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[Rotondo]

Finally solved all my camera visibility issues by implementing a dungeon master class that keeps track of what room type each room is on the client.

For zelda style rooms packed with a lot of enemies it goes for a more zelda fixed camera but it has two options overall.

Full Zelda style: where it locks in the center of the room you enter to give max visibility.


Partial focus camera: where it still keeps focus on you but guides the camera a bit more based on where the walls are.


Ran into an interesting trap formation on a path when I was testing, recorded a fun gif of evasion.



Finally I made a fancy dungeon boss door complete with required boss key, beyond just being entertaining this prepares you that something different is ahead.



Still need to work on the effects and animation, but it's a good start.

[Rotondo]

I compiled all the screenshots I've taken of the game over the past 4 months and made a time lapse video.

It's fun being able to see the progress, eventually I'm going to have to compile all the screenshots I have into one giant video.



Experimented with a demons/dark souls style roll accessible via an item.



I also improved the feel of the bow and dagger charge attacks.




It's crazy thinking how much I learned comparing these items to their original prototype counterparts, the new ones just feel so much better even though they do the same thing essentially.

I know people talk about those game feel videos to death, but I learned a lot from them.

[Rotondo]

Showed the game at Boston FIG, people seemed to really have a lot of fun with it. Met a lot of interesting people, overall was a really great time.







Also I'm doing a talk today at IGDA Rhode Island about hack & slash games, http://www.meetup.com/IGDA-RI-International-Game-Developer-Association-of-RI/events/225063247/

Should be a lot of fun, if you're in the area you should come check it out.

[Rotondo]

The talk went really well, Steve Caterson really knows his stuff when it comes to video games that's for sure.



Album here


In terms of game progress I made an ocarina item,



https://vine.co/v/ePuYZhWFuPj

I need to make some better ocarina sounding... sounds for it but the functionality is fun, you can play all the songs from ocarina of time on it.

Now to add a million secrets that are only accessible with it!

[Rotondo]

Making progress on things,

Started fleshing out the ice theme with some custom objects,



It's super fun to beat up snowmen, though a bit sad at times to see them headless.


Bounce traps now reflect projectiles for no reason other than it's fun,




Started work again on the snake boss, going to take a while to get his movement right,




Made a new gif to show off the "Voxel Destruction"




I also completely remade my website so it's easier now to work with, and also looks a lot better too!

http://www.ForgettableDungeon.com




If you guys notice anything broken about the website, please tell me. I'm not a web developer so this stuff is all very new to me.

[Mark Mayers]

Hey! Somewhat delayed but:

It was cool meeting you at Boston VR.
I wish I could have attended your presentation at Playcrafting (sucks they were scheduled for the same night).

I'll be following your devlog! I definitely want to play when we're at another local event and I get a chance 

[Highsight]

This looks CRAZY impressive!  You guys are really taking full advantage of this voxel style, and I love it.  I'll have to look into trying this out later.

[Rotondo]

Hey! Somewhat delayed but:

It was cool meeting you at Boston VR.
I wish I could have attended your presentation at Playcrafting (sucks they were scheduled for the same night).

I'll be following your devlog! I definitely want to play when we're at another local event and I get a chance  

Yeah, that was bad timing lol.

But yeah it was good meeting you as well, I wish I had a chance to try Desolus at BostonVR. So hopefully we'll be able to try each others games out at the next local event lol.

This looks CRAZY impressive!  You guys are really taking full advantage of this voxel style, and I love it.  I'll have to look into trying this out later.

Thanks man that means a lot.

---

Nothing too big to update today, I implemented a proper secret room system for the game. So I decide to make the classic...



Going to try and add a good variety of special and hidden rooms to keep things fresh.

I've also been gearing up for a kickstarter for the game,



I roughed out the rewards for the kickstarter the other day on the preview page, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rotondo/255782852?token=0397d323

If you guys have any feedback on them I'd love to hear it. I'm trying to make them the least confusing as possible.

Also I really need to think of a cool 1000 dollar reward, the dinner one is a joke lol.

Edit: almost forgot I also posted an update on my dev blog going into a bit more on things, but it's mostly stuff you've seen.

http://www.odnotor.com/post/130087325949/gifs-talks-kickstarter

[Rotondo]

I've been hard at work on the kickstarter trailer, the song I'm using is pretty face paced so each feature segment is about 5 seconds long. Turns out you can cram a lot into 5 seconds.

These three scenes are my favorite so far.





It takes so much time to even make a 5 second clip at times, I can only imagine what movies must feel like.

[TS42]

Awesome project! Looks really funny!!

But you should change that "Create your own secret room, featuring a unique layout, your character, and a whatever text you want!" to something where you have the chance to catch those "d!ck d!ck d!ck pen!s" trolls.

