Graphics Engineer / Technical Artist (Rendering)
Does: How the game draws — the hand-inked line look, lighting and shaders that keep the art faithful on a phone.
Skills: Unity 6, URP, HLSL/Shader Graph, Metal, iOS profiling.
Production file 07 / Cost of the impossible
Carny Island
Labs
Stage 1 — Game 1 launch on Steam and itch.io for PCStage 2 — Game 2 mobile game for iPad
Equivalent US human-hire cost. US-market estimates based on approximately 2020 rates.
The AI team / 13 specialist roles
One studio.
Thirteen jobs.
Gameplay Programmer
Does: What the player does — digging, tools, energy and detection.
Skills: Unity 6, C#, New Input System.
Systems Programmer (World-State & Persistence)
Does: The engine that remembers the world — damage, weather and progress that persist across a run, inside a memory budget.
Skills: Unity 6, C#, systems architecture, memory profiling.
Build & Release Engineer (iOS)
Does: Turns the project into a signed app on the iPad, reliably.
Skills: Unity build pipeline, Xcode, iOS signing, IL2CPP/ARM64.
Technical Artist — Asset Pipeline
Does: Gets the hand-drawn art out of Photoshop and Fresco into the game at full fidelity.
Skills: PSD, SVG/vector, Photoshop/Fresco, Unity import.
Animator
Does: Brings characters and the villain to life in motion.
Skills: 2D animation, Fresco motion layers, compositing.
Lighting Artist
Does: The sky, sun, moon and shadows across the day/night cycle.
Skills: Unity lighting, URP post-processing, celestial math.
VFX Artist
Does: The spectacle — gore, weather, explosions and craters.
Skills: Unity VFX/particles, shaders, performance budgeting.
UI/UX Designer & Front-End Engineer
Does: The on-screen interface — tool tray, action button, scoreboard and menus.
Skills: Mobile UI/UX, Unity UI, haptics, PSD.
Audio Designer & Composer
Does: Sound effects, ambience and music.
Skills: Sound design, Unity audio, composition.
Narrative Writer
Does: Dialogue, lore, in-world news and epitaphs.
Skills: Game writing, world-building, script.
QA Engineer
Does: Breaks it before players do; verifies every build.
Skills: QA methodology, Unity, iOS device testing.
Producer
Does: Runs the schedule, scope and delivery.
Skills: Production management, game pipelines.
Cost comparison / Approximately 14 months
What would this team cost?
Base salaries
$1,100,000 fully loaded$12,000 subscriptions + $18,000 hardware
13 roles in one working studioThe same 13 roles, built for roughly 3% of the equivalent fully loaded human-team cost.
Author-provided estimate. Brett Clements production estimate supplied 2 August 2026. Figures are comparative estimates, not audited accounts.