KickstarterForum.org

Hello guys. It took me months to get here, but finally my campaign is live on Kickstarter (and on Steam Greenlight, GL)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/20 ... pted-world

I am producing an indie strategy game. This is a bit about how i prepared it and about how it is going, and what i learned so far.

Long term preparation was done so :

• Beginning from october 2014 we went public on Twitter (2 accounts, 1600 and 800 followers approx), Faceboook (250 likes approx) and IndieDB
• Since then we posted daily the WIP of our work and some tutorials
• We made a simple website that we kept quite updated ( http://www.hammerandravens.com)
• We got some minor press releases out to help us enlarging a bit our reach
• We often posted in the Gamedev related reddit subforum (that unfortunately are quite small)

Short Term preparation was done so :

• We prepared a ThunderClapIt campaign that in february pointed at our first teaser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xsrN7DzIkg Getting 100 supporters on Thunderclap might be painful but we got quite some hits on the trailer. at the end of the trailer we had all the links to our pages (and the main one to our newsletter, but we hoped for more subscribers)
• One month before the KS we began pushing out announcements (-30.-5, etc etc)
• We prepare the whole KS page trying to keeping it more visual than textual
• We prepared the KS video as a teaster+gameplay trailer. Having no access to video recording pro equiment and people, we thought that make a video with us talking might have risked looking too amateur being not our specialization
• We release a playable alpha of our game (single map only) on Kongregate and GameJolt
• We managed to get a quite popular youtube gamer from Greece (we have a greek member in the team) playing our game live, got a lot of hits to our pages

Kickstarter time:

• We launched on tuesday May 12th. Simultaneously to the launch approx 30 customized email went out with press releases (presskit+link+demo), nobody answered so far but a couple of them
• We bought a banner (1 month) on IndieGameMag.com and we managed to get a news article there pointing at the KS and GL pages
• We pointed the GL page from the KS page and viceversa
• We got a Backercamp basic package (i.e. basically several retweet from them and featured in their page)
• We boosted a facebook post for 7 days [in 2 days approx 10k visualizations already
• We tweeted and retweeted and asked for retweets everywere (still doing it ofc)
• We are going to crossadvertise with two other campaigns that might be somehow related to ours, nice people all of them

What all this got so far? Well, average results. We got approx 500€ pledged in 2 days on base stretch of 17k€. That might even mean that keeping the trend like this we could reach it in 30 days, but that would be more than edgy. One day with lower trend would be already enough to miss it completely.

We are still hyped and pedal to metal, and we won't give up till day 30 of course, we believe too much and we invested too much time in game and preparations to give up easily before the end (just to point it out, we basically travelled 3k km to open a branch in a KS-friendly country as ours were not)

A quick glance at what we learned at Day 2. Your target are probably not the final users of your specific product. Your target are people into crowdfunding that also have an interest in your specific product, i think that might be the key point of a succesfull KS, specially in Europe where most of the countries can't put online their projects yet, and the trust has therefore still to be created.

All the best,
Cheers,
H,H&R

OK I wouldn't mind to give my 2 cents, as I see you put alot of effort into it.

It seems like you haven't got into your right niche, the people who are interested in this stuff don't know anything about it...so you need to target them. I bet the advertising money spent on Facebook and Backercamp didn't amount to much?

Also, your KS page is much to long. As an investor, I'd want to know more about who's designing the game and their experience rather than too much info.

The video looks good, but is probably 1 minute too long and then the music is really annoying. The starting animation looks really good!

Maybe this one liner needs to be refined as it doesn't mean anything to me "A Turn based strategy/Tower defense/Empire management hybrid, with a black humour infused plot, set in a grim, disillusioned world."

Some small things, couldn't you use USD, not many people know the value of SEK. Also your website is Twitter? Surely you could register one and use that as a referal address.

If you need any help let me know. I also wrote this article which may help:
http://www.giftsandcoupons.com/blog/che ... g-campaign

Hi, thanks for the feedback!

Money spent on facebook and Backercamp is pretty limited (approx 18 USD on each) indeed, the gaming banner was 150 USD for 30 days. The facebook boost though seems to have brought a lot of visitors at least.
But it seems that gamers themselves rarely back projects, as I said it's more the people that are into crowdfunding that also happen to be interest in gaming that do it.

We are about to publish an update with the team, what we are and what we do, do you think that would make up for the lack of that info in the page?

The music we know it's a mixed blessing, being a specific type of music, we have people that are loving the game mainly because of the music and people that do the opposite, i guess that was a design choice about the game that somehow set a subtarget of people.

The sentence you refer too is quite gamers oriented, i guess that people that would back/play games understand it. What is not clear to you about it?

The last details, having a Swedish company we could only use SEK unfortunately (we wrote the conversions everywhere, but I imagine that a foreign currency is not the friendliest thing to see when you get onto the page), and the website I checked and all of our pages are marked in the profile, including our own website.

I am now gonna take a look at your article,

thanks for the hints in the while!

no probs! Let me know by pm if you want my help...