KickstarterForum.org

Hello everyone,

So often, I see people blindly promoting their Kickstarter projects without pausing to give back to the community. I have always been a believer that the path to success is through the adding of value to the lives of others. Prior to my kickstarter, I offered feedback and support to a number of other project creators, gamers, and enthusiasts. During my campaign, I continue to release developer diaries and short videos on everything from convention etiquette to game design as well as set aside time to look at other projects and provide feedback to support others. It is easy to lose your values in the mad scramble to fund, but I feel that it is important to check yourself from time to time and give back to those around you.

I am currently running a Kickstarter for a card game called Crop Cycle (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/17 ... crop-cycle) that may or may not fund, so I may live to eat these words, but this is what I believe is the path to success in both crowdfunding and life!

@TrevorL The game looks extremely cool!

I definitely agree, giving back is key. Building dedicated fans and folks who appreciate you seems the most important thing - other than having a great product / concept to start with.

I'd rather have 5 good conversations that convert folks into real fans than get 10,000 messages blasted out to people it will only annoy! It's great to have a site like this that lets us share / give as well as receive from the crowd funding community.

Good point, I think keeping in touch with reality and giving back is the best way to keep people interested.

Great looking game by the way!

I agree Trevor. I think it depends on what you end goal is. If it's all about the money, you may be ok with a short term strategy of taking more than you give. (Maybe not, that's up for debate, but lets pretend.) However, if the reason you are creating your project is at least partially because you want to give back/ be a part of your community, it is important not to lose sight of that during your campaign. So far (4 days in) I think I'm doing ok, but it is not walk in the park. The ticking pledge amount number is stressful, and it is difficult not to focus solely on that. Keep up the good work. It looks like you have your head in the game.

Dylan,

Two things: First I have fallen totally in love with your project and its goal, and have pledged and shared on Facebook.

Second: It would be an unspeakable tragedy for your project to not get the attention it deserves due to some issues on the Kickstarter page. The main two things I would suggest are:

1) There's a couple of video fixes that I think would be relatively easy:
- Remaster the sound on your video. There are places where the background music is too loud to the point it's pretty distracting.
- You might consider reshooting so your head is in frame, but I think that's less important as the cut you've used does a good job of getting across your personality and passion for the project (which certainly in my case was way more important than high polish on the video).

2) It would be awesome to have a sample of what a standard quest pack might be on the Kickstarter campaign. You could even spin it as a thank-you for people checking out the campaign! The idea is cool enough that if the execution is even half-way as fun as it promises to be letting people actually experience that will get them hooked (or at least the sort of people who will pledge). I love the Kickstarter Quest, but showing a more standard example of the sort of thing people would get will be really helpful (I'm guilty on this front as well - we're just putting together the practical examples and sample cards from our deck to show for our campaign!)

Thanks for working to make the world a better place! (I'm guessing you're a fan of Jane McGonigal's work?)

It looks like you're off to a good start. I'd love to hear more about your campaign strategy - yours seems like the sort of project that if news of it takes off could easily make several times the goal.

Wow, thanks Connect Deck!

First off, thank you for your enthusiasm. I think you are as excited as me about Quest Scouts, which is great because I am very, very excited. It is going to be great! My hope is that it will be even more fun than it promises to be. Thank you for pledging and sharing the project. I'm glad to have you on board.

I've got a huge list of improvements I want to make, and sound is at the top of the list. I've reached out to a video editing friends of mine to ask if she can "fix it." Video is definitely not my strong suit. I won't be refilming to keep my head in the shot. It's not that I don't think it is a good idea, it is that I need to put my time into other things and filming takes a surprising (to me) amount of time.

Yeah, I hear you about priorities - the head-in-frame thing is LOW on the list.

Even if you just have a friend who's skilled with Audacity, they could equalize that sound for you and then someone with a little skill could pop that track back onto the video.