Final stretch goal reached + bonus SSC sticker!
over 3 years ago – Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 04:11:21 PM

$150,000, y'all!!

We're gonna do it! This is enough for us to spend a year of full-time dev working on a 100% content port. That's all the mech licenses, npcs, and talents from the core book (plus any pick-me-ups like how the Kobold is already mostly done).

I want to say "we never expected this", but I think I've said it enough times that at this point I just need to get better at expecting things. 🙃 🎷

We're still ironing out the details about the timing of this full-time year — we might do it all at once after we finish the rest of the base and stretch goals, or we might distribute it throughout. And as previously described, it's a "take our best shot" kind of deal; we will likely have to tweak some mechanics to make them fit into a video game, and we're not gonna stay chained to this forever in order to get every single optional NPC trait.

What's Next?

These last 48 hours will help rebuild our buffer that already got eaten up by ad-spend. We'd be fine if it ended today, but I'll breathe much easier if we end up somewhere in the $160–170k range.

Other than that "help soothe Olive's anxieties" range, this was the final stretch goal for this campaign. Mod support and VTT capabilities via local multiplayer are on our unofficial wishlist, so we'll pick them up if they end up being relatively easy. We're just not confident enough to put ourselves on the hook for them for this initial chunk of work.

Finally, I'm planning on hosting a livestream/ask-me-anything for the campaign's close. It'll be at twitch.tv/wickworks this Friday the 31st from about 7–9pm Pacific. We'll hang out + chat, play the game some, maybe poke around in Godot, and do a final countdown at 9pm.

(You can see what that is in your time zone by looking at the schedule here. Sorry that's so late for our East Coast and European friends! I wasn't thinking of this when I set the campaign end to 9pm PST.)

Stickers_final_final (3).png

Turns out that I couldn't handle having stickers for only three of the four core manufacturers, so here's a little last-minute surprise bonus entry: SSC's Moth Kaleidoscope. This design may be a biiiit more subject to change than the others (it's weirdly the only one without some kind of text), but we are officially Out Of Time for more announcements so this is what we got! Some cybernetic moth motifs and a DNA ring! Heck yeah!

This means each sticker set for Veteran tiers and above will have a total of five stickers: one for each of the four manufacturers + our good friend trans dabbo gobbo.

Thank you, everyone. We're gonna make something real cool.

Week three // IPSN sticker // Dawnline Shore worldbuilding // Play Anthropocene interview
over 3 years ago – Wed, Mar 22, 2023 at 02:09:56 PM

IPS-NORTHSTAR STICKER

The last (?) sticker design! It's based on the guidestone from Homeworld; a spiral galaxy that evokes a whirlpool/ocean with nautical map on top. The logo is positioned at space-north to reinforce the "Northstar" theme, and the font (Goldman) has a passing similarity to the "worm" NASA logo (look at the S). I originally was thinking the whole thing could represent blinkgates before I realized that the locations of Lancer are entirely contained in the Orion arm. Since we can't have a galaxy-spanning subway map, I guess I gotta put a "for navigational and/or informational purposes only" disclaimer on it like it's in the homeopathy section of a supermarket.

The story in my head about this one is that some designer at IPS-N was tasked with mapping their logo onto the heavens by making a star chart that emphasizes relationships between stars to mimic the shape of the IPS-N compass. It also undertakes subtle cultural warfare by placing Cradle at the center of the galaxy by putting everything in relation to it; the Karrakin Trade Barony does not approve.

I'm super happy with how this one has turned out, though it took several times longer to get right than the previous stickers. Here's what the design file ended up looking like:

Dawnline Shore & worldbuilding

Speaking of maps, I've been meaning to share this one for a while. While trying to figure out the setting for Lancer Tactics, I tried to pull together as much info on the Dawnline Shore as I could to figure out if there was space anywhere to put a video game. Most of the specific bits of lore come from the Battlegroup core book.

