The first week of our venture, my wife and I started pouring through our finances. The big question was: "Do we have enough to sustain ourselves for 2 years?". In indie games, 2 years is kind of the magic number -- longer than that and a lot of startups would run out of money, or possibly even become obsolete by the time they're done, and anything shorter than that, and it's difficult to make a game that is competitive with other games.
Crunching the numbers we found that we're close. We need to cut our costs by about 30-40% to make it work. Our two biggest expenses are Housing (39%), and Food (22%).
Right now we live in Santa Monica, which we moved here in order to avoid a Los Angeles commute. Cost of living here is pretty tremendous, and we're paying 1880 / mo for a 1.5 bedroom apartment. (It has a dining room we use as an office). So we entertained the idea of moving back to Minnesota where you can get the same sized apartment for half the cost, but that would take us away from Nate and Annie, and also tear up the roots Candy has been growing here in LA. I'm sure we could make the distance work, but we decided to look around LA. As it turns out, it's not hard to find places to live in LA that are much much cheaper. Albeit there may be barbed wire on the fences.
The next biggest expense to cut down is food. So far this has been pretty easy. We now only eat out on occasion, preferring to live like shut-ins to make the game. Not eating out has cut our food budget almost in half.
I hope we can make it to the other side with enough money to actually promote the game :). At the time of this article we have an impressive 5 viewers per day. When we have a game, we might need to buy some friends.
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