ID:2214034
 
Basically, how much does a byond game cost to make?

Programming
Pixel Art
Mapping
Nothing.

And you'll want to avoid BYOND. As we see with Pixel Realms, BYOND cannot handle decent games. We look at Yut Put's deployment of Epoch on steam, multiplayer was trash. BYOND is just not worth the time investment.
How long is a piece of string?
It entirely depends on the scale of the game, and how willing you are to spend money on outside services.

Ideally, with any project you'll want to keep your budget as low as possible. If you can make art and code on your own; it's typically best to do that yourself. If you /do/ decide to hire assistants you'll probably end up investing between $100-$400 depending on the services wanted, quality, and the volume of work needed.

So really, this is a vague question. It depends on how much work you're willing to do yourself and how much work you are willing to offload to outside users and at what price range. Most BYOND games are developed with a total budget of $0.

Also; ignore Lugia319. Assuming your project isn't too ambitious, BYOND is entirely viable as an engine provided you know how it works and how to work with/around its limitations. Pixel Realms and Epoch are both great games and run well(although do suffer from some poor design practices i hear); Lugia319 is just a community troll/waste of space so don't pay him much mind). Epoch actually released to some success and profited a significant total compared to the budget the game had.

So to summarize; if your game idea isn't too overzealous, and you're willing to do most of the work yourself, BYOND is a great option and can be used with a budget of $0. I definitely think you'd want to practice with the engine a bit before starting a serious project, as to familiarize yourself with some of the limitations and nuances of the engine.

Good luck!
In response to Kumorii
Kumorii wrote:
Pixel Realms and Epoch are both poor examples because from what I've heard, both suffer from some poor design practices(although they both run pretty well; Lugia is just being a poop).

Well, in Severed's case it was due to the webclient either being very poorly optimized or just not realistic in the first place for BYOND. I'm not too sure on the specifics here, just that I'd avoid touching it until there's major work put in to bring it up to speed with DS.
BYOND may be fine for simple games. Nobody's disagreeing with you on that.

But if you want to make anything really polished and smooth, BYOND's useless. Any other engine is better at it.

Lack of good rendering control due to thin client architecture makes good looking games hard and clumsy, and thin client is an awful networking architecture so multiplayer is awful.