Kickstarter was relatively new and was getting some pretty amazing contributions for things I could do.

This blog entry is part of a series

001 - The Influence of Board Game Mechanics
002 - A Prototype Board Game is born
003 - Prototyping on computer leads to a new direction

Kickstarter

Kickstarter was suddenly in the news frequently. People were getting funding to make board games, and video games. I did see a trend I did not like and I was going to try something different.

Trend:

• Post a video about your game that was all flashy and promising many things
• No playable demo, no proof on concept

I wasn't going to do that I was against it. I could tell many of the ideas were using publicly available things and that there was no indication the project even had even a prototype that was playable.

I took the high road in my naivety.

I was going to pitch my game, but I'd make sure I had something they could play. They would see my project was real.

I partnered up with a friend to work on this that is an artist. Together we redid the look and we did indeed release a playable version. We also had a friend from the Philippines who we were going to work with but he ended up not being able to commit time. The only thing he did was the station in these screens, and our initial ship. Both which have been replaced, but they were there for the Kickstarter.

We calculated what we thought we needed to finish the game and it was extremely modest. It was modest because we did not plan to quit our other jobs to finish it so we were only asking for what we thought we needed to finish it.

We did not succeed in the kickstarter.

Link to the Kickstarter page... long dead.

So what went wrong

Well my beliefs that the fact we were asking for such a modest sum, and that because we had something actually playable we were offering better proof to potential backers that we could do this made us a better project to back was flawed.

It did not factor in human nature. It turns out projects like:

Alpha Colony which I had first hand knowledge from someone at the company that not a single line of code had been written when they did their kickstarter. Some mock ups in a 3D modeling program were it.

Their video is good, the topic is one I liked. I backed that project myself. It was not a hard task to complete but they were asking vastly more money than me. While they failed they did get way more money pledged to them than I was asking for in our kickstarter that failed.

In this I believe for Kickstarter purposes they were right and I was wrong. As a long time gamer I've seen many games with amazing videos and cutscenes that look nothing like the game. They excite people and they buy the game. I was kind of holding myself ALOOF and SUPERIOR (in my mind only) by not being one of these people I considered doing false advertising.

Unfortunately, that is not how a market works DESPITE my convictions.

There were plenty of other examples that I was wrong

Starforge - this one was on IndieGoGo not kickstarter

I did not back this because I recognized most of the assets and I could tell they slapped them all together from asset store content (for Unity) and were making big promises that clearly showed they were new, excited, and promising things that would require overcoming some huge challenges they hadn't even considered yet. I knew it was a pie in the sky.

They still did quite well. They went on to be one of the first Early Access games on steam and yes people were pissed off and complaining about exactly the flaws I was expecting. Years later they had a game that at least was functional and playable, but it wasn't quite the thing promised in the IndieGoGo video.

They were funded. I was not. It is simple as that. Their approach was right, mine was wrong.

I was right about the quality, and the technical difficulties. I was just totally wrong about how to approach marketing and get funding.

So kickstarter was dead, what did we do next?

Really not much of anything. I kept messing with Unity and experimenting and will blog about that but for a couple of years we didn't do much with this.

I had spent around $500 setting up an LLC so we could use Amazon Payments which was required by Kickstarter, and that's about it. We spent some money, and some time.

It wasn't about the money for us. Otherwise we would have asked for a lot more. It was about making games we wanted to make without being restricted by publisher demands, and making games that we wanted to play. I am a bit dictatorial on some of this as I've been doing this type of stuff for a very long time. So much of what the game is comes from me as far as gameplay. If people don't like that, it is no fault of my other team members.

So it is not DEAD... it just went into hibernation... this blog will continue from there.