Anyways.... having an image at steam with a dickbutt on the floor might increase your sales ^_^

[Rotondo]

Awesome project! Looks really funny!!

But you should change that "Create your own secret room, featuring a unique layout, your character, and a whatever text you want!" to something where you have the chance to catch those "d!ck d!ck d!ck pen!s" trolls.

Anyways.... having an image at steam with a dickbutt on the floor might increase your sales ^_^

Thanks!

Also thanks for the feedback, I updated the reward tier to hopefully prevent that situation lol.

----

Anyway, I've mostly finished the kickstarter trailer, I just need to do a final pass on audio today.

You can see that here,



I've also been fleshing out the kickstarter page with a lot of words, going to add some pics and gifs today.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rotondo/255782852?token=0397d323

Sadly I learned that no matter what I do kickstarter re-encodes your gifs, so I can't do anything fancy to make high quality gifs at a low file size

[LobsterSundew]

With a $8,315 minimum funding goal and looking at the rewards, you would need to aim for around 320 backers to reach 100% funded. You would want to aim for at least 96 backers in the first week to have a good momentum going into the Kickstarter trough. It could be rough to go into Kickstarter with less than half that (48 backers) in backers prepared in advance.

About the rewards:

$1 name in credits
- Very good. Reward tiers like this do help boost a campaign's performance. $2 or $5 tiers don't really work. It has become clear that it has to be $1 to work best. A $1 tier is as valuable as a $10 backer for calculating the popularity ranking.

$9 early-bird
- 50 slots would be at least $450 (5.4% of goal) when full. That is about right. Having too many slots is actually a big problem for many small campaigns. 50 is subconsciously a good number to pick.

$13 introductory tier for a copy of the game
- You could clarify that it will include a copy of the game for Steam if you are successfully greenlit.
- Think about if you will be offering a DRM-free option such as using the Humble Store. They can handle both Steam keys and DRM-free distribution.
- Pricing is a game is a complicated topic. If the game is planned to release on Steam at a higher price than $13, then you could mention the discount here. For example if the game is later released for $15, then $13 backers save $2 as thanks for supporting the game earlier in development. It can be beneficial to mention if they would save money. Most backers will act in their own self-interests.
- I wouldn't recommend increase the price on Kickstarter to $15, at least not right now when so many strong $15 price games on the platform this month. Decreasing the price to $12 is something to ponder. A round number could work better than a number that ends with a 3.
- If you decreased the price to $10 it could take an extra 58 backers (378 total) to reach 100% funded. You could probably get more momentum at that price, but it is riskier in many ways.

$25 adds beta access
- The price jump is on the edge of being a bit too big. It feels just acceptable, but it also feels stretched. In general one should be careful about doubling the price for each reward tier jump when dealing with the small reward tiers. It is just $1 below double the price of the $13 tier.
- If the price dropped below $18 it would mess up the value of the $70 tier. I'd say don't drop the price below $20 if you end up reducing this tier's price.
- I did not see a download of the soundtrack mentioned. Adding both beta access and a download of the soundtrack in the same tier is a tactic I am biased towards. There is also the opportunity to add something like a PDF with design document sections, concept art or other behind-the-scenes tidbits.

$36 tier with 4 copies but no beta access
- 4 copies at $9 is $36, while 4 copies at $13 is $52. At the $13 price this tier saves the backer $16.
- Things get more complicated because a decision should be made and clarified about how names being included in the credits will be handled at this tier.

$40 tier for design a character
- The character will show up in the hall of heroes on a silver pedestal. This could be a very popular reward.
- You would want to clarify some rules on the project page or in a project update about player created content that will ship with the game. Rules such as no vulgar content that could get the game in trouble. You could clarify the right to veto a backer's submission and ask them to submit something else.

$70 tier for 4 pack with beta access
- This idea of stripping out and then putting back beta access later in the rewards structure is a strange choice. This note about beta access appearing and disappearing is one of the biggest notes about the overall rewards structure.
- I suggest adding a title like "SPECIAL OFFER" to this reward tier then an explanation like "Want to save some loot while also preparing your future dungeneering party?". If it is clear that it is different from its neighboring reward tiers it shouldn't harm the flow of the rewards too badly. This point may also apply to the $36 tier.

$80 tier is upgraded version of $40 tier
- The character will appear on a gold pedestal in the hall of heroes. This tier is also potentially a good performer.
- It could be sweetened. A backer could get to name a cheatcode (what would be typed in to activate it) if your game supports cheatcodes.

$100 tier for design a weapon
- Includes the $80 tier.
- 1.2% of goal per backer.

$150 tier for secret room
- Includes the 80 tier.
- 1.8% of goal per backer.