Each planet has several names listed for what the various factions call it. DS5, DS6, and DS10 are all blank slates; this name-chart is the only place they're given any kind of identity. DS5 jumped out at us because of the through-line of its three names — Verdevilla, Emerald Harbor, and Viridian. It posed the question: what about this place made everybody agree that it was, indeed, very green?  

The easy answer is that it's some sort of lush plant-heavy paradise, but my geologist worldbuilding collaborator (Enyo) had the idea the color coming from heavy-metal chromite sands. However, the tileset we've been using is a more grassy-hills-and-medieval-walls theme. How to reconcile that?

We'd recently read the Sanjak Revolution flashpoint in the The Karrakin Trade Baronies supplement, so the answer of terraforming and the injustice of borders were fresh in our minds — what if we did something like that? We have these stone walls as a symbol, so a group called the Sappers that fights to undermine those walls is good thematically. We also realized that the name of Sappers could have originally referred to microbiotic "rock sappers" that slowly converted the chromite sands into life support — an idea almost wholly lifted from the story of how indigenous people terraformed the infertile soil of the Amazon rainforest into rich dark terra preta over hundreds of years. The massive and rapid slash-and-burn terraforming being undertaken by the Karrakins is literally just modeled on industrial irresponsibly-applied slash-and-burn techniques. 

We essentially backfilled the setting based on the questions posed by these two data points: the green-themed names and the medieval-themed tileset with stone walls! 

Funding Update

March is flying by. We have nine days left. How are we doing?

We're sitting just under $120. After the initial rush from the ads, the rate of pledges has more-or-less leveled out to pre-ad levels with ROAS has dropping to just 3.0 (we tried adding some new ads, but there was a hiccup as fb finally took issue with us encouraging people to do crime 😬). Current ad-spend is $5k before fees.

Reaching $150k by the end is still possible but dicey! I think it will almost entirely depend at this point on how large the final 48hr spike is; the oft-quoted rule of thumb is about a third of the project total in the final week, but browsing Kicktraq, it looks like the patterns nowadays is a big jump at the start and just a steady climb throughout with a slightly steeper slope for the last few days. Backerkit is still projecting $170, but my own math puts us closer to $145k unless there's another big surprise. As discussed in the ads midmortem, just barely bumping over $150 is actually not a great situation for us if we have a high ad-spend so we're going to continue keeping a close eye on that. 

"Project we Love" status!

Oh, also, I got this lovely message yesterday! ngl I'm pretty proud to be batting 3 for 3 for this particular flavor of external validation for all of my campaigns so far. Really sweet of them!

Play Anthropocene interview

I did an interview with Play Anthropocene and took the opportunity to soapbox about our political aims with the game & why games are bad at being anything other than a game (based on my previous experience making science games). Quotes that I think are particularly punchy (if technically arguable):

"We've kept the focus about the consequences local to create a sharp visual contrast; a wall with grassy hills on one side and industrial slaglands on the other. Oil barons thrive on muddling the issue; they make it seem complicated and economic. We're leaning into the clearly contrasting imagery to tell people: no, it IS that simple. The ultra-rich have chosen to burn the world from inside their walled gardens; they have chosen to choke the air and kill us."

and:

"The stories of justice we're planning to tell will be stories of resistance to and survival within this system. It's tempting to show the evil empire toppled and the wrongs righted, but the effect this has on  an audience is one of pacification. Think instead of the discomfort of an unhappy ending and how it stays with you long after you leave the theatre. We seek to magnetize, to activate, to show that despite the persistence of injustice victories can be fought for and won (sometimes just survival and helping others get out alive is what winning looks like).

We believe that these local victories can add up to change the global status quo, but that's a story best told over the bones of empire."

This comes with the disclaimer that we barely have any narrative space in the game so our reach here is super limited. But I think it's good to know where you're standing when you're making something, no matter how small. Read the full interview here! 

Advertisement midmortem
over 3 years ago – Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 11:37:26 AM

Let's talk about ads!

