We’re done with the Kickstarter!

“You’re done with the Kickstarter? What does that mean? Is the game officially out? Aren’t y’all still working on it?”

What I mean is this: it’s been three years since the campaign funded. Our final stretch goal was for three years of work. From here til Steam release in a year or so, development is gonna be powered by ongoing early access sales. It seems appropriate to mark the milestone & do a wrap-up to see if we did everything we said we’d do.

That’s right — it’s time for a (non-judgemental, just transparent) report card!

Note before we get into it: we’ll be doing a livestream celebration & AMA next Monday 4-6 PST on Youtube; submit your questions here!

Report Card

Apparently I love being graded, and if nobody else is going to do it I’ll do it myself. Let’s get into each subject:

Backer rewards: A

Download keys have been available via Backerkit throughout development. All the enemy pilot and credit names were gathered through a Backerkit survey and have been put in-game. We took care of shipping physical rewards (stickers + coins) pretty early on. I had video calls with everyone who signed up to create Instant Action encounters at the end of last year.

For the custom pilot portraits, we ended up taking each one’s individual designs and breaking them down into components that can be re-used in other portraits as well; because one backer wanted a cool anthro robo-helmet, now everybody can use it. You can find them in-game in the “stock pilot” roster for Instant Action:

Finally, there’s not too much I can say publicly about the Xiaoli homebrew mech. Through unforeseen circumstances we weren’t able to get the final designs from the backer, and then we were not able to muster the design energy to bring it over the line ourselves (ironically, the existence of the Zheng’s Tiger-Hunter Sheathe sank the design that came the furthest). I’d very much like to come back and fulfill this in future development (maybe as the masthead for when we add mod support?) but it’s a miss for now.

10/11 == 91%, so that’s an A for backer rewards!

Project completion: B

Looking back at the project page, these were the baseline & stretch goals, point by point:

Out of 17 goals, we finished 13, totally missed 2, and got most of the way there for the last 2. Notes for the ones we didn’t complete:

• Mech art: we still have a handful of NPCs that are missing new tokens, and all drones are using the same default sprite. We’re still working on them & they’ll will be done in followups (in this metaphor, that’s summer school I guess?). Partial credit.
• Content-complete: as described from the outset, this was always supposed to be a “give it our best shot” kind of goal. We ended up getting everything except about half of the NPC templates; I think that’s pretty good!! But less than a ✅ still isn’t a ✅ so I’m not marking it as such. Here’s the breakdown:

• Campaign modules #1 and #2: Oof. I’ll talk about this more down in the Organization section, but we just weren’t able to pull these together on time. Dia, Trey, and Eld all got their writing & design work in just fine, but we didn’t have a team pipeline to turn that work into something playable by this milestone. Can’t win em all.

• I’ve said a number of times over the last few years that if I could take one thing back about the campaign, it’d be adding the second campaign stretch goal. As it became clear that this was a wayy bigger swing than I’d anticipated, we shifted our focus into making the module editor the best it could be for this release with the expectation that that would pay dividends into the future as we and you, fellow reader, make stuff. Getting these done is still essential for the eventual Steam release so we’ll get to them over the next year, but it’s a miss for now.

As a side-note, the “adapt TTRPG rules to digital” point sounds innocuous but as you may remember, it led to our biggest community outcry/debate/conversation when we decided that Kai’s NPC Rebake would make for a better experience for LT than the vanilla statblocks. I’m very happy with where we ended up as a result of the conversation, and I think the game is stronger for it but expect to be hearing about the feathers it ruffled for years.

On the whole, we were able to stay extremely close to the TTRPG rules. You can directly import characters you made in COMP/CON and expect them to function as they would in tabletop. Flying as a status, 2 action “points” instead of quick+quick/full, and limiting the brace triggers are the only other significant rules adaptations we had to make (that I can remember right now).

If we count the partials as 1/2, that’s an arbitrarily-defined final score of 14/17 == 82%. Solid B.

Extra credit: +3 points

Module Editor: Even though we didn’t manage to pull together the campaign modules themselves, we do have the tooling to do so up and running. Much like the combat map editor, we’ve kept our content-creation tools player-facing so we now essentially have a miniature visual-novel maker built into Lancer Tactics.

3D world: About a year into the project, a quick art test revealed to us that Lancer Tactics really, really wanted to be in 3D. With a fixed 2D camera angle, we couldn’t have more than one or two elevation layers before it would start obscuring everything behind it. Since line-of-sight blockers are keystones in Lancer map design, this meant we’d be forced to have all these giant robots not be able to see past cliffs/buildings that were clearly shorter than themselves.

Moving to 3D unlocked the ability to have maps that were, well, more tactically three-dimensional. Think of how strange it would have looked to take this fall damage getting pushed off one of the 2D cliffs.

Looking back, there’s a certain theatre-of-the-mind charm that I think we could have made work if 3D wasn’t an option for some reason… I hope the alternate reality versions of us that went down that path instead are having a good time.

Not many games would have been able to swap out their renderer like this a third of the way through development and still come out on schedule (sans for the 3-month extension we gave ourselves for the change). My confidence that this wasn’t a project-ending cascade of scope creep was ultimately born out. Good job keeping logic separate from display, me.

