Hanako Games

The costs of visual novel production

#1 by hanako - Sep 10 2008

(minor warning - they're talking about adult games, so someone may post naughty links in the discussion. But mostly, this is just about development costs.)

http://zepy.momotato.com/2008/09/09/eroge-production/

Scary.

Needless to say, things can be done for less, if you cut enough corners!

#2 by RedSocialKnight - Oct 3 2008

If you don't mind my asking, how did you cope with this as an indie designer? Were you able to attract investment money, or was it something you were able to get off the ground just by doing absolutely everything yourself?

#3 by hanako - Oct 3 2008

I started off doing absolutely everything myself. I still do bits and pieces of things myself. If you track my games by creation date, you can see me slowly building up a little bit of money over time and managing to hire artists who do a better job than me.

Fatal Hearts needed a lot of art, but to keep the costs manageable for what I had available at that point in time, it was broken up over a lot of different artists. Summer Session (which was not financed by me) cost more per-image and had everything done by the same artist, but had a lower amount of art overall.

If you hire people to do small amounts of work, it's easier to find people doing art as a hobby, who will work super-cheap. If you want someone to actually put in a full-time-job doing art, you've got to pay them full-time wages.