As mentioned previously, I've never participated in an ad campaign before so this is an experiment for me — and my scientist training has taught me to digest experiments by writing and sharing, so here we are! I hope to pull back the curtain some on how your data is being used across platforms & maybe come to better understand the money engine that powers most of the internet.

This is a hunky update, so feel free to skip to the discussion at the end to see us agonize over the morality of participating in society.

The data so far

We've been running ads on Facebook and Instagram since Monday the 13th. The campaign was in its middle plateau phase at about $80k and was averaging ~$1k in pledges per day. There's always a bump in the final 24 hrs, but even accounting for that I think we would have only crested $100k by the end of the campaign; we've already far outstripped the capacity of my personal connections and I don't have any kind of press contacts planned (because I have an incredible amount of social anxiety about cold-calling strangers and am already whelmed by managing this campaign).

Since starting the ads, we've seen about $2k in pledges per day from directly from ads (tracked from the URL that folks use to reach the campaign). The rate of non-ad pledges has also increased from $1k/day to about $3k/day (Kickstarter itself pushing it more due to the increase of traffic? I haven't been able to track down the source of these). These have gotten us to a current project total of $110k, compared to the ~$89k where we would probably be without running ads. The backer who claimed the Xiaoli homebrew reward also came to the project via ads; it's unlikely that tier would be filled if not for this ad campaign.

This sounds great! But it carries with it a hidden cost: participating in ads means the funding level of the campaign no longer 1:1 represents the the money we'll have available to spend on the project. We originally set each goal to the actual cost of implementing that feature, but now every pledge that comes in through advertising has a chunk shaved off — it's almost halved!

For example, this first week of ads has generated about $13k — but we will need to pay for the ads that got us to that point + Backerkit's 15% commission. With a time-of-writing campaign total of about $109k, the post-payback total is $103k and that gap will only widen the longer we do ads. 

And that's before the cost of fulfilling $13k more's worth of pledges; it means we'll need more stickers, coins, postage, etc. Fortunately we did a good job picking rewards and those are flat costs so we're not in danger of breaking the bank, but it's worth remembering.

Devil's wager (facebook is the devil in this metaphor)

So those are our choices as I currently see them:

• we could end our ads and happily coast along to the end of campaign with what we have, or 
• participate in ads that will almost certainly bring us to the stretch goal of $150k — but if we don't end up overshooting it by enough we'll end up with the obligation of a 100% port without the full $150k to pull it off. Running ads brings our "true" final stretch goal from $150k up to about $170k!

Backerkit's current projections put us at about $160k ± $30k by the end, so falling in that awkward window is likely. We'd be able to find a way to make it work and the project would not be in jeopardy, but it's not ideal — we would have to dip into our personal savings in the hope that later sales of the game would make it back up.

Mark and I discussed this and, for now, have decided to continue with the ads for as long as they maintain a good ROAS. Honestly, we just really want to take a crack at 100% port* to get the game into a more complete state. We'll both be able to absorb the risk if that's what it comes to. So — here's hoping! The game is on! We might actually make it to that final stretch goal!

*or a year of full-time work on it, whichever comes first

Targeting, or, Why Is Olive Asking Me To Fill Out A Survey?

Here's where we get into the parts I still don't understand as well; Backerkit has been handling all of the audience-building stuff, and bless them because I've tried using that interface before and it's gnarly. We used the backers from my previous campaigns and the people who signed up to be notified for the project launch to... somehow build out the audience on Facebook to show the ads to?

Whatever they did, it's working. We've gotten nearly twice the click-through rate as industry average, although it's fallen off after the initial splash. I'm hesitant to try and interpret this as Backerkit has advised me that these are highly context-dependent and project-specific, but it's generally a good sign and means that the money we're spending is more efficient than usual. 

