Dia Lacina will be writing the second campaign! // Stream Q&A // Hi-res sticker files
almost 3 years ago – Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 11:46:04 AM

Dia Lacina!

I'm pleased as punch to announce that Dia Lacina has agreed to write the second stretch-goal campaign!

Dia Lacina is a writer, photographer, and cultural critic living in Philadelphia with her partner and over 100 plants. She's previously been published in WIRED, Waypoint, Wireframe, and elsewhere, and is a frequent contributor to Paste Magazine. When she's not writing she can be found guesting on podcasts and recording Let's Plays.

You can follow her on Twitter @dialacina and her other platforms here.

Stream Q&A

Here are the questions and answers from the campaign's closing stream that I promised to write up summaries for!

Sagarmatha / Chomolungma / mechs from other supplements?

If we end up running into easy pick-me-ups (like the Kobold already being mostly done) we're likely to do them, but I continue to wielding the sword of "that's out of scope! no promises!" with extreme prejudice. We're going to focus on the core game first and do our best to leave the door open to further expansions rather than bite off more than we can chew all at once.

Most annoying mech to program? Funnest?

We spent a long time talking about this on-stream, but the one that has stuck with me really has gotta be the Death's Head. Its damn +1 to attack rolls is the only time a build-specific bonus like that ever shows up and means we need to account for that possibility in a general sense throughout the whole attack roll subroutine. All for a dinky little +5% goodie bag.

The funnest thing to program... I'm hoping will be the drone-bonanza that comes with the Hydra. That seems like it'll be one of those emergent-property things where we set the base rules and there'll be cool and complicated gameplay implications that kind of grow out of it.

Large text // accessibility options?

Yes!! Adding as many accessibility options as we can is a cornerstone of our project pillar of making this game as queer as possible. I'm no expert, but I frequently refer to these game accessibility guidelines. Curb-cut effects also rule.

How did I come to like Lancer enough to make a game?

Pandemic campaign, baybeeee. It's also the first TTRPG that has really filled the mix & match mechanic hole in my heart left by MtG since I had to go cold turkey on that.

Speedrunning?

It's sometimes fun to think about how a speedrunner might approach a scenario after the fact, but we're not specifically designing for them. In my understanding, designing for speedrunners kind of undermines the philosophy of them pushing the game to its unintended limits.

What would be your favorite mech to pilot?

My answer to this will change depending on whatever build/OC I'm fixated on at that point, but currently I've got a special place in my heart for a defender Duskwing/Saladin. I just wanna fly around and be a master of airspace kinetics.

Why did we show the stats & analyses behind the campaign?

It's a habit I've picked up during my previous campaigns and my creative peers. Being transparent helps everybody; doing writeups a practice helps me process and understand what happened, provides Content for the Content mill, and I think can be genuinely interesting and valuable to read as a backer. It also helps set a tone of getting folks a realistic view of what goes into making games, which means that if/when unexpected things happen and we need to make adjustments to what we're going to deliver, folks are better situated to understand.

Also, it's like the least I can do if we're gonna be engaging in this shadow market of user tracking and advertising!! It would feel weird to me to have that kind of tracking data and keep it hidden? ALSO since people were kind enough to fill out the "how did you get here" surveys, I feel like it would be rude to not close the loop on that and share how it turned out!

How do you feel about the success of the campaign? Unexpected?

"Well, I guess that happened, neat! Time to roll up our sleeves and get to work."

The biggest "oh heck" moment was the day before we went live when we got 700 signups to be notified on launch after a tiny announcement post. It became clear there was a Hunger for this and we battened down the stretch-goal hatches just in time to make absolutely sure we'd be able to pull them all off.

Modding / custom tilesets?

Modding is an unofficial goal! I think it's essential for the long-term health of the project, but since we haven't done it before in Godot I'm just very skittish about promising it as part of this initial chunk of work.

Prefer to be pilot or GM?

Playing as a pilot is definitely less responsibility! I've learned to enjoy GMing as kind of a zoomed-out separate game where I'm trying to maintain an even amount of mechanical pressure rather than pushing my mech to its absolute limits.

How do you find the time to do this?