Mod.io support: What good is making stuff if you can’t share it? We didn’t promise it up front, but I got integration with mod.io working for both Instant Action combats and modules.

That’s +3 extra credit points, in total. What kind of points? How do they relate to the rest of the grades? These are questions I’m not interested in answering. They’re points. Next!

Financials: A

Here’s the $50,000 budget we presented on the campaign page, not including the final stretch goal.

Here’s where our spending is today, with a lifetime income of about $240,000 including both the final stretch goal and ongoing sales on itch.

Looking at the numbers as a whole creates a strange disconnect for me. In retrospect, that’s a lot of total money that moved through the project, but at this point we’ve expended the Kickstarter funds so my daily concern is about the balance between ongoing sales vs our post-Kickstarter burn rate + new expenses; for every payout from itch, we find new stuff we need to hire/buy.

We’ve gone over the initial budgets in a number of areas, but have matched those overrides with more ongoing sales than we expected. There was one point where we technically had more budgeted to spend than we had in the account, but it didn’t last long and our buffer has since recovered. Only since the trailer dropped and things have started to ramp up on itch have we started to really breath easier.

Here’s the last year of sales on itch, which I feel a little awkward about sharing but also am inspired by Evil Hat Productions who keep their numbers public, so I’d like to be able to do the same.

The spikes are the dramatic events (thank u dragonkid11), but it’s so weird to me that the baseline sale rate is so steady. The only thing powering it is statistics: “Lancer Tactics ambiently shows up on X number of people’s screens via the itch.io storefront & google searches, and Y percent of those people buy it.”

Looking at the path from where we are to Steam release, we now have the luxury of attempting to get there powered by these sales alone. We’re still going back and forth on whether to seek additional external money from a publisher/fund for some extra muscle, but it makes me feel extremely secure to not require it for our survival.

Survival is victory. We get a simple A here.

Organization: C

Okay, so… my co-leads Josh Boykin and Mark Carpenter have been co-writing this section with me for about a week now. We have a google doc that’s about five pages long where we’ve been trying to come to a narrative about the strengths & weaknesses of how we set up our roles & lines of communication. In the interests of the transparency that we’ve established in these backer updates, we think it would be extremely valuable to share but would inflate the length of this already-long update.

So here’s our org chart & summary, with plans to post the full thing as a part 2 next month:

• As a near-fully remote team, communication between members doesn’t come for free & had to be explicitly planned. Mark, as Art Lead, ended up acting as an “axle” whose near entire job, at times, became having individual calls to make sure everyone was moving in the right direction.
• Josh started working with us at the end of year 2 as a writing editor, but as it dawned on us how much we needed help on the non-Lancer-mechanics side of the game he shifted to taking on a full Narrative Lead role. However, we never took the time to hash out the clear responsibilities of that role, a pipeline for how exactly to add narrative to the game, nor what resources were required for doing the work.

• This setup resulted in interdisciplinary tasks — specifically, implementing the campaign modules — slowing to a crawl because none of the Leads had all the context, resources, pipeline, or time they needed stitch all the pieces together.

• I’ve described the experience as feeling “silo’d”, where I talk with the people I’m directly working with but only rarely interact with people more than one step away. As Programming/Creative Lead, I’d get looped in whenever there were bugs/features/designs that required code changes but there are still some contractors I’ve never spoken to. I think that’s natural as teams get larger, but when we’re still as small as we are the only reason we’re not interconnected is because we didn’t invest in doing so.

Josh has pointed out that these kinds of structural issues are common for new organizations, especially in the wake of unexpectedly successful Kickstarter campaigns, so I don’t feel bad about this. It’s an area for growth, and through coming together and writing this postmortem I’m optimistic that we’ve identified and are undertaking ways to improve.

We’ll discuss it more at a later date. “C” me after class.

Backer communication: A++

Slideshow of random photos like they show at funerals.

(There’s a reason they call these types of writeups postmortems)

Here’s a montage of all the good times we had getting here, pulled from previous posts. Suggested listening.

Debut Trailer

What’s next?

• Game’s not done. We’ve still got at least a year of work ahead for us before Steam release which, for marketing purposes, is the point it’ll be “officially” out (although LT is the sort of long-haul game that wants indefinite ongoing support & additional content, so who knows when the work-curse will finally be broken). Until then, we’re still in early access.

• Even though the Kickstarter is now technically complete & our obligations are discharged, I’m going to keep posting ~monthly updates and changelogs here. Writing these is a compulsion // an essential part of my process so may as well lol (I just did a quick count — I am now just two shy of having written 100 lifetime project updates on Kickstarter).

• After our celebration livestream this upcoming Monday, we’re going to be taking a week or two as a break to catch our breath and plan the road to Steam over the next year.

Thank you for coming along with us & reading (some amount of?) these updates for the last three years. All three of my Kickstarter campaigns have been life-changing but the scale of this one has been especially so. Backers are in many ways literally co-creators through playtesting, content submissions (all those pilot names & callsigns are chef’s kiss), and comments. It’s a pleasure to have gone on this journey with you. 🙏🫡✨

— Olive, Josh, Mark