$500 tier with design a boss and includes $100 and $150 tiers
- The text to keep track of what is in each reward tier starts to get more confusing here. I potential solution is later in this post.
- The jump from $150 to $500 is a bit much, but the hard part is brainstorming reward content that could fill that gap.
- 6% of goal per backer.

$1,000 tier with design an inn character and includes $100 and $150 tiers
- Interesting.
- 12% of goal per backer.

Overall the rewards structure is not bad. There are small ways to improve it a bit. It would be possible to get funded with it as it currently is.

Reward models:

There are multiple types of "reward models" for how rewards fit together. The most commonly seen one is "Includes all the above". Less common ones can be "Included from this tier onward" or daisy-chaining reward tiers with references like a $100 tier "Includes the $80 tier" and the $80 tier "Includes the $40 tier". Each model has pros and cons.

You are already using the model of "listing everything" for what is included in each reward tier. This is a good call in this situation because of the flexibility. If done right you could avoid having to implement a complicated add-on reward system. The biggest thing to watch out for is how large the text for each reward tier grows.

Below is the text I saw for the $500 tier.

---
Pledge $500 or more
Help create a boss for the game.
+ Secret room
+ Design a weapon
+ Gold kickstarter hall of heroes + Design a character tier!
---

First, what I want to point out is you can make the text easier for the human eye to skim. My eyes jump to the plus symbols, but then I have to go back and read about the boss part.

Second, you could use Unicode characters like a black box (■) which fits with the voxel theme. There are many unicode characters out there besides boxes. The human eye jumps right to them like flags for key information.

Three, I know it is still being drafted but think about the flavour text of the reward tiers. There is the standard marking adive of "Sell the sizzle, not the steak".

Fourth, the structure of the rewards daisy-chains nicely back to the $80 tier. Chaining could reduce the amount of text each following reward tier after $80 would need.

Those four points would transform the $500 tier into something like below.

---
Pledge $500 or more
■ Design a boss
Help create a cool boss for the game. See if your friends can beat it!

Also includes:
■ Design a secret room
■ Design a weapon
■ Design a character
■ Includes the $80 tier
---

About the project page:

I saw the question on Twitter asking if it is possible to do indenting on a Kickstarter project page. Some projects use a transparent image as a box to indent paragraphs on Kickstarter. It can look a bit weird when viewing on mobile.

It is possible to center a small GIF like that by adding whitespace on the left and right. Because of how animated GIFs get optimized this doesn't add too much to the file size. Another option is to have two video clips side-by-side when making the GIF so that the full width of the project page is used without using a lot of vertical height. Your development blog already has side-by-side GIFs that are still separate images. The next step is just merging them into a single image.

Voxel destruction is one of the strengths of the game. There is the "Voxel Destruction" animated GIF already in the preview. Some of the blackness in the top of the frame could be cropped out if you needed to squeeze the file size smaller. That destruction GIF is worthy of being the first thing below "About this project" at the top of the main page body.

The project thumbnail is many potential backers' first impression of the game.

The last major update to Kickstarter itself results in a lot of resizing of images like the project thumbnail. It gets confusing sometimes. When browsing Kickstarter with Chromium the GIFs also now don't load until I mouse over them. They have 3 animated circles when they first load. In project updates there is the freedom to use fluid WEBMs using a service like Gyfcat.

About the video:

I saw the October 4th version. It passes the 5 second test to have something interesting within that intial period. Picking up the bed was a good joke.

It then passes the 30 seconds test. Picking up "THIS" was also a good joke.

I know the audio levels of specific sound effects are still being tweaked.

There was the good montage of action and features. The music has good energy. It does get repetitive, but for someone not critiquing the video they might not notice. The montage helped convey a lot of information visually about what the game is. Many projects fail to get that right.

The current length is 1 minute 36 seconds. This is good. Video game projects don't always need someone talking to the camera. In other categories that is important, but for the video games category just using a trailer is often fine. A project update can then be used so backers can get to know you better.

The fade to black at the end could bring up a screen with a call-to-action like "Thanks for watching. Support the game on Kickstarter".

[Rotondo]

Thanks so much for the feedback! I implemented a lot of stuff you talked about, I was already thinking a lot about some of the things you mentioned so hearing another point of view on it helped a lot.

----

The kickstarter video is now done, it can be viewed on the kickstarter page https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rotondo/255782852?token=0397d323

Sadly it's still a bit blurry but I'm not sure if there's a way to remedy that since it's such a low resolution.

The kickstarter page and rewards is now mostly fleshed out and done as well, I just need to put a few more nice screenshots around.


Since I don't want to post without a gif, here's some orbiting chickens that happened when I was working on the boss orbit logic.

