Process flow
Each lane runs in order, step by step. Pick a step to see its model, cost and what it does.
- Unity AICredits, at most US$0.055 a generation (US$35 over about 640 on Hash Brown)
- RunPod RTX 4090US$0.89/hr Secure, US$0.34/hr Community, billed by the minute
- Local MacFree: Blender, Python and the Unity editor
- Human reviewFree, but every gate waits for a yes
- A review gate: nothing moves on without a yes
Characters
A fighter goes from a written brief to about 440 hand-checked drawings. Nearly all the money is spent here.
Stages
A stage is one painting over a 3D blockout, cut into parallax layers. Anything the painter gets wrong becomes a cut-out.
Combat effects
Sharp, fractured toon flipbooks rendered in Blender. Almost free.
Merch
The T-shirts reuse the game art at print size.
What one fighter costs
The fight frames are about 90% of the spend. Everything else for a fighter comes to under US$5.
| Item | Cost | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Concept, edits and clean hit drawing | US$0.20–US$0.40 | estimated |
| Fight frames (about 570 generations) | US$30.00 | measured |
| Win stills and victory art | US$0.20 | estimated |
| Win loops (3 Kling sheets and 3 upscales) | Not yet priced | unmeasured |
| Super backdrop and five story scenes | US$0.60–US$0.70 | measured |
| Home stage and its cut-outs | US$1.50–US$3.00 | measured |
| Solo fighter | US$32.50–US$34.30 | plus 1 item not yet priced |
| Group fighter (a swarm drawn as one body) | US$47.50–US$49.30 | estimated: about 1.5× the frames |
What the stages cost
Measured pod time on a Secure RTX 4090 at US$0.89/hr. A new stage is usually US$1–2 of painting plus US$0.50–1 of cut-outs.
| Stage | Pod time | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Behind the Bleachers, per trial | 30–50 min | US$0.50–0.75 |
| The fête table (France), three pods | about 2 h | about US$1.80 |
| Café | about 1 h | about US$0.90 |
| Crimson Vine Ridge | about 70 min | about US$1.05 |
| Home-stage prop rounds (12–58 pieces) | 8–15 min each | US$0.12–0.30 each |
The models
| Model | Runs on | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| gpt-image-1-5 | Unity AI | Concepts, every fight frame, win stills, victory art, stage cut-outs |
| Kling v3 image-to-video | Unity AI | Win-pose loops, stage animals, the sea |
| Magnific upscaler (precision) | Unity AI | Win-pose sheets, 1024 to 2048 px |
| NoobAI-XL + lineart ControlNet | RunPod RTX 4090 | Stage paintings, super backdrops, story scenes, effect repaints |
| DreamShaper + ControlNet | RunPod RTX 4090 | Earlier home-stage prop rounds |
| Blender 5.2 | Local Mac | Pose guides, stage blockouts, every effect flipbook |
| Python (PIL, numpy) | Local Mac | Keying, slicing, packing, parallax split, cut-ins, loops, merch |
| Mureka.ai | Human review | Character themes; the cover art sets the palette |
Tried and retired
- SDXL with a trained character LoRA for fight frames: it copied every guide mistake. Training cost about US$1.50, and most of the 196 wasted generations came from this route.
- Kling or Higgsfield for attacks: they can’t follow hitboxes.
- Gemini concepts, IP-Adapter, Qwen-Image-Edit, Spritix, Sprite Flow and SpriteForge.
Still unknown
- Kling and Magnific prices per call have never been logged.
- The US$0.055 per generation is a ceiling from one top-up, not a price list.
- The theme music licence (Mureka) needs checking before a Steam release.