Got a "Kickstarter" going!

[Blxz]

Bugger, I check this forum like twice a day. And the one week where I go on holiday you have a limited time offer for special forums icons.... Nothing else really worth buying now.

EDIT: Despite that I read through your writing. Its as smooth and charming now as it was the first time. plus I like the practical breakdown of where the money will be spent. I may well spend some effort into looking how to fund this a bit more. I still really want a forum icon though. =(

EDIT2: Whats an AUDO engine? I tried googling it but came up with nothing. Perhaps you meant audio? Considering you already use OGRE as the game engine. But then again I could be wrong.

[methodology]

If you gentlemen read the fine print on the page it says a purchase of 10$ is enough to get the game so you can in effect just select donate without perk and put 10$ down.

VehoNex, I read that, but the problem is most people won't or might be confused. And since this is mostly modeled after kickstarter, if people come to this site they'll expect it to work roughly the same way as the other successful kickstarted game. IE lowest tier is usually the game at no frills and that's shown on the side as usually the first pledge. But here the first tier is donation only, the second tier is sold out at $10 and then only the $25 tier is available. That's what it'll look like to someone coming in. I'm just saying he should probably specify another tier on the rewards sidebar so people know immediately that it's viable and not "sold-out". Basically just cut out any confusion on this. Hopefully they'll let you update it.

[OmegaX123]

Will people who bought the game before IndieGoGo get the special title, or is it just a special thing for them? Because the $10 IndieGoGo donators get everything I and other early-adopters got, plus the title.

[Blxz]

Will people who bought the game before IndieGoGo get the special title, or is it just a special thing for them? Because the $10 IndieGoGo donators get everything I and other early-adopters got, plus the title.

Reminds me of another similar situation somewhere on Kickstarter. Some guys paid like $40 or $50 to get late alpha/early beta access and then the same game came on desura at like $15 at the same time they got their access. Can't remember the game but it is a kinda funny situation.

Somehow I doubt Chris is likely to give all the early, pre-existing members a special icon or anything. Still, I'd appreciate something to show I was a fairly early supporter. I like how the paradox forums have the little badges for all the games you register. Something similar could easily work here for some fun.

[toaster Assassin]

My vote for a tiny bees shaped icon to the right of the user avatar. Yay or nay?

[lkenage]

A note on getting news of your Kickstarter out there:

You probably want people to spread word, so hitting up gaming sites and forums would be a good start. I've started a threat on Reddit's /r/gaming -- lots of indie games have seen considerable funding come from Reddit. I think it'd be a good chance to get a lot of exposure, after all, that's how I first heard of Kenshi.

I've posted news of the Kickstarter here, I just hope that it'll get enough interest to get big:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... based_rpg/


Suggestions
One of the biggest things that I want to see MORE of in your Kickstarter campaign is pictures. You NEED to have lots of pictures, people want to see what they're putting their money into. You only have seven pictures. You need more pictures: pictures of combat, of the inventory screens, and of planned content. I noticed in your video that you included some of the future content, such as building structures and large scale fights -- I really want to see that content reflected in the game screenshots as well.
NOTE: I noticed that Vurt included some excellent screenshots of the game on this thread. I think including those screenshots would be awesome.


Up until now, only one gameplay video of Kenshi is up. While it's a good video, it simply doesn't show enough of the current/planned content for Kenshi. Something that would REALLY sell the game to me is showing planned features -- cutting off limbs, and perhaps replacing them. Defensive structures, as well as some of the other planned features. It doesn't even have to be gameplay, it could simply be a video of yourself talking about what you want Kenshi to evolve in.




Example Kickstarter Campaign
An especially successful example of a Kickstarter campaign can be seen here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cra ... /grim-dawn

The developer of this game had an excellent kickstarter, partly because he gave people a face to associate with the development of the game. Also, because he had a TON of gameplay videos, and A LOT of pretty pictures. Also, the developer had a lot of specific plans for the future and outlined how he planned to allocate his cash. In short, the developer of the game already had a lot of gameplay content that he could present. That, and his corny video did a good job at showing his sincerity.