[LobsterSundew]

The title is "The Forgettable Dungeon: Online Co-op Action Dungeon Crawler". That is good. A professional marketer may have wanted a title that is easier to search for, but it should be fine. "Dungeon" is a word that many other games use in their titles. There have also been many crowdfunding projects in both the tabletop and video game categories that used that word.

The description is "The Forgettable Dungeon is an online & offline co-op dungeon crawler with a heavy focus on roguelike elements". That duplicates some of the information in the title. If you removed the name from the project description field you would have more space to talk about other points like a heavy focus on visual customization and destruction. It is possible to edit the title and description after launching.

What can't be changed is the campaign duration, the campaign URL (it is influenced by the first 50 characters of the title) and the minimum funding goal. Once a reward tier receives any backers you can no longer edit that individual reard tier beyond manipulating the limit on the number of available spots.

Some campaigns will launch with a simpler title to produce a simpler URL and then immediately edit to add more to the title after the campaign goes live. Your URL could appears as "projects/rotondo/the-forgettable-dungeon-online-co-op-action-dungeo" with the word dungeon partly cut off. Sometimes Kickstarter replaces the last two characters with "-1" or "-2" for reasons I do not know. It appears to happen more to rebooted projects. Some project creators have even gotten creative and made URLs like "not-potato-salad". A potential downside is some Kickstarter analytics tools only record the first title a project had when it launched.

The "Default", "NES" and "NES - No Bump" graphic is cool.

New animated GIFs were added since last time I looked. These are good.

Some project creators link to HD versions of the pitch video on YouTube. I don't think you need to. The voxel art style still looks good after Kickstarter's compression. Trying to upload different video codecs might not result in much better quality.

To avoid spambots you may want to have that contact e-mail address in an image format or replace the "@" symbol with something else.

It is possible to search Kickstarter projects by location. Boston has had multiple successful video game projects. It is an opportunity for shout-outs. It appears there is an indie meetup on the third Monday of each month.

The video games category is starting to thin out after the surge of September probjects. The Dwarves, Battle Chasers Nightwar and Allison Road ended. For The King is ending soon. BattleTech is likely to continue to hog the top rank in popularity. Two potentially strong campaigns that launched were Wanderer and Hello, Neighbor!. Home Free is still going well. It should be getting easier to compete, while also not too late in the year the the holidays start to make getting funded more difficult. There are currently 180 live campaigns in the category.

I see the IndieDB page has 70 watchers. A Blockland forum thread has over 136 pages. There are 517 Facebook page likes and 429 followers on Twitter. That is more engagement than I see a lot of small projects prepare in advance. This is good. If you can get at least 96 backers in the first week you should have a good chance of having good momentum for the Kickstarter trough period.

[Rotondo]

Thanks again for all your help!

Just launched the kickstarter page, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rotondo/forgettabledungeon




Feels good to finally launch it.

[LobsterSundew]

37 backers are currently pledging $1,108 (13.3% of the goal). If you can raise $1,387 more before Friday then your chance of success will be greater than your chance of failure.

The data for launch day looks good for your project. Details like the $12 tier having no backers is acceptable when the $9 early-bird is still available.

In a past post I mentioned you should be aiming for 320 backers at 100% funded. With the data from the launch it looks like between 287 to 332 backers should get you funded.

Kicktraq currently shows a trend to $15,500. It is possible to add tags like "roguelike" and "Linux" to the Kicktraq page using that green "+Suggest" button. It then takes time for a human to manually approve the tags. Eventually the Bitly Analytics page for the project will show data. This only includes traffic for the project shortlink. Eventually SideKick will calculate a success probability. I find it is often pessimistic.

The URL ended up as "projects/rotondo/forgettabledungeon".

Right now the campaign is in the phase where the project creator focusses on messaging bloggers, generating exposure through social media and responding to backers. Reaching milestones such as 30%, 50% and 100% are good excuses to make project updates. It is good to have the first project update be in the first 48 hours, even if it is just talking about progress so far.

Good luck over the next few days.

[Rotondo]

Thanks again for all the info LobsterSundew!


The first day is over!

In the first 24 hours we raised...




2972 dollars!


I think we have a good shot at making the goal, thanks to everyone who pledged or shared the link today it means a lot!

Edit: kickstarter link

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rotondo/forgettabledungeon

[Conker]

i want this

[Rotondo]

Day 6 and we're almost at 80%!



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rotondo/forgettabledungeon

Also the Mindcrack guys played the kickstarter demo and loved it!







Looks like I have a good chance of making the goal but I'm going to keep spreading the game around as much as I can.

[Mark Mayers]

(As I've said before) excited that your Kickstarter is doing well! Keep up the good work dude.