It's never as easy as you think it's going to be, there's definitely far more involved than what you're thinking, and trust me, we are ALL aware of time = money!
And yes, it was almost exactly a year between launching the Kickstarter for Cognition & releasing Episode 1, nearly to the day in fact.
Of course, as long as we come in under 8 years of development time, we'll still be beating our time spent making TSL Episode 1, so I think we're good there.