I've lucked into a great day-job situation where I have enough flexibility to work on side-project like setting all this up while also making rent. Motivation-wise, I dunno, something something hyperfixation and working on projects like this is what I've spent the last decade setting up a lot of my life and habits to support. My brain really likes latching onto projects where there's always more stuff to do, so a lot of that habit-work has been setting up structures to be able to do that sustainably & healthily.

Programming languages?

Mostly gdscript! It rules. C# for performance-dependent things like line-of-sight algorithm.

How to handle Brace / Swallowtail core?

Good question! We may end up tweaking how they work mechanically, such as having brace only trigger on being structured, which is where you see it applied like 85% of the time anyway. One of the few TBD mechanics that will require tweaking in the port.

Community page or discord?

I hella don't want to do more community management work than I have to, so unless we start making hire-a-community-manager money, the PilotNET discord and the itch.io forums are going to be the primary community focal points.

Digital sticker designs

As promised, here are hi-res digital versions of the four corpo stickers, released here under the CC BY-NC 3.0 license. (The trans dabbing goblin isn't included because it's not my art or design.)

Campaign Postmortem
almost 3 years ago – Mon, Apr 17, 2023 at 05:01:52 PM

Two weeks out from the campaign, we've been able to catch our breath a bit. Time for a postmortem on the campaign!

Overall Trends

Let's collect some numbers! The project ran for 31 days, from March 1 to 31st, and raised a total of $195,585 from 4762 backers. There was $1905 in dropped pledges (1%) and a payment processing fee of $6753 (3.5%). The average pledge was $41.07; a week before the end of the campaign it was closer to $50, but the surge of $20 backers at the end brought it down.

It followed the standard pattern of having a spike at the start and end of the campaign. The oft-quoted rule of thumb is about third of funding comes in during the first 48 hours, middle period, and the final 48 hours. However, we saw something closer to a 25–50–25% split.  

This weighting towards the middle plateau was is in large part due to starting the ad campaign midway through the campaign. I appreciate being able to clearly see its effects in the relative quiet of the middle period (more on that below).

I'm curious about what caused the gradual increase in daily revenue between the 22nd and 28th; I can anecdotally relate that as we closed in on the final $150k stretch goal, people got super excited about it and it felt like there was more grassroot sharing going on, but I don't know if that can explain such a sustained change.

In doing pre-launch research on other recent campaigns, I remember noticing that big end spikes actually seemed relatively rare; it was more common that there'd be a more-gradual 2-3x pickup in pledges the last week or so. I haven't heard this talked about or named, but it would be interesting to do a more comprehensive search and see if it's a real pattern and what the dynamics driving it might be. Something for next time.

An interesting note is that although the spike in backer count was comparable between the first and last 48 hours, the former's funding spike was about 2/3 of the latter. I would attribute this to the fact that the high-end rewards had all been claimed at that point, but it's also possible that late backers are more likely to pick lower tiers.

Rewards

The $20 base Lancer tier for just the game was the most popular, as expected. However the Veteran tier actually raised slightly more funds despite being 2/3 as popular.

The lesson here for folks running their own campaigns: do not neglect your $100+ tiers! (although try hard to keep the cost of fulfilling them as low as possible!) There's a reason you see campaigns with a huge laundry list of deluxe xtreme VIP rewards; funds raised were about 50:50 between under and over that ~$100 slot. Weirdly, I saw that exact same pattern during my last campaign despite it having been an order of magnitude smaller.

Traffic sources

I always wish I could see a timelapse of how these proportions change over the course of the campaign, but I only remembered to take a few scattered snapshots. Next time I'll try to do a daily download.

Once again, I neglected to utilize referral codes and have a big ol' slice of "Direct" links where we don't know where the person came from. I particularly wish I'd used them for the PilotNET Discord announcements; there are many grassroots servers that mirror that channel, and we have no way of measuring how many of those direct links are attributable to those. As those announcements went out at the start and in the last 48 hours, how much they drove those spikes is lost among the larger signal.

I'm always suspicious of the graph that Kickstarter provides for referrals (below) because it clumps the launch and final-48-hour reminder emails in with the traffic it drives itself through the site itself; how much of that is value coming from Kickstarter-the-platform vs how much of it could be replicated by sending those emails yourself?

