Dwimmermount Kickstarter is… Schrödinger’s Cat?

So maybe you have been following the Dwimmermount announcements and noticed that the Kickstarter was supposed to launch this afternoon. But then it got to be evening here on the East Coast, and where was it? The answer here is that Autarch can seem pretty polished due to the excellent production staff whose day jobs make the Escapist look so good. However, it is still a small enough company that it can be seriously bollixed by a single fourth-grader who loses his backpack in a way no one can find it. (Where was it? In his classroom, not really lost at all, which is why it was so hard for me to find it.)

It is a poor craftsman who fails to account for this kind of thing, and that would be me. In my day job before we can apply for funding we have to go through a whole series of internal review processes. Because I am a procrastinator and the people I work for are emergency medicine physicians and thus adrenaline-junkies, we like to stress out and do everything at the last minute, but the internal deadlines mean we do this well before the time it is really due. Without those review steps, I gave myself the luxury of cutting things so close that a couple of hours of running around doing Backpack Quest created a problem.

OK, but then James posted that we were delayed! This is because when I finally got it ready to submit, it turned out that Kickstarter had instituted a new internal review process after all. In some ways I was glad for this – one of my “lessons learned” was to get it ready and then announce when it will go live, since these deadlines are all self-imposed. But at my day job, the internal review process takes ten business days, and now that Kickstarter’s funding awarded is catching up with federal agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts, it made sense to me that was the kind of review they would perform. So I wrote to James and was sheepishly like uhh I have a good idea for an Open Friday post…

But then within just a few hours – even though it was well after end of business out here – Kickstarter got back to us with the green light to launch the project! Normally this is a great moment of champagne-popping rather than frantic confusion, but the good news here is:

• yes we are live and the response has been tremendous, thanks for believing in this project despite the confusion!
• when there is a snafu you have some evidence that we will try to get out in front of it ASAP and let you know what’s going on
• James now has the distinction of having the most briefly delayed most-anticipated-delayed-gaming-product ever

Please accept my apologies for the unnecessary excitement!

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