The people who use Kickstarter for indie games are reaching out to a wider audience, asking for money for a project they'd not really be able to do otherwise because of dev/platform licenses, required toolkits, time, and art. They're doing it with both profit and long-term jobs in mind. Get enough to fund it, produce it, and then hope sales happen afterwards...
The PCE is free to develop for, and it's assumed you probably already have testing hardware. Mednafen is free and works fine in place of real hardware for almost all testing.
and, again, you're targeting PCE, where its been proven at least twice now, that if you ask for pre-orders, you'll get your funding easily, and quickly. Just make sure you have proof that the project is actually ready to go.
Not to mention, there is not a large PCE fanbase. Once you do your initial sales wave, that's basically it aside from sporadic purchases every month or so.
You're more or less just asking the PCE community to toss larger sums of money at you than would normally be expected of a homebrew, simply to keep you fed/alive while you lock yourself in for a whole summer, hopefully finishing a game.
You would have to generate A LOT of money from a small fanbase in order to keep yourself sustained during this marathon and still have money to produce the game and whatever bonus loot you come up with. Creating that stuff isn't free either.
Not to mention, if you want to attract an outside crowd, you don't really have any previous games to demonstrate. The majority of outside gamers will be skeptical about handing money out to someone who only has tech demos to show off. The PCE crowd gets these things, but the other crowds may not.
Sure you could have a prototype of the current game, but without at least one finished game under your belt, I can see the non PCE loyalists being skeptical about completion.
This is especially because of all of the homebrew speedbumps that occur in all the scenes. People are skeptics. It happens.
I'm sorry duder, I don't see the point. We've got a steady stream of PCE happenings as of late that are continuing to go on. I myself am comfortable waiting for you to do whatever you are planning at a leisurely pace.
I honestly say, if you want to make a PCE game, just make a PCE game, at your leisure. I'd say its safe to assume everyone here, including myself will encourage you to create your game either way.
I mean, Insanity was made during both college + work in under a year in spare time, and that included learning the hardware, figuring out the whole chiptune thing, and all of that. Why rush things?
