It's a good thing, to feel hope rather than despair. It's a very healthy thing to have some optimism for the future ^^

The crowd funding project sounds like a cool idea! If you're really looking into a Kickstarter be sure to get all the tips you can on how to make sure it's as successful as possible! Many of those fail because the creators don't budget well or they simply aren't able to spread the word successfully.
You might try showing off your promotional videos/images and what you're planning to offer as rewards and such here on FA before finalizing it, so you can get some more focused peer review (and drum up some hype) before you launch officially.

I was feeling the pain for quite a long time, but once all the bad stuff happened, I just decided to not really let it go too much into my head. I guess it's just getting numb to the pains of life.

Getting the word out is going to be the single most difficult thing that I have to do as I have been pretty ineffective at doing that for my old stuff. Mainly because I am so quiet and unwilling to ask for plugs from other artists. Will use simple math (or should be simple math) to negate the cost of the budget, but yeah that word of mouth thing I am kind of weak in.

If you do a kickstarter, best believe I'm in your corner.

Thanks, man. Now I got to have a corner to stand in!

If you want to get all the money which people want to donate to you, you might not want to use Kickstarter and its clones.

Those companies take a couple of percents of off your total donated money. Even one artist had to face how 25% of his donated money get sulked up by a KickStarter-clone. That's how crowd-funding companies get income and make revenue.

So use your social/art network(account)s to get attention and people eager to donate, but handle the real financial thing at your own.

Those companies offer a useful service, though. Imagine if you're trying to gather together some ten thousand dollars in donations and you're just doing it all through Paypal. You have to keep track of possibly thousands of donations and distributing prizes for those with no assistance. You have no easy way to know who donated how much, and if you don't make your goal, you have to refund every single person on your own.

Kickstarter takes 5% of funding, and additionally, payment processing fees amount to about 3-5%. You have to include that loss in your overall goal, but for all the services offered by the site it's actually quite worthwhile. Yes, if you're losing out on 25% of your funds you're getting ripped off, but I think Kickstarter and IndieGoGo take very reasonable amounts. In any case, you need to look at what it's going to cost to offer up your rewards and what you'll lose to taxes/fees, so you know your goal is set high enough that success won't leave you needing more.

Using a spreadsheet (MS Excel, LO Calc) to list who donated how much isn't that hard IMO.

Of course it depends on how much cash your goal is and if you could control the amount of donors. If the goal is $100 or $250, refunding is tricky, but still practical to do. But yeah, at bigger amounts like $1000....

But yeah 5% plus 3%-5% is 8%-10% that's $80-$100 when the goal is $1000 and $8-$10 when the goal is $100. That's still an amount of money that makes worth to do everything manually.

It's not really worth jumping into a Kickstarter or something if the goal isn't at least $1000, IMO. Even $1000 will only pay the bills for a couple months, really. That's not enough for a developer or graphic novelist, unless what you're making is a very short one-man project.

$1000 was just an example value. Still it could be realistic if it's a small game project if only (simple) art design and just some little modifications of an already complete game engine of a previous project are needed.

I am pretty sure that the companies want their cut, so I plan to not have so much a "round number" ($5000, $8000) as a goal in a reflection of the cuts that the site and the payment company take. So it's just about knowing that they will take a cut (25% of the donated funds is larceny in my opinion) and finding ways to stop that hand from ruining the project. I know it's not that hard to achieve.

I probably will try to get help from my networks, yet the problem is that this account has the largest audience for my work, followed by dev art with half of the size. It will be tough to get through a comic or game while you're a relative unknown in most places. I guess I need to get out there and do something.

Indeed, setting up a crowdfunding project is one thing, but getting donators for it is a bigger challenge.

Good Luck anyway~! |=(:3