It turns out, $3681.54 USD.
That is quite a bit of money! And it doesn't even include my own labor! Although, it’s also a very low budget, depending on how you look at things. I’ll note that technically, none of these expenses are strictly mandatory. You can absolutely make a game for cheaper, if not free. This diary is not presented as advice, but rather a retelling of the development process from the point of view of dollars and cents. (and Euros!)
This definitely feels like one of the more personal dev diary entries. Like, even though we’re talking about something relatively boring like a budget, it is also exposing my privilege: I’ve been lucky enough to be able to scrape this money together over the course of a year and a half. Still though, as someone who believes in pay transparency, it’s time to put the money where my mouth is. My hope is that this will be helpful for anyone else who wants to attempt solo game development, and you can piece together what you really need. At the very least though, I hope some of you find it interesting.
I’ve broken this down by category, so it doesn’t correspond with when the expenses occurred. For the most part, these occurred over about a year and a half from September 2023 through March 2025.
Publishing Fees: $224
This is the category for paying the gatekeepers. This is probably the most necessary expense of the bunch, but Itch.io is free, so you could still distribute a game without any of these.
- $100 Steam Direct Product Submission Fee: Technically, this will count as $0 once the first check comes out, since they return this if your game makes at least $1000 USD in revenue. (Iron Village has done so, I’ll talk more about that in a future dev diary.) However, I haven’t seen it in the company account yet, so it counts as an expense.
- $25 Google Play Developer Fee: This is a one-time payment, so any future Lunar Chippy releases on Android would be covered as well.
- $99 Apple Developer Program: There’s a longer story to tell about this annual fee, but I signed up for two reasons: App Notarization for MacOS, and potential iOS development. App Notarization avoids the app getting blocked by the OS from running, which is user-overridable, but only if they make the effort to go into security settings and allow it. However, my account randomly got caught in some sort of automated spam or fraud detector algorithm after a few months, and Apple shut it down with no reason given. The support person was like, sorry, I can’t tell you anything, maybe try making a new account? If the Android version does really well, maybe I’ll try it again, but I’m not really in the habit of throwing away $100 for nothing.
Legal Fees: $770
This is mostly the $520 for establishing an LLC (Limited Liability Company) as a separate legal entity, rather than just publishing as myself. Mobile games tend to be less restrictive towards companies (i.e. less rigid testing policies), whereas I don’t know much about what the difference is on Steam. Mainly though, this gets you legal protection in case you somehow get involved in legal issues – worst case scenario, the company is held responsible, not you.* Either way, my partner’s side of the family has multiple lawyers, so I couldn’t get away without doing this. The $520 is for establishing in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, most US states are lower as far as I’m aware. Outside of the US, I have no idea what the costs would be.
There’s also a $250 fee for filing a trademark claim with the US Patent and Trademark Office for “Iron Village”, though this process is ongoing.
Assets: $483.57
To be sure, this is not the cost of just what I actually used in Iron Village – a solid chunk of this was bundles of everything a creator made during seasonal sales on Itch.io. Those assets may or may not show up in later projects. Either way, it turns out I’m a sucker for pixel art.
In addition, some assets were obtained through Patreon memberships, which totaled $176.29 over the course of development.
Translations: $811.87
This is the most expensive category, but also one that can act as a significant multiplier to letting people around the world play. Some places are fine playing games in English, even when it isn’t their first language: the most extreme example is probably the Netherlands, which is one of the best selling countries per capita for Iron Village, despite there being no Dutch translation. On the flip side, players definitely notice well done localizations, and there are many players who you otherwise wouldn’t reach without translating into their language.
- $0 for Brazilian Portuguese: I was contacted by Thiago Mania pretty soon after the store page went up, who volunteered to do this translation.
- $0 for Spanish: This was a combo of 4 years of high school Spanish classes, looking things up with Google Translate, and cross checking with the Brazilian Portuguese translations. Each of those three things by themselves is not enough: my Spanish is hella rusty, relying on Google Translate is a great way to get yourself into una situación embarasada**, and Portuguese is a totally different language, just with similar-sounding words.
- $761.87 for French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese: I worked with WeMavin Languages for these.
- $50 for two international wire fees for those translations: turns out wiring money internationally can be expensive!
Capsule Art: 600€ ($653.03 USD)
Capsule Art is the images you see that represent each game, usually some form of title and artwork. It’s the digital equivalent of box art. For Iron Village this was done by NicoSquare, a French artist, hence the payment in euros.
Physical Marketing: $739.07
This was mostly related to attending BostonFIG, but includes other physical supplies.
- $38.95 for the shiny Lunar Chippy Games stickers
- $118.75 for a bunch of train sticker sheets I was going to hand out at BostonFIG, but didn’t arrive in time.
- $368.06 for the BostonFIG Indie Sponsorship
- $157.36 for a a ton of business cards, the posterboard, and stand
- $55.95 for a Target run to get other supplies (mouse, headphones, tablecloth, etc.) for BostonFIG
Online Marketing
In hindsight, this was an area that could’ve done with more investment, largely on time. I did end up doing one paid short video (I forget how much it was, maybe $20?), and talked with a couple of PR companies, but those didn’t really go anywhere. Thanks to everything else going on in my life, there wasn’t really time to make a PR push myself, so I was left to a bit of social media and hoping that the Steam algorithm would look kindly upon me. I think it did, but I’m calling this out as an area that could have used more love.
Total: $3681.54
The flip side of this, of course, is income. That is going to get its own dev diary, once the checks start coming and I can see exactly how much Steam is taking for itself. (Steam pays out by the end of the month for all the sales that occurred the previous month, so that’s the end of April for Iron Village.)
*Technically you can be held liable if you do something so far outside of the scope of your business that it’s your fault personally, but as I understand it that’s a much higher bar. I am not a lawyer, do not listen to me for legal advice.
**The joke here is that embarasada does not, in fact, mean embarrassed. It actually means pregnant.