Thanks for all the thoughts, folks. My responses, in no particular order:
1. Yes, something like this is uncommon. That's kind of the status quo around here, though, right? We've already seen some
positive press leaking out about this and we haven't even announced anything yet or shown the art.
2. Yes, I agree that kickstarter sells hope. I also think that a lot of those hopes are going to be horribly dashed in the next year or two, and I don't know what will happen to kickstarter then. No amount of awesomeness can live up to the expectations that some people have for the projects they fund. That's why I want to be so concrete about things here; because I have zero desire to be part of the fallout that happens when the kickstarter bubble bursts.
3. Contrary to how it might seem with my tossing a few figures around, I don't yet have this worked out to the penny as to what this will cost. The reason is simple: we have yet to even select our final studio or style yet. Each studio charges a different rate, and each studio has a different style and takes different amounts of time to complete work of different styles (and possibly quality). Quadrupling the cost is something I mentioned because that's the high end of what my gut tells me is sustainable, and the $100k figure is also a rough ballpark "is it bigger than a breadbox" sort of figure.
4. If this does make the game a lot more attractive to folks, then I expect this will also have a very positive impact on our sales of the game. Meaning that even if our costs were worst-case 4x higher per enemy and such, and even if $100k was only enough to do the revamp but not go much further than that, then we should be able to cover the difference. Not least of which because then none of my time will be taken up on working on art myself, so I'll have more time to dedicate to other aspects of this or other projects.
5. The solubility of Arcen really isn't an issue here. We aren't spending big money on this (a few thousand), nor are we going to be directly making money off the kickstarter itself (that all goes right back into the project in terms of the art budget). So at worst this wastes some of my time and we come out with a better-looking game (or a failed kickstarter but some interesting publicity, I guess), while at best we come out with a game that a lot more people find acceptable to buy and play thanks to the new art style. Which in turn would give us more than enough resources to continue to do a bunch of more stuff in the new style.
6. Also bear in mind that enemies and buildings and such aren't our only expense, nor our largest. For one thing, there has to be good loot and such, and thus far I think I've been doing a largely quite-good job with the particle effects, with a few exceptions. Those pieces of art get subtracted out of the 4k pieces that have been mentioned. And the cost of doing new spells that are particle or projectile-based won't increase at all with this sort of new art style, I wouldn't think.
7. As to the question of how many frames there will be, that all depends. If we go with an articulated sprite style, then there won't be any frames in the classic sense, but rather a variety of body parts that get moved around in a puppet-like fashion to create extremely smooth animations. If we go with a pixelart style, then the framecount will massively drop overall, rather than rise, but we'll also have some things like probably standing animations and such rather than just burning 21 frames on running and then doing 1 frame for everything else. These details remain to be worked out, and I'm working it out in different ways with each of the studios to explore what is possible given their talents and our desire for "better," whatever that means.
8. At the present, if I were to do a kickstarter it would be exactly one of those "high hopes" sort of things, because you haven't seen any art and all there is is the vague promise of something that costs more to make but must surely look a lot better. That's what this initial R&D period is about, is taking those vague hopes and turning them into a concrete "this is what it would look like." AND "this is what it would cost."
9. As I already noted, this won't impact our plans for AVWW content in general, or AI War's next expansion, in any way. There are quite a few substantial revenue sources remaining for us in the remainder of 2012, and none of them have to do with this kickstarter business, which is really an exploratory side venture. Don't fund this kickstarter because you think it will help us stay afloat; fund it if you want the new art, whatever your motivations are for that.
10. I definitely won't be forgetting to talk about the game itself, or our plans or what we have going on. Obviously with
1.104 right now there are some exciting things going on, but prior to doing our kickstarter I intend to have some features that are even more exciting out the door in at least beta form. I finally had some epiphanies on a few things that are missing from the actual gameplay itself (sod the art) last night, and I know in general what to do in order to get the first iterations of that off the ground. As always, on our own dime of course.
11. Beyond even these things I think there will be more to do, of course -- isn't there always? But things like new terrain generation or new mission types or whatever generally don't require as much art as they do programming.
12. In terms of getting to see revamped art samples, here is one that I'll share with you. The urban sniper balloon enemy (which is completely un-animated in the game at the moment) has been attached, as well as a gif file of its prospective replacement from a studio we'll call K.
