Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

The costs of a (sort-of) hobby game (Ridiculous Space Battles dev budget)

Posted on November 3, 2026

If you have read my blog a lot you will be aware that I am totally schizophrenic about whether or not Ridiculous Space Battles is a big professional game project, or a hobby to keep me busy as I ease into semi-retirement. I still have no answer for this. When I speak to other devs, it certainly seems like I spend at least as much time developing it as a full-time dev, but then I am also trying not to take it too seriously, and definitely trying to avoid any stress related to it…

Anyway, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t also have an interest in what it cost to make. Its VERY cheap, to be sure, but I just love numbers. You could give me spreadsheets showing the revenue from a local cafe and I would be in heaven, I just love some numbers. So under 2 weeks until Early Access release (16th November) here are the numbers:

The Development Budget

This is a very unusual game, because I didn’t want to hire or deal with or even speak to anybody during its development. Building a solar farm was WAY too much people-management, and I vowed to avoid actually hiring people again, so I decided to do almost everything myself, and experiment with AI for stuff I couldn’t draw myself. I can play around in photoshop and Blender quite happily, so the majority of the art (the spaceships) was done using stock-assets bought from CGTrader, plus a lot of kitbashing, and editing, and messing around. Its not as good as a pro artist, but it kept me busy :D. Anyway the total spent at CGTrader so far is:

CGTrader £441.93

Which is peanuts for the spaceship art for a game about spaceships :D. Thats the majority of art in the game, as each ship has some layers, some turrets, a damaged version, and a hulk version and debris elements, all from the same kitbashing.

I then needed art for the modules (used in the ship designer mostly) and for the races showing the alien crew. I decided to use AI for that, using scenario, which is a cool game-centric AI art generator. It lets you upload a ton of your own art and use it for creating a new model, which is cool. I also used it for some of the nebula backdrops and planets (the others were mostly me in photoshop) and for the game logo.

Scenario AI Art: £296.51

Again, pretty much peanuts. I could have spent more time here, and more money maybe. but we are not even in early access yet…

The other use of AI was for some voice clips. I decided not to use a lot of it, and kept changing my mind, so I spend way more than I needed to for a few lines, but the total was still only £176.76

Elevenlabs AI voice: £176.76

Most people wouldn’t really be able to use AI voices, but my voice is supposed to be a neutral computer voice just reporting data anyway, so I figure its pretty much perfect. All in, this makes the dev budget for the game £915.20. Nothing. Obviously I WORKED on it for about three years, so my personal coding dev time is huge, but its kind of a hobby, so I am disregarding that. I don’t log my hours anyway.

The Marketing Budget

I had basically three approaches to marketing this game. A newsletter to previous Gratuitous Space Battles owners, Youtube ads, and reddit ads. The newsletter was a PAIN to set up and manage, and frankly very expensive, and quite tedious. I don’t think many emails actually even get read in 2026, so eventually I just gave up on it, after spending probably way too much on it for the slim results:

SendPulse Newsletter £567

Youtube ads were to promote the game’s trailer.I was quite happy with how many views I got for this, given the low spend, and thought it was a really good idea until I saw the pitiful conversion rate to wishlists in the steam utm-reporting. But before I gave up I had paid for 70,000 views for £799. I also promoted some other related videos, for a total spend of £974.13

Youtube promotions £974.13

Reddit ads is where most of the money went. As I ramp up the daily spend (currently $50) the cost per click keeps rising, which is depressing, but the conversion rate to wishlists is pretty good. I have been running these ads on and off for over a year, as I keep changing my mind. Currently the total spent on reddit ads is £4,502.67. Way bigger than everything else!

Reddit Ads: £4,502.67

That gives a total budget of £5,984.87, with 15% being development and 85% being marketing. For my previous, commercial games, the split was normal 50/50. And the budgets were way higher, at least £100,000, and more like £300,000. Democracy 4 had a dev and marketing cost of roughly $400,000. So this is absolutely a little hobby game for me. (And yesthe D4 cost also excludes my time and effort).

Conclusion

Wow, I have spent basically no money on this, which is a relief, because its impossible to sell games now, and my aspirational goal of 1,000 sales (eventually) would definitely make a paper profit. The game will cost $24.99, so I get about £12 per sale after currency conversions, chargebacks, VAT and valve’s 30%. So that would be £12,000 if all at full price. Assume half at full price (£6k) and half at an eventual 50% off, and thats £9k, so about £1,000 PER YEAR for my time. But given that I LOVE programming games, and its basically my retirement hobby, that will be fine with me.

Of course it might only sell 100 copies, or 10,000. Who knows! Anyway, hope you enjoyed reading about the pitiful small scale of my current project. Feel free to add the game to your wishlist below :D.

Ridiculous last minute re-design!