Grim Dawn's kickstarter was successful because they pointed out that development of their game is going to be heavily influenced by the community, something that I would really like to see in Kenshi. At the moment, current development seems to be undergoing a kind of "black box" phenomenon. New features are being released, and I don't really know if community ideas and feedback are making a large impact in the production of the game. By telling potential investors that they can influence the development of Kenshi by throwing around ideas, it would attract a lot of interest. Personally, I feel that there were a lot of excellent ideas being thrown around, but I haven't really seen any of those ideas being addressed. If you look in the gameplay section of the forum, you can see a ton of interesting ideas. Not all of them may be viable, but some are worth considering.

A few of the especially interesting ideas are:
- Suggestions on expanding the medic skill: Defibrillator & Checking pulse
- Cloning (Definitely needs balancing, but an interesting idea)
- Dual Wielding
- Medical Research
- Bounties


Another note, I think that more constant updates on progress in Kenshi would be a plus, especially during the duration of your kickstarter campaign and for a while after it. One thing that people want to see is how the new money is being used in the game; I imagine that an update once a week, minimum, would be excellent.





Anyways, good luck on your kickstarter! You've got a really good idea, I hope you get the proper funding!

[toaster Assassin]

First and foremost, great job on spreading the word!

The Kenshi project is under development by just Chris and any contractor that he can afford to do some work.(One example of contracted work is the foliage in the game) So an update a week minimum may be too much, this is unless he takes the next update features and spreads them into several updates.

Ikenage said:By telling potential investors that they can influence the development of Kenshi by throwing around ideas, it would attract a lot of interest.

If you look at this page http://www.lofigames.com/index.php?opti ... &Itemid=55 under you don't believe me
you will see that Chris does not want the project to be controlled by investors and shareholders. Unless by investors you mean the fans, still one would have to be careful not to allow a big investor to demand ideas.

You are right about using media to increase funding, currently there is but the bare framework, but in the next few updates there should be allot of interesting implementations that would definitely help by being displayed in media.

This all boils down to Chris being the only man on the project,making videos and doing weekly updates (All the coding) and responding to forum texts is allot of work. Chris seems to be doing a decent job balancing it, and balancing it is key.

The Ideas you listed can do allot of good for the game, but until we know as to how far the tech will be the cloning and defibrillators may be too much or just right.

Thanks Ikenage for mentioning Grim dawn, I may have found my next LAN game.

[Captain Deathbeard]

Thanks for the advice, and if anyone could upvote that reddit it would be good. I might start one in the indie section too.

Just to be clear, I read every almost post in these forums and always consider the ideas. I find though that most ideas either A) usually I'm already planning it B) Its a luxury feature I won't have time to do or C) It will not work well in the gameplay

[Arutha]

Ikenage is right, we really need more Media

I mean say something and i`m sure we give you hundreds of sexy screens to upload ^^
( 7 are linked here)
And also there are cool Videos out of there like the environment test scenes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hR0kl16ihNE or this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iBU-5C1 ... ature=plcp

maybe we should ask the guy if he could make a new sexy indiegogo trailer for us he seems to be really good ^^

And jeah maybe just made an update to say that you have uploaded new media Stuff just because i have seen that a couple of indie sites reported about kenshi started crowdfunding and maybe if you made updates there, they will be updates on the progress on other sites like http://indiegames.com/2012/05/kenshi_se ... indie.html

[lkenage]

Thanks for the response so far guys, I'm glad you agreed.

This all boils down to Chris being the only man on the project,making videos and doing weekly updates (All the coding) and responding to forum texts is allot of work. Chris seems to be doing a decent job balancing it, and balancing it is key.

Regarding this point, Chris doesn't have to develop all this by himself. There is already quite a lot of pictures and videos made by fans for Kenshi, its fully possible for Chris to ask for permission to use this content. I'm sure that the majority of owners would be happy to allow it.

Just to be clear, I read every almost post in these forums and always consider the ideas. I find though that most ideas either A) usually I'm already planning it B) Its a luxury feature I won't have time to do or C) It will not work well in the gameplay

About this point, I think it would be really helpful if you, Chris_The_Great, replied to ideas. Maybe you could tell people that it's a planned feature, or if it's impractical, why it is so. A lot of ideas can develop into wonderful things with proper guidance. Even if it's a luxury feature that you can't complete, if we manage to compile a list of future features and a list of features that could be really cool, modders might be able to eventually implement some things. I know that Minecraft has had a TON of mod support, and team Bukkit was lately signed into Majong. Kenshi already has an excellent set of modding tools, I just think that setting up a system of ideas that can support a large modding community in the future would be great.


