@Joey
It’s very true that there are a few risk factors within this. However, I can clear some of these up.
As for details, normal people are waiting in line to kiss mod flank (unshown, I think) and put their hoof on a rule book. (but hey, you get to choose which one!) There. Secret’s out.
As for “at least 70 characters”, Smudge and I have mathematically determined that there’s enough room for around, or at least, 70 characters to be in the piece. What’s going to happen is we’re going to keep accepting submissions until we get to 70 (within the first submission period, assuming we get another). After this year is over, Smudge is going to actually begin drawing the piece. In the event we can fit slightly less than 70, then a few random people will get full refunds and a huge apology from us both for being mathematically stupid. If it’s determined there’s more room available for everyone, then submissions will be opened back up, we will given an estimate, and things will go 1 at a time, to prevent the chance that someone gets disappointed.
As for the math part. Originally, everyone was going to get their own plot of pixels 900p x 900p (a somewhat standard commission size for reference sheets, if I’ve done my research correctly.), which would be a 3” square. Accounting for borders, title, and inner size, you’re looking at a 11 x 7 character slot area, with a little wiggle room. I had the epiphany about a week ago, after looking at more crowd pieces, that characters look more natural bunched up and interacting than having a set space. Increased the height to 1,200p (4”) and account for all factors again, and we hit just over enough space for 8 rows. Since 7 characters fit before, with a few extra inches, bunching up characters would easily bring that to at least 9, meaning 72 slots APPROX. If my math is wrong as we have slightly less, then there’s a good reason I passed high school with a D+ in trigonometry. If I’m wrong and we have more, then that’s good news, but I also suck at math.
Addressing less or more room. If we get drastically less people than we believed would be interested, it’ll probably flop. Full refunds will be sent out to all individuals, and a full apology for our clear inaccuracy as to what the people may want. If it’s only a few, well then other factors kick in. A few less would be, like, 60 instead of 70 characters signing up. Less than that and I’d have to talk to Smudge about it. Anything less than 30, and it would probably flop, as then characters would be pretty massive. Re-scaling, of course, comes with less people signing up, but we’re not going to downscale should there be more.
And yeah, I didn’t actually think about HOW this would be presented. My guess is that I reasoned it would just be on display, and people could just marvel at it. (I doubt anyone wants to listen to my odd voice for anything more than 2 minutes, if that.)
Thank you for bringing these concerns up! I had actually not thought about a few of them, and I’m a little upset at myself for not catching these and addressing them prior. These have more than likely caused a great deal of concern for many people even slightly interested in this, and I apologize sincerely for making it seem like I wanted anyone to take a massive risk in all this. You as a consumer shouldn’t feel like we’re a Kickstarter or Gofundme. We wanted to eliminate as many risks as possible, and thus wrote everything together and brainstorming, but we missed such obvious points that I genuinely feel terrible for not catching these.