Posted on October 21, 2026

So in case you missed the news from my last blog post (I haven’t exactly made it to the cover of Newsweek), I have released a demo for my space based autobattler Ridiculous Space Battles. You can grab the demo from here. In the run-up to release I knew a bunch of players had said they really don’t like the idea of grid-based movement, which marked a change from Gratuitous Space Battles, but I thought people would be won over when they tried it…

Anyway, to cut a long story short, almost everyone disliked it when they tried it :D. And I am not immune to persuasion from players, so I decided, with less than a month to go before the game goes into Early Access to just do the sensible thing and totally redesign the entire movement system :D. A lot of it is already done, checked in and updated, so the current demo has the new movement code in. It is still missing ‘Keep Moving’, ‘Escort’ and ‘Formation orders’, but ‘Keep Moving’ is already done and tested, and I’ll work on the others over the next week or so.

People also wanted Hit Indicators from GSB in there, so I added those too… (obviously you can switch them off)

So far I have generally enjoyed having the game out there, reading people’s feedback and suggestions. I had a bit of a silly crash bug, but it is since fixed, and a number of people have problems running the game on…Linux. Oh what a shock. I do wonder if linux gamers actually ENJOY games just not working, or apps not being available. It just seems weird to deliberately install a game that expressly says its Windows only, and then be surprised when it doesn’t work for you. I would say that at least 90% of bug reports are from linux gamers. I cant see demo platform data any more, but from what I remember around 1% of my customers are on Linux. 1%, but 90% of bug reports…sigh.

Anyway, I am kind of resolved not to care, I hate this sort of thing. 95% of players are wonderful, cool, friendly and clever people with great feedback and ideas, but some seem to have a desire to just start an argument. I am 56 years old and semi-retired, I am not wasting any of my remaining years arguing about linux or AI. If you are a furiously anti-AI linux gamer, do us both a service and just play something else.

BUT! For the other 99%, give the demo a try and tell me what you think. I do really enjoy constructive feedback on my games ;D.

Ridiculous Space Battles demo released!

Posted on October 13, 2026

It has taken SO LONG to get to this point, and to be honest I am just very very tired, physically and emotionally. I recently went to some event ion my village where I started to worry if I had the energy to walk home. I have no idea if its just a lot of stuff going on at once or age, or the stress of following world events way too much… but anyway, regardless whether people love or hate it, there is now a playable demo of my latest game: Ridiculous Space Battles. Enjoy this big clickable button:

I actually had trouble finding the ‘demo’ button on the steam store page, which just goes to show how often I try new demos I guess… Anyway, its out and its hopefully playable. I have done 2 patches in the last few hours to fix a thing, and then the thing that was caused by the fix to the first thing…and ultimately it was all because my build script had not noticed some files had been updated and needed adding to the build…grrrr….all my own fault.

Anyway… its done! and I have about a month now until the release of the main game into Early Access. This is by far the weirdest game release of my career, because I STILL do not know if its just a hobby, or a proper game, or how to feel about it. The games industry is super-weird right now, and frankly I do not know how ANYONE is making any money from games…

But the main thing is I REALLY enjoyed making this game so far, and I think its pretty good. I just re-watched the final ‘Battle Of Cardassia’ episode of star trek:DS9 tonight, and I am definitely someone who enjoys a good space battle, so this game just had to be made didn’t it :D. Hopefully some of you like it.

Approaching Ridiculous Space Battles demo release!

Posted on October 3, 2026

Oh my god, the release of this game has always seemed to be some far off nebulous thing in the future and now I go into Early access with Ridiculous Space Battles NEXT MONTH. Argghhh. To put that into perspective, the last time I released a ‘new’ game was Democracy 4 and that was (checks steam…) January 2022. OVER FOUR YEARS. Oh my god what happened? Well the short answer is that this happened:

I built a solar farm, and it took forever, and it was stressful, but its mine and I love it :D. But also, Democracy 4 was a huge project, and also frankly a very successful one, and there was absolutely no urgent need for me to release another game any time soon. Also…I am 56, which sounds insane to me, but I am 11 years from retirement…and if I smugly retired properly at 60, I am only FOUR years from retirement. In other words, I am able, very fortunately to be slowly winding down the rate at which I make games, or at least commercial ones.

But anyway, after I finished the solar farm, I decided to mess around making a little simple game as a way to get back into game dev, and I made this:

Which is on steam as ‘Gratuitous Space Shooty Game‘. It was a piece of fun, its sold a trivial number of copies (211) and was made mostly because its something I could make in a few months. But that got me back into thinking about Gratuitous Space Battles, and how much BETTER a game I could make now, 16 years after the original. And although that started as just me messing around, I got more an more into it. Initially I was re-using GSB art, but then I decided to buy some stock models from CGITrader, re-combine them, render them, edit them and make all new fleets. Then generative AI became a thing and meant that creating the race images and module graphics could all be done as a solo developer, and then I took it way too seriously :D.

Because RSB is a passion-project, and not a big commercial endeavour, I decided to use AI where it made sense, and not where it didn’t, but not give in to the anti-AI crowd. I am FINE with people refusing to buy RSB because they have some political or aesthetic objection to AI. Not every game is for everyone. I hate the look of Terraria and Balatro, but millions of people like it, thats cool. I am absolutely not even vaguely even slightly even a little bit trying to sell this game to people who hate generative AI.

