We are so excited and energized by the support the community has been giving us. Over a dozen programmers have offered a helping hand, and the funds raised so far will give us a little more than 2 months to work on this project without the impending pression of finding investor money.
I want to say a few things about this whole crowd-sourcing venture, and also where its heading to.
First of all im very glad about the faith all of you supporters have been giving us. We are confident and we are going to make a great place out of Kaya, and having people telling us right from the start that they like what we are doing gives us a lot of energy.
With this project we dont want to only give one more thing to the community: we want to change the mentality of the community and how its used to do things. We want to raise the availability and quality standards for Go projects and ventures. We want to make people used to contribute and help all those that put a lot of effort and energy into providing a new experience for Go players.
Right from the start many players privately told me that i wouldnt be able to get any money, because Go players are cheap. I've always resented that comment, and knew it was not true. And Kaya is the first living proof that it isn't.
Our original goal with Crowd-funding was 4k U$S, which we achieved and for that, we are profoundly satisfied. We are not going to "push" this matter much, although it will be open for newcomers. We have achieved our goal of funding the first 2 months of the project, which should be enough, by our estimations, to create a first version.
Our overall strategy is to get a first version to show to potential investors and have more leverage to both convince and negotiate terms. If we are able to get more serious money, (30-50k) we are most likely going to expand the team with 1 or 2 developers.
But even if that happens things are on schedule. I want both Polly and I to deal with all foreign matters as soon as possible so we can develop 100% and reach our goal for a demo for October 15,which is getting close really really fast.
So what are we working on right now? SGF. GoSpeed is reading Sgfs and we are converting the server protocol to process and write SGF file formats.
Once that is done, Polly has to finish scoring on the board. After scoring, we will work on design and deployment. Polly has to make it look pretty, and i have to deploy this application into Amazon, so it becomes easily accessible for everyone :).
One motivating factor could be that most go clients are aged and people want to use a more modern version of the game. There is features people want, and no one is adding them.
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