• Role: Finance Officer
• Team Size: 6
• Game Engine: Unity
• Tools: Excel, GitHub, Discord
• Development Time: January-May 2026 (4 Months)

For Indie Game Development, the focus was on the commercial aspect of game development. Each member of the team was assigned a role relating to this end, such as Creative Director, Marketing Executive, Lead Designer and so on. My role was as the Finance Officer, tasked with creating a budget plan for the next 3 years of hypothetical game development.

The game we were developing is “Test of Time”, a tower-defence game based around upgrading your units through the progression of time, with them and the enemies evolving through the eras of history from the stone age to the modern day and beyond.

The budget includes factors such as wages, pension, corporation tax and rental costs and marketing expenses among others. I’ve investigated multiple different sources from which the project could receive funding, such as government programmes, publisher backing and crowdfunding as well as regular sales. The spreadsheet also takes into account ARPU (Average Revenue Per Unit) after deducting publisher and distributor fees and tax to find the real profit our studio would receive from each sale.

The sheet is also designed with multiple versions of the plan to account for best, average and worst-case scenarios in terms of funding. Including sales projections based on existing similar products and funding amounts based on data from publisher statements. The worst case is also designed with several of the costs reduced to save money, such as adapting to budget constraints by working from home and marketing through free sources such as social media.

In terms of the actual game made for the project, I was the one who developed the groundwork for the project, such as setting up the GitHub repository and coding the basic game mechanics such as player movement and tower behaviour.