IndieGoGo Campaign

Species will be on IndieGoGo by the end of the week.

This crowdfunding campaign has been a while in development: the FAQ has been promising it since at least April, and the backstory is long, arduous and painful, so I’ll spare you that much and move on to what we hope to achieve with it.

The obvious one is funding for basic expenses. Species has website costs, business costs and software costs to cover. At the moment the project is acting like that housemate who eats all your food and doesn’t pay any rent. Friggin’ pre-teens. GET A REAL JOB.

Less obvious, but waaay more exciting, is expansion costs. Development so far has been done part-time by myself, our artist Jade, and our sound developer Brain Sugar. Paying them, spending more time on it, and possibly (if things go really well and we find the right person) expanding the team, could accelerate the games development significantly.

And more exciting than either of those for me personally, is publicity. I’ll never be able to measure Species’ success by money: instead I want to see people playing it, enjoying it, talking about it, studying it, learning from it, raging at it, calling it science, calling it blasphemy, giving me suggestions and idea’s I can steal use to make the game even better, and generally just PLAYING IT. Wait, I already said that one.

Anyway, this campaign is the perfect excuse to go against my introverted nature and shout madly from the rooftops, and encouraging who supports the project to do their own shouting until everyone who wants Species to succeed is raising their voices to heaven in a beautiful, amazing chorus of- no who am I kidding that would sound like someone torturing a load of cats. But it’d still be pretty cool.

There will of course be tiered perks/rewards for donors, including the classic preoreder-the-game entrance-level perk. Above that, we’ve limited ourselves to stuff we can deliver digitally to keep production costs down. This will include (among other things) the soundtrack, “playtester” status, several ways to get your name into the game, an exclusive copy of 0.4.1 I’ve been working on in the background, and a few chances to influence the development of the game for high-tier donors.

Oh, and we’re also makkin’ a proper trailer and upgrading the website to look less like a dogs breakfast. That’s why the forums are down (actually they’re down ’cause I’m an idiot who really should learn to read installation instructions before trying to upgrade stuff. But we’re working on fixing them. Will keep you updated)

Cheers,
Qu.

…

PS: And don’t worry: 0.5.0 development will continue apace through the course of the campaign. MULTITASKING!

PPS: The vast majority of humans think they’re pretty good multitaskers. They’re not. They’re embarrassingly terrible at it. But they think they’re multitaskers because they’re pretty fast at switching from one train of thought to another, something the average human brain is actually remarkably good at. So yeah, I won’t actually be multitasking, I’ll be switching, but shouting that as a way to punctuate the end of a sentence is nowhere near as much fun.

PPPS: Spare time? What’s that?