BackerClub Forums

Over the last half of 2014 I've been slowly assembling a free Kickstarter guide for the /r/gamedev subreddit. Below is a link for BackerClub's community to see a sneak-peak of the in-progress draft.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/900 ... pha132.pdf

What I am aiming for is not a beginner's guide, but a more intermediate to advanced guide about Kickstarter. This guide is in an incomplete state. I would describe it as a bit over 60% done for content. I am still adding notes from a big stack of papers under my desk. Right now a lot of effort is just organizing the information before I shift more focus towards proofreading, adding graphics and formatting. Sections with non-indented paragraphs are older and will be seeing a lot more attention in the future. By focussing just on the video games category I can be a lot less generic with the advice for indie game developer. If I tried to cover every Kickstarter category the scope would balloon even larger.

Even in my guide's incomplete state it may already be useful to some of the project creators here. The most frequent backers on Kickstarter are also some of the most experienced, so BackerClub's forum may produce some interesting feedback. I want to include multiple perspectives on some issues beyond the project creator side's of a campaign, such as the views of bloggers and backers. For those that came to BackerClub to discuss Kickstarter strategies and tactics with other frequent backers this is a good thread to do it.

I've downloaded it - well sent to my kindle to read & add notes. After I read I'll check back and add my comments. I may have questions also. Wow 200 pages. That should keep me busy this weekend.

Here is a newer version of the draft:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/900 ... pha136.pdf

I've started to add more about pricing strategies and more notes for how to simulate a campaign. The section about hiring PR firms has been expanded a bit.

Many times Kickstarter advisors warn against too many reward tiers, but it can also be a problem when a campaign has too few reward tiers. I've started to use the phrase "Leaving money on the table" that is a phrase used in the construction industry for bidding to do a job for far less than the client was expecting to pay. I use it to help explain how significant drop offs in the tally of backers from one medium priced reward to the next reward tier can result in funds that a campaign failed to tap into. This idea can also be applied to the highest priced reward tiers. If a backer was willing to pledge $500 but the rewards only span up to $200, then that backer may settle for just the $200 tier because there was no higher reward tier to contain that pledge.

I need to work on building up the explanation for how a time-limited early-bird reward tier works and the problems it both creates and solves. After that, I'll be able to explain the new tactic of a milestone-limited early-bird reward. Normal early-bird tiers have a limited number of slots. Time-limited early-bird tiers have thousands of slots, but the project creator manually sets the number of open slots to zero after a specific time-limit is reached such as the end of the first 48 hours. A milestone-limited early-bird has the number of slots closed when a milestone like 30% or 100% funded is achieved.

Whoa, 200, just on video games, I'm just skimming through but will dive into it later, it's pretty comprehensive, lotsa examples LOTS of examples. I really enjoyed reading the "which month to release section" and yes it's true too many attempts have been made on horror on Halloween (so true hahaha).

I started reading the original version. For some reason kindle wouldn't let me make notes. This weekend I was at Arisia (SFF convention) and now I'm visiting with family & friends. I'll grab the newer version and give it another try. Lots of good info most of the notes I tried to add were add-on info to what you have.

Latest draft:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/900 ... pha156.pdf

Many small additions littered around the latest version. The marketing section is starting to get more attention.

In October there can be greater demand for horror game because of the build up towards Halloween. There can also be a lot of bad rushed horror game projects in October trying to grab some funding because it can be relatively easy to slap together a first-person game where the player is just a camera with no body and have the player walking around in a dark location using bought assets from the Unity3D store. Those rushed horror games do appear all around the year. There are a few active right now.

Here is a new draft:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/900 ... pha167.pdf

The page count jumped from 230 to 243 since the last draft I linked to. I've been distracted with helping on two campaigns this February.

I've been jump around the sections a lot. Most of the concentrated progress has been in the marketing section about crafting e-mails and when to send them to bloggers.

Good to see your still around. I've missed your comments and insight.

This is a really comprehensive guide. Although, I'd recommend making it more concise as to not overwhelm anyone who is going to do their campaign. As someone invested in Kickstarter, it's nice to see so much detail, but even I had to drag my feet a bit to make it past page 50. Otherwise, it looks great.

Here is the latest draft. I haven't touched it since March 7th.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/900 ... pha215.pdf

Pre-launch preparations for two projects meant almost no progress with my guide in March. I have made progress with gaining insights. I reformatted and re-installed my main computer in late February. I've been reworking my spreadsheet templates. I needed them to be both backwards compatibly with data collected from 2013 but also monitor changes in percentages at specific reward tiers more elegantly. I'm starting to look at differences in project timing more and more.

Somewhere I had a half-written post about making the draft more concise, but it is in one of the backup flashdrives I have't reloaded since the reformat.

It has always been a battle to get the scope right. I've been crunching down paragraph after paragraph. Some paragraphs are over a year old without being touched. Some are directly copied and pasted from a discarded draft from mid 2013. Many sections are being changed to use lists when possible. I'm currently rearranging the sections to reduce spreading material apart. An example was that there were two sections about pitch videos. I want to merge them into a single one.

The performance analysis section is judged to be the most important. It is material others don't have and is able to help start the salvaging process for a project's run, so it is now going near the start. Marketing is closely followed in importance, so it too is appearing earlier in the guide. Performance analysis and marketing are the minimum scope. I do want to get into reward tier tactics because that too will be new material for most project creators that they won't find in other guides that may end up saving the campaign. It is very obvious to me how some projects are failing primarily because the rewards are structured poorly.

I am modeling the guide after filmschool textbooks like those of Jon Reiss and other's I've acquired over the years. These books can get very large in scope. Each section will be self-contained almost like an essay or blog article after the reader has progress through the concepts section. The table of contents is used like a troubleshooting guide to navigate to the problem. Why do it this way? It actually makes it a faster resource to use because most of it can be skipped and most importantly it can provide very small specific tips that could actually avoid a disaster. Such texts are intended to be returned to again and again for reference when different problems arise, rather than be memorized with a full read-through.

I had the career path of a cellular biologist, so I have a bias towards needing to shove a lot of examples into a page to convey my point. The target audience is generally people with college-level programming knowledge, so I haven't been planning to reduce the amount of math, since many video game project creators are programmers looking to hire freelance artists.

The fulfillment section of the guide was always the worrying one due to scope, so it has remained the most incomplete. I had planned to have individual sections for the common items like t-shirts. It would go into survey setup, sourcing, common problems, pros/cons, well known providers, etc. to do a lot of the work for the reader. The stack of notes for that is intimidating. The guide may end up 700 pages if I do that. A future version of the guide may have to have this content added as an appendix later. Having information like that ready to go can save a project creator more time than it should take to read the guide.

A personal goal is I want to reach the beta version of the guide (Feature complete, but not fully edited) by June so that it can be ready to help projects in September 2015. I am going to have to slow down helping on campaigns besides a few reboots to free up time to get back to work on the guide. A lot of it is still on loose-leaf paper in a box under my desk. It is a problem that I'm generating notes faster than I can process them.