To folks in general: I had a long call with some of the higher-ups at kickstarter and our awesome kickstarter rep, and they had hordes and hordes of good advice and information. There's a lot of things that we can put into practice soon (starting tomorrow), and so you'll start seeing a lot of changes around here.
That said, at the same time we were doing really well on a lot of the largest points, so I'm very pleased about that. We spoke with a lot of indies before embarking on this, and read a lot of articles and talked to a lot of fans, and clearly that paid off. We still have a lot to improve on, but they are much more minor compared to the main things they would normally be looking at.
The other thing that they were really clear about: this isn't remotely over. We need to stick this out to the end, because things ramp up towards the end, and based on the various things I was able to tell them we have planned and in the works (NDAs were abided-by), they think we have a quite good shot.
Basically we're currently in an "awkward place" in some respects, but a place where a lot of campaigns claw their way all the way to the end and/or beyond. This is based on looking at our market segment, our campaign in specific detail, and all that jazz; not generalized statistics. We have our work cut out for us for sure, but we're in the zone that a lot of funded kickstarters were at this stage of themselves.
They was quite upbeat, and clear that if our numbers were at a different level "we would have been having a very different conversation."
So! Today you have heard some about our various contingencies and hedges and backup plans for if things don't work out, and you can rest easy knowing that we do HAVE that sort of thing, but that's the last you're going to hear about any of that sort of thing for a while. I'm also not going to have time to talk to any publishers or even think about Reverse AI War for a few weeks at minimum, so the 5% or so of attention that was diverted that way is now firmly back on AI War II.
