Tag Archives: social media

So You Want To Make A Successful Indie Game Using Kickstarter…

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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.

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48 Until End of Kickstarter… Plus New Art For “James – Journey of Existence”

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My Kickstarter for “James – Journey of Existence” (http://kck.st/19wTNSh) has only 25 backers so close to the end, which is a little embarrassing, when the beginning had so much promise. On the other hand, the new IndieDB page for “James – Journey of Existence” (http://www.indiedb.com/games/james-journey-of-existence) already has 4 followers after about 24 hours of being up, so it seems an easy and safe simulation of how a Kickstarter would play, given the growth in community rises at almost the same rate.

There were several things wrong with the Kickstarter campaign. One major one was the current quality of the game itself: the environments were bland, the animations were crude, and the character designs were lacking. Art is in the eye of the beholder and some have truly loved the game’s style so far, but I can’t argue with the masses. And here’s my first step in fixing that: new character designs for James!

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What “Innovative” Means In Games…

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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.

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The Importance Of Communication…

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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.

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