I'll answer what I can.
5.) What helped your final decision to favor top-down 2D-sprites instead of say a 'rendered 1px high 3D-sprite analogue' that might have offered greater scope of rendering and post-processing effects for little extra overhead?
6.) If you were at the beginning of your planning/development cycle again, would you use kickstarter/desura to generate interest and funding during development?
7.) follow-on of above, would you lock availability until beta following the initial KS/Desura offering ended as Dan did with Stardrive
5. These sprites are textures rendered via OpenGL, so they can indeed do some post-processing and rendering effects. Not sure what you mean by '1px high 3D-sprite analogue'. As for why sprites rather than 3d, well: I'm a 2d artist and don't do 3d. It looks good and it's relatively cheap from every perspective.
6. I'll answer this as a game developer generally, apart from Starsector, which only Alex can comment on from a business development perspective.
Kickstarter: I'm pretty uncomfortable with it. Reasons:
- They take a big cut. That sucks. If I was to do a Kickstarter-style campaign I'd rather do what Introversion did and host it myself so I could control the money and the terms. (This requires having already established a reputation of course, but I've got that luxury to some extent.)
- The focus on hyping and selling the idea rather than making the product is a distraction from what the project should be about: Making Something. This also tends to discredit the whole arrangement because you get charming salesmen successfully launching products rather than competent developers. Anyone who hasn't shipped a project will absolutely underestimate what is required. Every time, without fail. Alex is doing pretty well here because 1. he was a Real Software Developer before Starsector and 2. he hasn't promised any deadlines (which KS would require) and therefore can officially ship when he is actually happy with the end product rather than before, and 3. I can't really imagine Alex trying to play the salesman; he's simply not the sort of guy who hypes stuff up unless he can but absolutely sure he can deliver.
- The focus on silly 'rewards' is a huge time-waster and distraction from the product itself (though an admittedly clever way to enabled people with a lot of extra money to throw it at a project that tickles their fancy). Everyone always underestimates how much work and cost physical merchandise is; I know I did for Dredmor merch and
it wasn't worth it from a purely financial perspective - it was cool to give something to the fans though, and we only did it *after* we shipped the game and therefore had some time.
To go on with this point, word on the grapevine is that the FTL guys had to put in a ton of overtime on producing merch which took away from game development. Just more costs and time-sinks.
So in the end you've got to put at least half of the money you got from Kickstarter back into Kickstarter and on merch -- and waste valuable development the time on merch while trying to hit your deadline which is almost certainly set too soon. I mean, yeah, it's good to get a pile of money, but it's at a huge cost, especially to inexperienced devs. Therefore: extremely skeptical.
We developed Dredmor at Gaslamp by being extremely poor for years while working on the game, then launching it. It was actually a pretty awful experience in most ways (stressing over making rent, buying bags of potatoes, rice, and lentils to live on, etc.) so I can't recommend that either. Possibly Kickstarter would be the way to go, but I don't think we would have been able to succeed at a Kickstarter if it had been around in 2008.
As for Desura, for all the good feelings it evokes, I suspect - but am not sure - that no one actually gets a lot of money from it. I would suggest trying to find some hard numbers before considering it a viable method of fundraising.
