How one indie studio burns $15K per month (or: this graph looks like Pac-Man)

$15,000 sounds like a lot of money -- why yes, I would like to buy a brand new motorcycle, thank you -- and for an indie studio, it's just enough to keep the engine running. Indie Studio Cipher Prime know this better than most, having tried various funding styles for its three titles, Auditorium, Pulse and Fractal, and now banking on Kickstarter to finance its newest installment, Auditorium 2: Duet.

Dain Saint of Cipher Prime put together this handy visual breakdown of what $15,000 means for his studio, and for the likelihood that his team will be able to buy groceries each week. Co-founder Will Stallwood points out that the graph doesn't include health insurance, because they "opted for food over health insurance," and it doesn't list the debt Cipher Prime has piled up from using credit cards to offset slow months.

Check out the full graph below for a rough representation of Cipher Prime's expenses. Again, note that it doesn't account for everything, including equipment costs or the price of a pro license of Duet's engine, Unity, which runs $6,000.