This obviously is only a fraction of the art that's required for the game, and this one didn't cost anything since we got a friend (*cough* girl-) to do it, but everything else costs, and it doesn't come cheap either.
Given the fact that one of us (me) is unemployed to focus on this full time, it turns out that this game is very quickly running into the red, and will take a non-trivial amount of sales to pull us out of this hole.
Optimally, we were looking to have an artist that wanted to team up with us and would share in the success of the project, but after several weeks with no success, we've had to bite the bullet and commission an artist to do our art.
We already commissioned this artist for a number of the monsters in the game, but now we think we're going to use her for everything (and a lot more monsters). Excited that we're finally going to be getting more art, but not without significant investment.
But hey, without risk there is no reward right?
We're actually looking to start a kickstarter page to help with this very problem. I heard about kickstarter from a PAX panel, and initially didn't think we'd need it since our costs are pretty low (ignoring the opportunity cost of me not working)... but now I see that I was quite naive.
We're actually also going to E3 and we're hoping that we can get the kickstarter up and running before then and maybe (not sure how yet) we can talk to people there and drum up some support for our little indie venture.
To say that this has all been a massive learning experience for me is an understatement of the grandest proportions.
