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!
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.
The Kickstarter for “James – Journey of Existence” is picking up a couple backers, which is reassuring given that it isn’t even on the “Ending Soon” projects page yet for Video Games. Anyhow, some backers might notice that the description for the project was shortened a little, and more importantly, the rewards were updated. Or rather, some of the rewards were removed completely.
A lesson I learned from this campaign: when putting a new game on Kickstarter, people probably don’t care about your game yet. So when you offer physical rewards such as documentaries, art books, or soundtracks, very few people would actually be interested. It can even hurt the campaign, as you appear vain to be willing to spend money on making such things before an audience ever suggests they want it. As much as I would love a plush toy of The Cat in “James – Journey of Existence,” I’m probably the only one who does.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of communicating with different people, both supporters and nay-sayers about my hand-drawn indie game “James – Journey of Existence.” Both with Kickstarter and this blog, among other social media sites, I’ve tried to post updates and respond to everyone. However, it has happened often with both sides that they would completely miss important information I’ve posted when writing a comment.
This has quickly become my biggest pet-peeve: making a comment before actually reading an article. This is very common, especially on video game news sites where the fanbase is as “passionate” as they are. I don’t mind too much if the comment is nice, where I would then kindly repeat what I’ve said elsewhere. But more than once, people have poo-pooed “James – Journey of Existence” and used examples to help back their claim.
Ok, I want to put “James – Journey of Existence” on Steam’s Greenlight program, but it’s so early in development that I feel a little uncomfortable about that.
Instead, I noticed Steam has another option, to upload “Concepts,” which is similar to uploading a project to Greenlight, except that it doesn’t at all effect the game’s chances to getting published on Steam regardless of popularity. It’s a little unnecessary, but I figured the good gamers on Steam would be able to give an opinion.
You can find the game profile on Steam here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=214380982 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=214922280