Christ I hate having to include that disclaimer every time I even mention my game…and before anyone says ‘Just hire an artist’, I do NOT WANT to hire anyone. I HATE working with people, and this is supposed to be a stress free relaxing development for me, not people management. So anyway… I am now at the point, after actual years of coding and testing and optimizing and balancing… where I have a playable demo for my game. Oh my god, its submitted to steam and everything…

Its been 16 years since I made a demo for one of my games. Demo’s used to be the default, then everyone realised they were a bad idea, as they actually cost you sales, then weirdly about 12 years later everyone decided demos were needed again, despite valve’s refund policy. Anyway…there will be a demo for RSB. Two skirmish missions, no challenges or campaign. I think its enough for people to say ‘I like this’ or ‘I hate this’ which is the main point right? Anyway…its done, complete with upsell on the main menu and from the exit screen:

I am no longer a member of many of game dev communities. Frankly I find online communities very hard to navigate. I am autistic as fuck, and that means I need a LOT of social-cue information to relate to people. Pure text is hard, and I am too quick to take offense, and also I can be too blunt, and lack a lot of the emotional skills required to converse with people purely by text. Especially anybody I do not know well. Combine that with the fact that my goals and my situation are different from most indies (I’m not new, I do not desperately need sales, I am not making a roguelike deckbuilder), and I find its just not worth me staying in those communities any more… So I am kind of releasing a new game a bit blind, without a big social group of game devs to ask opinions of, or beg for retweets etc. And to be frank, I think ‘fellow devs retweeting your launch’ has a trivial actual impact, and something I’d hate to have to do anyway…

So anyway, thats a lot of text to say Yes, I DO have a new game coming out very soon, November 16th! and I have put a LOT of work into it (longest dev cycle in my career) and I am VERY proud of it, but I absolutely do not care if some people hate it. Thats fine. I hate Broccoli, but I don’t knock on the doors of farmers to tell them. I think some people will love this game. If 1,000 people buy it in its lifetime, I will be very happy (and probably break even!).

So hey, add the game to your wishlist I guess? I DO have an ad budget, I’ve spent a few thousand dollars on it I thinks, but it doesn’t hurt to beg at the end of a blog post right? :D.

Challenge code and UI almost done!

Posted on August 26, 2026

So…I am still working on the online multiplayer(asynch) code and UI and UX for Ridiculous Space Battles, but progress has been pretty good, and certainly way quicker than the first time I attempted to do all this sixteen(!) years ago… So I am happy to say that apart from a few small things I need to fix, and a few minor things to add (like rankings and victory counts), the online challenge portion of everything is kinda in and done! Here is the current challenge list screen:

UI code is fiddly and takes ages, but what really took a while on that screen was the filtering and order sorting. You can sort by any column, which is pretty cool, and all the filters at the bottom work correctly now! There is a manual ‘refresh list’ button which grabs a new dump of all the challenge data from the server. Right now its super-dumb and just grabs the first 1,000 challenges from the server. The original game (Gratuitous Space Battles) was so popular that this would have been useless, and in an ideal world, where I get a lot of players, I maybe need to redo that so it multi-threads, and gets the ones that have changed only, and so on…but that is probably something worth saving for refinement during early access… Anyway here is a totally NEW screen:

This is what you get when you click on a challenge. It shows you the enemy deployment thumbnail (although their ship positions obviously get inverted when you hit play and fight against it), some data about it, the description and name entered by the challenge author…and today’s mornings work, which is the list of challenges that were issued as a ‘retaliation’ to that challenge.

So a ‘challenge; is basically a player designed fleet, formation and orders that is designed to beat all opponents. It gets uploaded to my server (its only a 10kish text file) along with a small jpg of what the deployment screen looks like. Anyone and everyone (including the challenge author) can then design a fleet and fight against that challenge. If you WIN against it…you see an extra button on the game-over screen that lets you submit your victorious fleet as a ‘retaliation’. Here is what that currently looks like (It might be easily missed I think…)

That gets attached to the existing challenge, with that challenge as its parent. These are the challenges you can see in the ‘retaliations’ list above, which are normally filtered out. You will be able to hit ‘replay’ to watch the two fleets fight, and the idea is that you get to see how an enemy managed to beat you.

Now this is just my first go at the UX and gameplay for this, so it will likely evolve. Right now if you win against a challenge with an amazing victory, there is no way to break that challenge out into its own fresh challenge, and maybe I do need that. And I definitely need to put in a voting for difficulty and fun system like I had with the original game. But its progress! and eventually I’ll get back to working on less UI code and more awesome battle stuff like this screenshot:

Anyway… I signed up the game to be in the next NextFest with a demo, so I have a hard deadline at last. Kinda scary. But if this sort of game appeals to you, please add it to your steam wish list using the widget below: