Have you guys considered Venture Capital? Either through the various companies that exist for this purpose or Angel Investors?
On a side one way to get money would be allow pre ordered customers to be able to download betas
Itd get the word out there at any rate. You'd need to be able to achieve a decent release schedual to make the release to pre orders worth while from a marketing perspective.
Awesome work guys. Not sure if the pricing model is a little unrealistic for yourselves at essentially 20 AUD for a pre order you will need to sell alot for it to be profitible and worth while considering the effort you put in. Unless your going to use some other form of income source, such as using an online service to extend the games function or something. *shrug*