Hi! I heard great things about libgdx :)

During our 10 months of early access, we had a recurring / one-time support option on the website. We got (very roughly) about $1000 from that thanks to many generous people. After taxes and all, that doesn't leave much but we are pretty frugal, we live and work together so we've been able to afford it so far.

We're hoping to make a decent living with a mix of donations (we just setup a Patreon - http://patreon.com/SparklinLabs), maybe some sponsors? as well as part-time contract work around Superpowers or game development in general. If it doesn't pan out, well, we're very happy with what we've been able to accomplish so far, so we get to keep that! ^_^

As someone in a similar space, I work part time on data consulting contracts. I spend 10 to 20 hours a week working for clients, usually at the end of the week, trying to cram it all in before the billing cut off. Then I go back to spending all week working on my project.