Thinking of the hard questions
If you follow us on social media, you’re aware of our recent Kickstarter campaign. As part of organizing that, we had to address project risks and challenges.
We needed to ask ourselves the hard questions:
- What risks did our project involve? (“Lose money” risks, not “grave danger” risks.)
- What challenges did we foresee?
The idea was to give the generous people who might give you money (in our case, we ended up with an amazing 255 backers) some reassurance that you had put some thought into what problems might arise, and how you would be able to solve or overcome them.
I thought it would be good to share that section here on our site as well.
How we address risks and challenges
We believe in ourselves
We’ve already committed $50,000 worth of our own money and another $50,000 worth of time into developing Spirit Lake: The Game. We’re going to do whatever it takes to get it completed and on the market.
We have the personnel, infrastructure, and technology we need to make Spirit Lake a success. Our game is not a concept: We have a tangible product. Now it’s just a matter of making it better.
Team resources
We have made sure that no aspect of the game is solely reliant on a single person.
If a technical problem comes up, we’ve got a handful of brilliant developers and programmers that will work to come up with the solution.
If it’s a matter of aesthetics, we have multiple animators working on our game to turn what began as a vision and handful of photographs into a virtual world.
We’ve recently brought on a marketing officer to share in the business side responsibilities.
Tribal Consultants
If there’s questions about accuracy, we have tribal consultants on the team—with advanced degrees in history—who will ensure the game is culturally and historically correct.
Testing and data collection
We’ve already gotten over the biggest hump when it comes to this game—we’ve built a beta version that we’re testing in schools.
Final boss
The biggest challenge we face when it comes from transitioning our game from a prototype to a commercial product is funding. Hence, our Kickstarter campaign. Right now, we’re splitting our time between game development and less exciting projects we need to take on to pay the bills. We continually look to the future to identify, overcome or avoid setbacks before we’re faced with them.
The more funding we get, the more time we can spend on this game.
The more time we spend on the game, the faster we get the game in the hands of kids. The more kids we get playing the game, the more students whose math scores will improve.