SEAR DevBlog, week of 6/1/26: Of Crowdfunding and Research

The clouds part and the final transition completes

I’ve had a few questions come my way about Kickstarter and crowdfunding recently, and I’ve mentioned more than once over the last few weeks that I’ve been working on “Kickstarter stuff.” I just want to clarify what that means. In particular I’m not sure, as I sit here writing this, whether we will be running a Kickstarter, and if so, when. 

If you go back to my first post when I started this whole thing, crowdfunding was always my top-of-mind idea for how to fund this. Find an audience that gets the idea, and see if they can help us make it happen. That would still be my preferred route for funding over seeking a publisher, for example, just because of the risks in loss of creative control or other pitfalls that can happen with a publisher. I’m not opposed to the idea of a publisher on face, it can just be tricky to find a good one, and if you end up with a bad one, the results can be quite bad. By contrast, every time I talk to someone who loves the idea of SEAR, I come away invigorated and excited. If I’m choosing the environment in which I’d like to work, that’s the one I’d pick.

So one of the things I’ve learned a lot about over the last year or so is the different ways crowdfunding campaigns can be run. You can build a community first, get the idea out there, and launch a campaign when you can be fairly sure of support. The problem is, getting the word out can be expensive and/or time-consuming (which is the same thing), so it’s a bit of a catch-22. You can also use a pre-launch period to a campaign itself as a sort of community-building effort if you have some funds to invest in it upfront. And there are variations of these strategies as well. 

So, in short, when I say “working on the Kickstarter” I don’t mean the KS is necessarily right around the corner. I mean I’m working on researching the options, including feasibility and timing, and getting assets together to be prepared to launch if and when it happens. That last bit is a good time investment anyway, as a repository of copy, video, and imagery will always be good to have on hand. 

In a best-case scenario, I would love to run a Kickstarter this year, but only if I can be fairly assured that it will be successful. We don’t have a large community of supporters yet, because we only just recently reached the point where the prototype is polished enough to really show off the idea, so we’re at a bit of a crossroads. We’ve been pretty under-the-radar up until now, selling the prototype on Itch and posting a little bit of video on YouTube, doing a con or two, posting a bit on Discord. The next step in my mind is to get out a trailer that shows off what we’ve got and what SEAR is all about, start getting louder about it, and concurrently do the market and audience research that will tell us when and whether the KS will be a good idea. Believe me when I say no one wants the answer to that question more than I do.

In project progress this week, I knocked out a few visual bugs that have been irritating me for months. Taking gameplay video is a good impetus to get stuff like that done! On top of that we now have 5 of the 6 main transitions finished, looking great, and running in the shipping build. The last one is very close and with any luck will be wrapped up today. I am really excited to show this stuff off - when it’s all running, you can feel the whole vision finally pulling together. The feeling when the transition finishes, the camera locks in and you get control of Groove back right as you catch a boost reswave is…. 

Well, there’s no other way to describe it. It’s SEAR.