To start a Good company.

Wow, I really love your mission statement, Fabs! I'd be quite interested in being a part of that on the music front. I really love how you view trial & error as an approach to development, and creating an environment where one can fail safely.
I really hope it'll work!

I am not quite sure what the plan would be with regard to the Kickstarter.  Raising enough money to hire 3 people for a year is incredibly difficult if you don't have a claim to famous successful past projects, also it is unfortunate but your association with The Failure might harm you on KS (those who backed it can be incredibly mean, and they have been ignored for a long time, as soon as word gets around, you could end up becoming an outlet for them to hurl unjustified abuse at).  On top of all this, how would you convince people to pledge to an unknown project (am I understanding this part correctly)?

I don't know how familiar you are with the current state of Kickstarter but people are extremely wary of it these days. However, games companies do still use it successfully to drum up hype for their future releases, and you can still get pledges from people who are really convinced by your page. I ran a failed kickstarter in 2015 for Empires of the Undergrowth (its an ant game inspired by Dungeon Keeper).  Here is the overview of the KS:

www.kicktraq.com/projects/eotu/empires-of-the-undergrowth/

Getting those 329 backers was hell, and I don't think it was a particularly weak campaign (though we did make some mistakes).  The main feeling we got from it was that people didn't trust that we could actually deliver the product.  We even had proper gameplay footage in updates where we described different systems - it was pretty fleshed out. To be fair, another problem was that we were targeting mobile devices and a lot of the interest was coming from PC gamers.  In April the following year we ran another KS after switching to Unreal Engine, turning it quickly into a PC game and provided a demo.  Here is the overview of that one:

www.kicktraq.com/projects/eotu/empires-of-the-undergrowth-rise-of-the-colony/

This went way better and even though we lowered our target, we got more than the original target.  Still, getting that £18k involved the fanbase that we had built up over the past 6 months, and a month of no development whilst the 3 of us (3 devs on our project) tried to contact games media, youtubers, generate updates, learn how to use twitter and fb for promotion (and something called Stomt). It ended in a 24 hour live stream on twitch where we ate insects in exchange for funding milestones, that was a lot of fun actually.

The point here is that we had a convincing video, a demo that everyone could play, and 3 people (albeit with no prior record and no marketing experience) trying to promote the game, and all we could amass was £18k.  That is certainly not enough to pay your 3 developers for a year.  I can only imagine that, with another 18 months passing since then and probably a load more burned Kickstarter backers who put money into failed indie games, it is even more difficult now.

Maybe I misunderstood part of your plan, but it sounds like you might be setting yourself up for disappointment.  I don't know what to suggest otherwise, perhaps somehow you could use your past affiliation with "snac22" to your advantage, but I don't know how that would look. Perhaps a series of AMAs on Reddit if you are allowed, they would certainly be popular and you could feel the pulse of the community.

P.S. What was it like working with Peter "He Who Shall Not Be Named"? I will always remember him first for his work on Dungeon Keeper and Black and White 

Trying to get him to do your job for you huh?

Even though I don't have many success stories, yet, I think that I might be able to get some momentum from the collective experience of the team members. We've got some interesting successful titles from different genres and scopes, including every member having done AAA dev on multi-million selling positive reviewed titles. Yes, me included. I worked on some good games too you know. It is true that the presentation of the value of the team is going to be very important for a kickstarter, so big thanks for reinforcing that point very clearly.



Oddly, working with him is still one of my fonder memories of game development. I didn't like where the company was going with its revenue stream choices, but I do like him. He's friendly, generally nice, and generous, but he's easily distracted and that can come off as rude sometimes. I do the same, go off on a different train of thought because of something that was said, and then get caught out not having listened to the last five minutes of the meeting.
The best feature of Peter is that, more so than many people I have known, he knows what something can become. He sees potential in things that I might have dismissed, and also sees what the impact a thing will have, rather than how it feels right now. This is a great trait to have in a producer, or a game director, but I think he squanders it (or used to) by being a designer.

Henry James once wrote:
- What was the author trying to do? How well did he succeed? Was it worth it?

Peter is able to answer the last question very well, without even seeing the full concept, and that's a great strength, as it leads to far fewer pointless features. I wonder if it's something you can learn to do, because it's a skill that would be invaluable at a place that makes as many games as I want to be making.