So, you’ve been thinking.
You’ve been watching television. You’ve been reading internet news. You’ve been reading the local newspaper and magazines and books.
You’ve seen that Kickstarter is a great way to get money directly from fans/customers for you to use to create your product.
You’ve seen that many indie games have achieved success on the site.
You’ve decided that you will make a Kickstarter campaign for your game!
Most of my blog posts revolve around personal views on how you should make games and how to sell them (based on my own personal views and mistakes after a tiny bit of experience). I’ve meant to do this next bit for a long time, and here it is…
A multi-part guide on “how to make a successful Kickstarter campaign for your indie game!”
A handful of you know that I had a (failed) Kickstarter campaign for my first indie game, “James – Journey of Existence.” It certainly doesn’t give me too much credibility to give you advice after only one attempt (a failed attempt at that), but I’ve learned a lot about crowdfunding and the indie community in general, and you can never have enough advice on the Internet!
Also, I know I haven’t followed this advice myself… but I wished I did, and will try to from now on. My mistakes are what led to this series.
The great Japanese animator and famed director of Studio Ghibli: Hayao Miyazaki is said to be retired now, leaving his latest film “The Wind Rises” as his last piece of art. I haven’t seen it yet, but I certainly look forward to seeing it later this month.
Recently, he said in a interview that the anime industry is filled with staff who are “otaku.”
A recent keynote presentation with former Uncharted dev Richard Lemarchand had him urge indie gamers to “make experimental games,” even at the risk of failing.
I couldn’t agree more. Indie games are, by nature, both blessed and cursed by having small teams and small budgets to work with. This makes developing large, ambitious games with high quality difficult and entirely dependent on the talent of the team, but also means that making a poor game or making a game that sells poorly isn’t as big of an issue (some indie developers risk their livelihood on their projects doing well, which no one should ever do). This means we can do things that larger companies just can’t afford to do.
Indie games will shape the industry over the next decade. Very few people can argue with this.
This just pisses me off. Sure, my indie game “James – Journey of Existence” is doing poorly on Kickstarter (http://kck.st/19wTNSh), and that’s largely because of how poor it looks this early in development. But it’s trying something new, and is trying to be meaningful. Then I look randomly online and find this game:
(note: The following rage is based on believing this game will cost money as opposed to being entirely free-to-play upon completion. If this isn’t the case, please ignore this post.)
What is it? It’s a game (very obviously made in Unity3D) that lets you play as a cat in your owner’s bedroom. The gameplay consists of you trying to knock over as many things as possible in the room in two minutes. Get a high score.
What do I think about it? It’s a cute idea. But the gameplay is simplistic, the models are simple and crude, the cat’s animations are laughable. Basically, I (and I’m sure most other people) could make this game from scratch within a week. It’s a online free minigame at best.