By digging through the 100+ referral codes and grouping them into the above categories, we have an answer: of the "pledged via Kickstarter" reported here, about 20% is from reminder emails, 15% is from (specific?) searches for Lancer Tactics, and the remaining 65% is the direct value-add from Kickstarter pushing the campaign. 

Advertising

We ended up with an overall ROAS of 2.57; we spent $9679 (plus a $3735 commission to Backerkit) and trackably-raised $24,903 from 669 backers (about 13% of the total values); As described in the advertisement midmortem, that $24k revenue will chewed down to a "real" profit for the project of $8867. Roughly 2/3s of that profit came from the first three days of ads, including a one-off claiming of the Xiaoli tier, and the rest trickled in over the rest of the campaign. 

An extra $9k is, like, nice, but if that's all it was it would not have been worth the amount I've stressed out about this whole process. However, this is where that mysterious untracked increase in non-ad revenue comes in. How many more people backed the project via another route because they'd previously seen an ad? How many people didn't click the ad but went and searched for it elsewhere? How many people forwarded it to a friend who found it by some other means?

If we had started the ad campaign along with the start of the campaign it would have been impossible to separate it out from the rest of the signal (well, besides gratuitous referral tag usage), but we luckily accidentally performed the perfect experiment by starting it in the middle where there were no other major identifiable influxes of traffic. You can clearly see a big red hill build up along with the ad campaign (days 14-18) before returning to a resting pre-ad state (compare days 19–22 with days 6–11).

The best takeaway lesson I might hazard for this is "the ghost hill from advertisements will show up for the first few days, but don't depend on it to stick around." Perhaps calculate ROAS separately for the first few days and the steady long-burn; they seem to operate under different dynamics.

Finally, something I only learned/realized a week before the project was over is that the daily ROAS is not an independent variable; you have some amount of control to dial it up or down by how much money you put in! If your ROAS is super high, the professional wisdom is that you should turn your spending up because you haven't reached the edges of your audience yet. Increasing your adspend will make your ROAS eventually go down due to diminishing returns — but returns are returns.

(A reminder that the closer you get to your ROAS, the more it becomes an engine to funnel backer money into facebook's maw; so there are real ethical costs of chasing those pennies.)

For all you neuroscientists in the house, this means that the process is basically a voltage clamp! Adspend is injected current, ROAS is neuron membrane potential — whereas a current clamp would be having a budget of a flat X dollars every day.

Next Steps

Another long one, thanks for reading! I feel like this was more of an statsdump than a careful dissection of the implications, but I've already spent too much time on this so this is what we got. Data for posterity, or something.

The Kickstarter funds hit the bank account this morning (😳) so we should be sending out backer surveys sometime this week/end. Mark and I are also working on sketching out a production schedule that we'll share when it's ready, but I'm trying to slow down to a marathon pace so am not going to give myself a public deadline for that yet.

🌺 Olive

Home stretch // closing stream
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 01:00:32 PM

me: alright, we've passed all the stretch goals (even the impossible one), we've cleared the adspend hurdle, I... I think we're golden?

my brain: great! what's next to be worried about?

me: no really, I think we're just good. we're even growing a healthy buffer for things being more expensive than we expected. we don't have to be worried about something all the time

my brain: ...

my brain: but what about-

me: NO LET US HAVE THIS. WE'RE GONNA CELEBRATE AN UNAMBIGUOUSLY SUCCESSFUL CAMPAIGN TONIGHT ON STREAM AND COUNTDOWN THE END. 7-9PM PST, STARTING ABOUT SIX HOURS FROM NOW, TWITCH.TV/WICKWORKS. THANK U SEE YOU THERE. UNLESS IT'S LIKE 3AM BC YOU'RE IN EUROPE. OOPS.

(it'll be an AMA format so if you're curious about the gameplan or other stuff about the campaign, you'll be able to submit questions during the stream. I am hoping it'll be fairly chill. We'll probably talk about Lancer, play the game a little, crack open Godot and show how the engine works, etc)

Actual project update: Sometime in the coming days, I'll write up a postmortem of the campaign + a rough sketch of what the next 2-3 years will likely look like. We'll also be sending out the backer survey for addresses, callsigns, etc in a few weeks via Backerkit. You'll be able to update your answers and addresses at any point between then and reward shipment.

Olive  🌺

Final stretch goal reached + bonus SSC sticker!
about 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
about 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!