So things have kicked up a notch on preparing our ‘Brainjacked’ Kickstarter. We had a long meeting looking at prospective artists and after a nice long (and constructive!) debate we’ve decided who to commission for our opening character art. I will share with you more details when the process is a little further along.

That being said Its now time to reflect on the lessons of Henchmen Kickstarter. The key three

• Better planning for the layout; a very much rookie mistake; when we where writing Henchmen we thought of layout as something that came after; fortunately we were blessed to be taken in hand by Jon, a pro-layout artist who helped up reshape our approach to producing a better looking, more readable product. This did require several rewrites. This time our style guiding and layout plan is going to be baked more thoroughly into our writing first off to save ourselves some grief

• No Maps! Well, this should be ‘no stretch goals without more thorough research and a costed plan” which is another rookie error, we promised some maps, we are still working on them. They are not late per se, our aim was to get them to backers by October, which is a year after the main project, but it's taking far too much time effort and money. I would have preferred to have them all done early, before our next Kickstarter but that's not realistic now.

• Allow more wriggle room in the budget; we budgeted tightly, too tightly when setting our Kickstarter goals. Currency fluctuations, changes in pricing, unexpected costs and good old fashioned inflation danced us back and forward over the ‘loss’ line too many times. So we are going to set a higher Kickstarter ‘funded’ amount and manage stretch goals with a keener eye than last time.

All that said Henchmen was a success on the terms we set for it, I am hoping these lessons will make Brainjacked even more so.