Anyways, I'm just going to be waiting to see how everything unfolds -- Kenshi's got a ton of potential, and I've been following it for a while. I just hope to see it gets the support it needs.

[Prezo]

I second Ikenage here, I think it'd be great if you could spare a few minutes every so often to drop a response just so we know you are listening and your judgement on if its A) B) or C).

We literally have no information on the game other than what you have told us, all we can do is speculate and if I dare say so, at the moment your best resource is this community, I know that many of us would give anything we can to make this game as good as it can possibly be, you can probably see that just from the Indie Go-Go it's been up for about a week and you already have over $1k pledged (that may not seem like all that much but the community is only so large)

Personally while I don't have any skills at a grade where I could actually assist (I'm studying Software Engineering, and programming needs a lot more base knowledge) I have friends who do 3d and 2d art and would be happy to donate some resources, I'm sure we're not the only ones who would gladly donate anything we could to help.

Modders have been known to do huge products for no cost, I don't see why you can't harness that.

Sorry if that came across as a bit of a rant, I just want to see this game be all that it can be.

[ArcaneSaint]

This is great! Though to be honest, a lot of the higher-tier rewards feel a bit hollow seeing as they can all be accomplished via the construction set for no extra cost at all. But I understand your decision for not wanting to make extra costs to produce physical merchandise, those prices can get out of hand real quick.

A great way to get extra attention to your [s]kickstarter[/s]indiegogo campaign would be a feature on RPS, I know they ran an article on Kenshi before, sometime last year around September I believe. They regularly do articles on promising/interesting Kickstarters, and I suppose indiegogo is similar enough to get similar treatment.


Also, when previewing, I notice we still don't have [strikethrough] tags.

[GimmeCat]

I sent a mail to one of the RockPaperShotgun authors who posted about Kenshi in the past. With any luck, they'll feature a short article about this. Here's hoping!

[toaster Assassin]

Little bees-shaped forum icons (For the win).

I still believe in the check-point donation idea. If Kenshi funding makes it to at least this level, then will can/will add X as a feature.(X could equal something like adding hidden jokes to the game (like fallout 2's Monty python spoof or adding the ability to make your character do stupid things)

I would pay money to enable the consumption of rum for my team.

You could make a poll to see what should be added as virtual prizes/features/stuff (all would be game-related and not a physical item).

[aattss]

You do realize that, at this rate of unactivity, this fundraiser will end up on page 2, right? Do you see how much money the average fundraiser not on page 1 fundraises?

[Penthus]

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/foru ... blic-Build

You could always do something like what the Xenonuats developers done. They are based in the UK and managed to create a kickstarter project by making a US bank account and registering a business I believe. The information is in the link at the top or you could contact them and I am sure they would gladly point you in the right direction.

I think the increased revenue from using kickstarter instead of IGG would be worth the effort of setting up a US account/business.

[UltimaVirus]

http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/foru ... blic-Build

You could always do something like what the Xenonuats developers done. They are based in the UK and managed to create a kickstarter project by making a US bank account and registering a business I believe. The information is in the link at the top or you could contact them and I am sure they would gladly point you in the right direction.

I think the increased revenue from using kickstarter instead of IGG would be worth the effort of setting up a US account/business.

I was going to suggest something similar. All you need to do is put your foot in the door and get someone to basically act as a Public Relations "Co-Owner" (with 0% ownership) to basically just post it on the site. Once you're in, you get full control and the co-owner is never heard from again.

Or just do exactly what Xenonauts did.

[Captain Deathbeard]

Damn! Wish I knew this 2 weeks ago! What do you think the implications would be if I did both? Do you think people would get mad that I ran a 2nd crowdfunding campaign? I'd offer the exact same tiers, it would just be to reach an extra audience.

[aattss]

I'd say, run the kickstarter on Kickstarter depending on whether or not the Indiegogo campaign doesn't work, first.

[1337]

Don't see why you shouldn't... as long as the prices stay the same there shouldn't be anything bad about it imo (i said imo).