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[yodalr]

As our campaign is ending I wanted to write about our experience, it can be read here:
http://ljis17.com/when_indie_dream_turns_into_indie_reality_aka_our_kickstarter_disaster.php

Comments and discussions are welcome.

[joseph ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

I don't see any mention of the quality of the game/demo itself presented in that postmortem.

Have you considered ways perhaps your actual game, in its early state, failed to capture the zeitgeist or imagination? I clicked to your media page, saw it was a top down something or other kind of space game, and left -- I imagine I'd have done the same on your kickstarter.

[Cobralad]

Demo didnt worked, but screenshots and video look rather bland.
It certainly lacks any sort of personality. There are other games that look exactly like that but have more charm in them.
News sites probably ignored you because they tend to get hundreds of emails like that in a day and only best get some mention.

[Udderdude]

Yeah, honestly the graphics and gameplay are both too generic to really stand out in a very crowded field.

I think I tested this out when you posted it somewhere else on here, too ..

[ThemsAllTook]

Some thoughts: To me, a big part of being indie is community participation. The developers I respect the most are ones who have interests beyond their own games and actually talk about them. Googling for yodalr, I find very little personal stuff, just lots of posts in various places about your game and nothing else. Looking at the Twitter account linked from the article, it's all business and nothing personal; the only reason I'd follow it is if I was already knew about the project and wanted to be kept up to date on it.

I'm more likely to take interest in your project and campaign if I can consider you a friend, rather than a stranger - with the online presence presented here, I don't really see an opportunity to get to know you, only to get to know your project. If you can give me a way to get to know you, and a reason to follow you other than being interested in this one game, then you've bent my ear and I'm more likely to want to know what you're working on. Be human, have opinions, talk about stuff.

[fenryo]

Yeah I know what kind of feeling you have. It seems like "crowdfunding has changed, whenthe backers are under control, funding becomes routine... only for the bigger ones or the lucky ones"

[Superb Joe]

damn, cant believe that 60+ disparate communities didnt give you money when you barged in and immediately panhandled without any kind of basic courtesy or pretense. what a crazy world we live in

[Dragonmaw]

damn, cant believe that 60+ disparate communities didnt give you money when you barged in and immediately panhandled without any kind of basic courtesy or pretense. what a crazy world we live in

[galdon]

Yeah, spamming a bunch of forums is bound to get you banned from a lot of them. Community forums exist for discussion, not for free advertisement. views don't always translate into money, you need to make people like you.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i'm actually kind of surprised it got as high as it did ($1200) considering the lack of production values in the trailer. i think that's the biggest thing; for a game to do well on kickstarter you either need to be a big name / well known, or you need to have really good graphics. your graphics were like the kind of stuff you'd see on a game maker freeware game of the day thing. it's not, like, repulsive, but it's bland, like corn flakes or store-brand vanilla ice cream

[DarkSiegmeyer]

The issue with the graphics is certainly valid, but I'm not even sure if that was the problem.  I also don't think that your project is unsalvageable.  It just needs to cook in the oven a little bit more.

Take a look at the launch trailer for Assault Android Cactus, or the Kickstarter trailer for Radio the Universe.  Both of those are punchy, convey action, artistic value, and tone very quickly.  Both trailers are barely over a minute long.  Radio the Universe has probably 45 seconds or less of gameplay. 

The gameplay that it DOES show really captures the imagination.

Think about the ultimate structure of your game.  Is it mission based? Story based?  Try to play that up in your next trailer.

Think about what's unique and/or fun about your combat.  Go back to your explosions, your screen-shake, your abilities, and make sure everything jumps and jiggles just the right way to be pleasing.  Take video footage of what's fun about it, and create a trailer from that.

Your Kickstarter trailer listed off very, very basic things that simply are expected from a functional game.  There's a Cracked.com article that eloquently puts it "This is like advertising a movie with 'This movie is in English, and the Actors are clearly visible.'" 

Don't give up hope.  I know you're discouraged, but take your project back to the oven and I'm confident that you can retool it to something that will blow people's socks off in about 6 months of cooking time.

[Pineapple]

Who put together the kickstarter video? They did a bad job.

You are not marketing your game to developers. The average backer will have no understanding of what a particle system is. (The ones who do will not find it impressive.) Your Kickstarter video is a chance to grab my attention, and to make me want to hand you money. You waste it telling me you've implemented a shield?

You should have played up the comics more because that shit is cool. Starting with a nearly-empty screen was stupid. There should have been little to no gameplay footage that wasn't showing battles happening, or at least building. Backers won't give a shit about how you made your character portraits, or the particulars of your ship movement. They're subject to change, anyway. Show them fighting, show them big battles, give them glimpses of technical feats rather than shoving them inelegantly into viewer's faces.

You could have invested in a halfway-decent video camera (or, hell, borrowed one) and recorded you and other people working on the project talking about the demo and your circumstances instead of the bland text on a black background.

Bullet time is a stretch goal? Provided you don't have ten thousand instances of "updateposition" to adapt to use a delta-time, that should take you all of two minutes to implement.

Your game looks fun and I'm sure you worked hard on it, but your presentation is lacklustre while you're competing with all the other projects for backers. I'm confident that if only you'd done better with the trailer you would have hit your goal, if not at least gotten closer to it.

Your Kickstarter trailer listed off very, very basic things that simply are expected from a functional game.  There's a Cracked.com article that eloquently puts it "This is like advertising a movie with 'This movie is in English, and the Actors are clearly visible.'" 

Don't give up hope.  I know you're discouraged, but take your project back to the oven and I'm confident that you can retool it to something that will blow people's socks off in about 6 months of cooking time.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

those are good observations. the thing is, there's like a thousand and one things that scream 'amateur' about that kickstarter, and they all add up. it's not any one thing, it's just so many many things that all need to be fixed