Hey Folks,
This post was originally entitled “Getting Prepared for KS” however, in all that preparation I just haven’t found the time to write a blog entry. Until now!
So now that our Kickstarter campaign is live I’ve returned to finish we’re I began and take a look at some of the things we looked at during our prep.
From the start we knew that we had a lot of work ahead before we were ready to launch. One of the key areas we identified was building up our community and generating some early interest during development.
Social butterflies
Twitter was our main focus as during our early research we noticed a coloration between referral and success rates.
In the past we haven’t fully embraced the social aspect and this time we made a concerted effort to start talking to gamers and fellow indie game developers so see what they we’re doing and to see if anyone wanted to know what we we’re doing!
It’s actually been great, chatting and meeting other indie developer and seeing their projects. There is an incredibly vibrant dev community out there tweeting away and for those who I’ve chatted to…HIGH-FIVE, you know who you are!
Obviously we setup pages for the game on Facebook and Google + to engage our existing followers.
Forums were also a necessity and they are now up and running, so we have a place where our community can come, gather and have a good old natter and we can keep you up to date better.
We also looked at a number of crowdfunding themed forums to read up on what others had done and what had been successful. Crowd Crux and KickstarterForum.org we’re particularly helpful, Salvador Briggman runs a tight ship over there!
Campaign Preparation – Research & Creation
We created a devlog for the game which was separate to our main studio website. We felt the game really deserved its own space and identity and the devlog would be somewhere we can communicate through not only the Kickstarter camping but throughout development.
Video
The video was something we spent a long time umming and arring over. During our research we came to these conclusions:
- Actually create a video! Kickstarter states, projects with videos succeed at a much higher rate than those without (50% vs. 30%).
- Keep it relatively short and to the point 2-4 mins
- It seemed that there we’re mixed views on whether to feature the team or not. In the end we decided to go for pure gameplay and atmosphere but we may return to this depending on how well it goes!
Artwork
We wanted to prepare as much artwork as we could and what we have we took form in game. We felt a responsibility to our backers to show genuine work.
Pledges
We mostly wanted to think about things possible fans of the game would like to see but we learned from other campaign not to fall into offer too many physical goods.
We really wanted to create quality rewards for the supports.
More on this at another time.
Steam Greenlight
I’m writing this only 36 hours into our greenlight submission and we’ve had a great response so far.
In fact we were 33% of the way to the top 100 on Steam Greenlight after 36 hours!
Which really was incredible and took us a back a little, really awesome support and we thank you if you voted!
What now
Well I think that’s probably enough for one post! We’ll be back with an update shortly and we’ll keep you updated on the campaign and development!
Thanks for reading, your support and remember to support our Kickstarter
Bye for now!
I'm not sure I like what I see and you can thank all those """developers""" pushing out tons of YouTube-Fodder for that.
I find it hard to tell whether this game is a genuine horror game or just YouTube-Fodder.
First person horror game for Steam made in Unity? This sets off my alarms right there.
Then I see the screenshots and the video and must admit that it doesn't look bad. However, neither did Daylight and how did it turn out? Basically-just-Slender™.
The description says that this game is focusing on storytelling, which is always nice.
All in all I won't support this game just now. I'll keep an eye on it, but right now I'm just not sold on it.
My tip would be to give this IndieDB page some more love. Post news about specific stuff. You mentioned a "cataclysmic event". What happened? You could post an article about the story so we know that when you said "The game’s foundation lies in its strong story[...]", you weren't just talking. What about another article dedicated to showing us some gameplay mechanics?
An article about the story here, another one about the mechanics (with a video showcasing them) there and BAM! You'll have a solid foundation for getting more people interested.
Great info, thanks guys. We're gearing up for a second attempt at KS and our first Greenlight. We're in Concepts and it was well received in there. Steamcommunity.com but we'll see. I too will have butterflys!