the same time no one else is so it doesn’t matter.

But since both of them still need that sweet sweet money, they also have real jobs. Dave works at Jane’s diner as a waiter (he also helps make apple treats), and Karkat works at the library with Rose.

Dave rights a lot of songs for Karkat, they often include a metric fuck ton of nick names for Karkat.

Birds are drawn to Dave, they follow him around. Dave doesn’t really want them there, and since he started dating Karkat they leave him alone now. They’re scared of how loud Karkat is.

Both of them are very prone to getting hurt on accident, Dave despite basically being a ninja is still hella lanky, and Karkat has a habit of knocking things over.

Karkat feels a huge need to protect Dave,this is because troll skin is thicker than human skin, it provides a bit more protection, so to Karkat Dave is really squishy and needs to be protected this has led to Karkat growling at anyone with a weapon who gets to close to Dave.

Dave has insisted that he doesn’t need to be protected but everytime Karkat just kinda pokes him and says “Dave you are so soft. You need me to protect you.”

The godteir system is still kinda available so Dave ended up finding Karkats quest bed so they would live the same amount of time: Basically forever.

The only downside is that as a blood player Karkat’s wings come from two slits in his back. Dave hates this fact more than Karkat does and has called bullshit several times on the fact. 

The wings are also different from the other trolls godteirs in the sense that he can choose not to have them out.

They both have very busy schedules but they always make time to go on dates once a week.

Their first proper date was to a movie and then a diner, even though they’d already been dating Dave wanted to go on a “real first date” this even included him asking Kankri is he could go out with Karkat. He really went the whole nine miles just to make it as perfect as he could.

Karkat is still kinda confused as to why Dave felt the need to ask Kankri for permission, even though Dave has explained that Kankri is the closet he could get to asking Karkat’s dad for the honor of dating his son.

“I couldn’t get your dad, so I asked the closest thing: your brother”

All the alpha kids are in some way or another involved in their dating life.

Jane makes all them a cake every year for their anniversary, it’s always the same: vanilla cake with an apple cherry filling. They’ve never asked her to make a cake but she does it anyway.

Roxy acts like she’s Dave’s older sister and whenever they go on a date somewhere she knows or if she has the time. She waits until Karkat gets up to do something and asks Dave how it’s going and gives him advise on what to say or do if he needs it.

Jake recommends movies a lot and even gives advise, he might not seem to be able to give the best advise but it’s almost always “If you have a problem talk about it.” or some degree of that.

Dirk doesn’t really help out but instead embarrasses Dave on dates. He’s always there and gone in the time it takes for Dave to go to the bathroom and come back. He almost always tells Karkat a funny story he knows about Dave, or a weird thing Dave’s told him.

Dave doesn’t really know this though, and is always really confused as to why Karkat has coughing fits whenever he comes back from the bathroom.

Karkat loves hugging people he cares about, he didn’t do it a lot during the game because he thought it would make him seem weak, but now that it’s over he will occasionally just tackle Dave in a hug.

Dave wasn’t used to this at first and used to just kinda scream whenever that happened, now that he’s more used to it they have random cuddle sessions.

Dave once tried to be romantic and make them dinner, long story short it ended when the pasta caught on fire somehow and Karkat started crying when he tried to cook a crab.

Almost all of these are fuckin’ paragraphs so this should be enough. God I love these boys.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Reposted from the Award Winning* Thimbleweed Park Dev Blog. *Awards TBD.

During last week's Thimbleweed Park 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 Gilbert

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Reposted from the Award Winning* Thimbleweed Park Dev Blog. *Awards TBD.

During last week's Thimbleweed Park 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 Gilbert