As others mentioned, paying by line is not a good idea.

And fieryhen, I've seen some code in my professional career that has been worse than that.

Seriously, pay by project, not even by hour.

This is an over generalization coming.

Software development follows the 20/80 rule. 20% developing, 80% debugging. From what I last heard, the average software developer writes 200 lines of code a day (8 hour days).

Let's state that your program has 1000 lines of code. That's 40 hours right there. Assuming you make $5 (we're going just legal here, not professional development), that comes out to $200 for a 1000 line program.

While others have done a good job of establishing that paying by the KLOC is a bad idea, I feel compelled to take a swipe at your estimate of the value of a KLOC.

While there aren't many accurate numbers flying around for games (because 99.999% of commercial games remain closed-source), I found some for the Quake games that put Quake at 250KLOC including tools and the Quake III engine at 325KLOC (not sure if that included tools). And based on roughly similar experiences for the projects I've worked on I'd say it's fair (or at least not wildly out of line) to say the average commercial game falls between 250K and 500K lines.

So you're setting the value of all the programming effort that goes into a commercial title at $1250-2500.

Windows Vista, which is about as big as a software project can possibly get, is estimated to have 50 million lines of code. That makes the total value of the programming effort put into Vista $250,000.

I'd say that's a bit low.