Crescent Loom Kickstarter Pre-mortem

Crescent Loom's Kickstarter campaign launches tomorrow morning. That is to say, ah, it's been a busy couple days. Weeks. I don't even know any more. @_@ I'm tired and sleep-deprived but it's coming together and (despite the wretched political situation) I have a spark of hope and excitement in my heart. This'll be a bit of a pre-mortem.

• Video editing has taken up the vast majority of my last few days. I dunno if I'm just really slow, but I think the final time-spent-producing / length-of-video ratio is around 10 hours per minute of footage. Blender, you're wonderful, but I think we need some space. The result seems to be a video that is pretty but spends maybe more time with me excitedly talking about neurons than the game.

• Reaching out to press is a skill I seriously need to work on. I spent days setting up a press kit for Crescent Loom and writing a press release for the launch of the campaign, then only ended up sending a dozen emails or so (rather than the hundred-plus that really excellent marketers send). I'll keep the hustle going throughout the campaign, but it is usually a lot more effective to make those contacts ahead of time. Let's call this an area of potential growth.

• The alpha demo still has a few glitches (and the save-load feature isn't quite at 100%) but is very pretty and gets the idea across. If kids picked up and enjoyed the really early tech demo back at OMSI, I think the current version will do just fine. I also made a subreddit as a place for people to share links to the creatures they create with the demo. We'll see if that's something that interests people.

• I dropped the project goal from $20k to $16k after a night thoroughly researching the numbers on other people's completed campaigns. A surprising takeaway for me was how little it seemed that reward tiers actually mattered -- the biggest correlate for the campaign's funding was simply how many people backed it (at least at the scale Crescent Loom; it separates out a in the megaprojects).

  • I'll need about 700 people to make $16k, which means about 200 within the first 48 hours (you get about a third of your backers at the start and end dates and the rest spread out in the middle). The CL facebook page has 50 likes, which means that I probably have at least that many friends and family who'll end up as backers, which is almost the right order of magnitude, at least. Fingers crossed.

  • Having a few solid high-end tiers add up fast, but really can only push you above the average for how many backers you have. As a consequence, I added a few $100+ tiers for an art project I've been wanting to do for a while: laser-etched Ramon y Cajal illustrated wooden panels.

Whatever happens in the next few days is gonna have a huge effect on the course of my life. Making an interactive neural circuit game has been a dream of mine for almost a half-decade. I believe that Crescent Loom has an enormous potential to teach and do some good in the world.Fingers crossed, into the breach we go. See you on the other side!