As an added bonus, the visibly-gay ads being well-targeted has a protective effect in that they're less likely to be served to people looking to start trouble; moderating the comments was rough for the first few days (I learned some new transphobic dog whistles, cool cool cool) but it wasn't as bad as it could have been and I have a better handle on it now.

Many of you have gotten a message from me about a survey about how you found the campaign; this helps us know what's working (so we don't shovel money into fb's maw for no reason) and I think helps us not serve ads to people who want to make "jokes" about people like me being dead. Though I want to stress you're under no obligation to fill them out if you don't want to share that information! It's helpful info, not essential.

As you can see, the click-throughs are dropping off fast so we're probably going to wind down this first batch of ads as we figure out when the next step to take is going to be — either a new batch or wait until near the end of the campaign when we can pull out that "final 48 hours!" card. If you're curious, here's a list of the 7 ads and their stats. Trans Balor has predictably caused the most engagement, but note that the ads that demonstrate the tactical nature of the game (2, 5, 6) have the most efficient conversion percentages.

Discussion

Ads are an engine to turn money into more money! It suddenly makes sense how a company like Google can run on ad revenue; as long as an advertiser stays comfortably above their minimum ROAS, any magnitude of money spent is basically free because you make more than that in return! I can so clearly see the path of how someone could scale up from here and end up throwing a quarter million to these tech companies without batting an eye. ROAS is better when you know more about your users, so this engine is incentivized to do all of the privacy-invasive stuff we've heard about.

Let's take a second to step back. I'm goddamn considering paying facebook $13,000 — an amount of money comparable to my last entire campaign — because that's what the numbers on a spreadsheet come out to! It feels real bad to have such a large percentage of backer funds get diverted into a platform that helps overthrow democracies!

Is it better to turn your back on this advertising monster because you don't believe in its values? Or is this just what participation in society/this industry looks like? I've been asked a handful of times — by sealions, granted — what being gay has to do with doing giant robot crimes. My canned answer is that we want to make a game that's "culturally queer, with those values shining through wherever possible." Does that begin with saying no to participating in this kind of system?  Is it hypocritical to pay facebook to put up a trans flag? There's gonna be some ad there — why not have it be pride instead of some war game that doesn't concern itself with all this? This is the battlefield we're on, let's take up space! // This is the trap they set, capitalism transmutes all criticism to itself into more fuel for its own fire.

Mark and I discussed it, and our answer to this dissonance is that we gotta pick our battles. We have limited space and resources. Our core goals are to make development a good experience for all contributors (pay fairly and promptly as possible, fit work schedules around our outside-work lives), to make a mechanically and visually polished game, and to infuse what narrative space we have available with all the queerness and anticolonialism we can muster. Trying to retain some kind of moral purity around the advertising of this initial fundraiser is related to, but not essential, to those goals. The ends don't justify any means, but they can outweigh some on a case-by-case basis. We just gotta trust ourselves to make art that's worth it. (we also don't judge other people for participating in ads or not; I trust others to make their own calls on this front)

Thank you again to Backerkit; they've been very helpful in guiding us through this process, have listened to my concerns, are down for us to share all these stats, and have been proactive about scaling ad-spend as makes sense for the success of the overall project. Personally, they also helped me narrowly avoid getting phished due to me being too exhausted from moderating the fb comments to notice the trap.

Whew. Thanks for reading, thanks for supporting. I may missed or gotten some things wrong because I'm still pretty new to this, but I hope it was an interesting dive.

Olive  🌺

Week two // H0RUS glow-up // Xiaoli tier // MEATPUNKS recc
over 3 years ago – Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 12:21:29 PM

Week two hullabaloo 

We're halfway through the duration of the campaign and passed the $100k mark last night. Yikes!

The keen-eyed among you may notice that the chart has had a bit of a different behavior for the last few days. This is almost entirely due to the launch of the ad campaign that Backerkit has helped us put together for Facebook and Instagram. I was hoping to be able to dive into the details for this update like I did for calculating ROAS, but I think it'll best be broken out into its own post and after we've had a little more time to sit with the data that's coming in.

