I'm also backed. I'm working on Squally, a PC game to teach low-level comp sci.
My two cents:
Other accelerators are under pressure to only fund companies that will be "top of their batch" come demo day.
This often means rejecting small projects, solo founders, and pre-traction companies.
However, Pioneer welcomes these companies with open arms. Make no mistake, it's still hard to get in. It took me ~8 months of sustained effort before I was accepted.
But once you're in, you're in the company of helpful people who are just as hard working and talented, and have access to valuable mentorship.
I disagree - if you aren’t planning to become a 1-in-100 company, you shouldn’t be taking VC period, otherwise your VCs will destroy your company in 3-4 years.
I always think of project tasks as flow charts, where every item either takes 1 day, or 1 week. There's no way of really knowing in advance. Complications happen.
It makes it really hard to calculate the "expected value" of 5-10 tasks.
The more tasks you have to do, the more certain about duration you should be - some of the uncertainty will cancel out and you will get a gaussian distribution. For your example, I expect 10 tasks of between 1 day and 1 week each (with flat probability) to take about 6 weeks in total, with a 95% chance of completion within 7 weeks.
I don't think we anticpated people wanting younger children to try this game, originally we were thinking 12+. Clearly we were wrong based on the posts in this thread, so we'll have to think about a path forward.
The storymode of this game was intended to have RPG elements, which tend to be branded as masculine. I wish more girls were encouraged to play RPGs, but I get that this isn't the world we currently live in. However, the game will have good representation as far as NPC gender/race breakdown.
Consider giving it the ol' "Crash Bandicoot in Japan" treatment, with an alternative version or special mode in the game that just loads different, cutesy resources — but the game is otherwise identical.
Western games localised for Japan is a great resource for making things kid-friendly since that's the aesthetic over there.
> RPG elements, which tend to be branded as masculine
It seems weird that RPGs tend to be branded as masculine, since, if I remember right, there's more female players (in proportion) than sport and FPS games
I made this game because this is how I learned. I liked tearing games apart, so my first language was x86 assembly. I got into programming through reverse-engineering.
Maybe there are other people like me who will benefit from this. It's probably not for everyone, but the goal is to have it resonate deeply with some users.
My two cents:
Other accelerators are under pressure to only fund companies that will be "top of their batch" come demo day.
This often means rejecting small projects, solo founders, and pre-traction companies.
However, Pioneer welcomes these companies with open arms. Make no mistake, it's still hard to get in. It took me ~8 months of sustained effort before I was accepted.
But once you're in, you're in the company of helpful people who are just as hard working and talented, and have access to valuable mentorship.