What is a ballpark estimate for the cost of a single playable character animated in something like spriter?
A lot comes into this:
- Creating the original (2D?) art. What's the art style? resolution?
- Animating the 2D character. How many directions? How many frames? Is this a bipedal creature?
- What do you mean by playable? Just walking around? Is combat involved? Ranged or Melee? etc.
What percentage was spent on art, animation, music, sounds and other assets?
I'm afraid there is no constant for this here. I'm assuming you're doing the art yourself?
Typically, art will take more than music and sounds (unless this is a music-centric game).
Art will be composed of all UI assets and characters. As you pointed out, some of that art will be animated. You will most likely also have "animation-only" artwork (Visual Effects otherwise known as FX).
There is a lot to making a game, and the level of polish is more than a mere variable, it's the entire project. You could get away with moving dots on the screen, and that will cost you nothing. I'm guessing that's not what you mean here.
You should know that scoping a project is a producer's role. It's what I, and a bunch of others, do for a living. A bunch of indie developers learn the hard way that they also need to "produce" and it takes a significant portion of their time away from other tasks. It takes planning, and more often than not, the only way not to fall into a trap is to have experience doing this.
Here are your choices:
- Fall into a trap and learn: If you want to learn to do it yourself, you need to try. Put less money at stake, see where it gets you, learn from the experience, and then use some of the money you saved and try again until you get better at it.
- Learn from others' mistakes: Land a job as a project coordinator, assistant producer or project manager in any video game company. Learn everything you can. See where the business succeeds, and where it fails. Even though it isn't your money, you can still learn from it, better yet, you might even get to choose how to do it and learn from it while not losing any of your own hard-earned money.
- Hire someone: A lot of indies would rather spend their time doing the game and don't necessarily have the skills or experience to plan ahead. There's no shame in hiring an acting producer (in fact, I do a pretty decent living freelancing as a producer/jack of all trades for indie businesses). Meet with someone, describe your needs, tell them your budget, and see if he can come up with a plan that makes sense to you. Most likely, this will lead to a discussion where you are willing to make concessions you didn't know you could do in the first place, and help the person steer the project in the right direction. That way, you can end "on-budget" and "finish" something.
Best of luck!