Glow-in-the-dark stickers!

On a bit of a lark, I noticed that Sticker Ninja offered this as an option and they had great reviews, so I figured why not! Let's have some fun!

I thought this would be a late-campaign surprise, but they got the proofs back to me super quickly and they're just too cool to sit on. The glow-in-the-dark material requires changing the lime-green logo to white (or near-white) but I think it still works. So yeah! The H0RUS stickers are now gonna be glow-in-the-dark as a freebie. Cool bonus!

Xiaoli tier — Homebrew mech incoming!

It's been zipped up! Zounds!

We've zeroed in on this zone much faster than I expected. The details are still under ziplock and key, but I can zap you this zoo of a hint about what kind of zesty mech we might be seeing that's home-grown on Verdevilla.

Strongly recommend: MEATPUNKS

The TTRPG for Extreme Meatpunks Forever released earlier this week! It's a game that pulls no punches, is Powered By The Apocalypse (both mechanically and, like, literally narratively), the meat mechs are these gross and beautiful entities literally made of blood and belief (one of the available weapons are "Screaming Mount Vents"), and its tagline is Be Gay. Pilot Mechs. Kill Nazis. — so um yeah I figured that there'd be some overlap here in what y'all are into. The art and layout is gorgeous, lore is frighteningly well-thought-out, and just reading through the rulebook will leave you Changed.

Check it out at sinisterbeard.itch.io/meatpunks. There are also communities copies available for marginalized communities.

Sticker #3 — (Reactor) Stress is a resource
over 3 years ago – Sun, Mar 12, 2023 at 09:13:37 AM

Happy daylight savings, everyone! It is the day that we are reminded that time is a social construct, an illusion carried forward by the momentum of the systems we have created. Truly a blessed day, for without it we would forget that we ourselves wrought this apparent foundation of the universe.

And if time is something we created, it's something we can bend. Push your mech's reactor to the 1d6+4 heat limit and you'll find that you can do more with the time that you have (one quick action's worth, to be precise) (how was that for a transition from the intro paragraph to the topic at hand).

Today we have the third sticker for Veteran tier and up: REACTOR STRESS IS A RESOURCE.

Like daylight savings time, this is a common refrain* to help remind us that if you end a mission with anything more than a single point of reactor stress remaining, you've basically left action economy on the table.

* well, technically, "stress is a resource" is the actual saying†, but out of context that sounds like some kind of weird hustle culture thing and we don't want that.

† after doing a search, it looks like "reactor stress is a renewable resource" was actually its first recorded form, so we've kind of come full circle here.

This design came from me playing around with the idea that we had a H0RUS sticker, what if we had one for the other manufacturers? I knew I wanted to do this phrase, and Harrison Armory seemed like the best match for it — but how to fit both the reactor symbol and the HA logo on the same design? Playing around with layouts, when I put four reactors in the corners it tickled a faint design memory. Where had I seen something like this before?

After some miraculous googling, I found it: the Indian-head test pattern used to calibrate old television sets. It's a cool bit of technology, with all the lines an numbers set up to reveal where your errors were if your set was incorrectly processing high- or low-frequency signals. It also weirdly includes a Native American wearing a headdress? Dunno what to say about that besides it sounds like part of the same sort of gross cultural impulse that used that icon as a football mascot. That shit's everywhere.

I couldn't think of any way to tie in the little numbers to something meaningful in Lancer gameplay or lore so for now they're just little numerical greebles. If you can think of some kind of Easter egg to throw in there, I'm all ears.

Finally, if you work in an honest-to-god nuclear reactor and have the freedom to put stickers on things in there, PLEASE let me know and I'll send you a pack of these for free as long as you post some pictures of having done so. This offer does not expire (until I run out, I guess). EDIT: on second thought, is it legal to post pictures from inside reactors? I don't think so. Please don't break any laws. I'll take your word for it.

Olive