Solo developer - First week after launch on Kickstarter

Hi everyone,  

If you don’t know us, let me present ourselves. We are Dragon Vein Studios, a Mexican Company, we recently launch a Kickstarter to complete a game based on the mechanics of MarioRPG, which you can check out here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dragonvein/another-crusade/  

You might be wondering how many people are in the project. We are 3, but I considered myself a solo developer, let me explain that further. I started this game alone and I friend of mine was giving me support, since he is a musician I invited him to make music for the game, but even if someone is your friend don’t expect them to work for free. Even if he had wanted to, just for the respect of his time, I pay him. The third member is a hired 3D artist. So what I meant by being a solo developer is that I started this out and I’m also putting my savings into this to it gets done. Why is this important? Well, I have met so many people who are in the same situation as me, solo developer with a dream to make their games. So if you happened to be in the position, I hope reading this can help you out a bit and understand how this works.  

I’m making this devlog for 2 main reasons, the first one being able to reach more people, as we are just in the line of a “good” campaign and we do not yet if we are reaching the goal or not. And second, is to share what we have come to understand in just a week of hard work during our campaign on kickstarter. So let just start with that.  

Before you start the campaign:  

Let me tell you something first, IT IS NOT EASY. You might have heard this before and say “Yeah, but my game is different”, and I kind of felt the same way before. My thoughts were, Ok, I think I’m doing a good game, it is fun, and it has a nice catch being based on the mechanics of MarioRPG. I might get people who liked that game to like mine. And yeah, people who have played the game like it, some became super fans right away, which makes me very happy. But there is just one thing… A lot of people don’t play the game. Why? Well that is the answer of the million dollars. I have seen the graphs here on itch.io where people come to the page, but don’t download the game.  

I made a lot of facebook ads, twitter posts, posts in reddit, and other ones. I have seen people commenting and liking the project, but that’s it. They might not go to the demo page, or the kickstarter page. Or they even might go to the Kickstarter, like it, but do not donate. Let tell you this straight, about 1% of the people that liked your game will donate. Yes, as sad as that sounds.  

I have spent the last week, working around 12-15 hours a day just trying to reach more people.  That’s what I meant when I was saying that it was not easy. So think about it, if you thought making the game was already hard, now, making people aware of your game is twice as hard. And here comes the comment again, since I’m a solo developer, I had made the entire game demo by myself (expect music) and then all this marketing also by myself, with 0 experience.  

One tip I can give you right away is having someone that knows its way around marketing, so you can just continue focusing on the game. And I know what you are thinking, that you might not have budget to it. I know, I’m on the same boat.  With that, comes the next part. The monopoly of companies running the kickstarter campaigns.  

After the first 3 days, I came across multiple companies that work only on making kickstarter campaigns successful, be AWARE because NOT ALL OF THEM ARE TRUSTY. Just as you start the kickstarter, some companies will send you an invitation for a “low” fee to contact backers and make your campaign a super miracle. Just don’t. Don’t fell in that trap. If you want to hire somebody, search of them, and their reviews. You will find right away that most of them are frauds.  

What I recommend to do, which I didn’t do because I did not know, was to contact trusty companies before the kickstarter, and by before I mean like 2 months before. So they can see if you are worthy of their services. They will help you run all the marketing for a % of the funds gotten. I truly regret myself for not looking into this earlier. Think about it, 60% of something is better than 100% of nothing.  

The next tip I can give you is to create a fan base before launching the kickstarter. Again, here I failed to make that, let me tell you what I did. I started making Facebook posts and paying some ads, so in a week, I created a page from 0 to 1500 followers. That is not an issue at all, but as I said earlier, only 1% of them will actually pledge. I got a bit lucky and got like 20 pledge from that, of course, the lowest tier of pledges.  

Now that I’m on the middle of the campaign, I’m desperately looking for more fan base. If I have started uploading screenshots or videos of the game while I was developing, maybe I could have gathered a trustier fan page. So if you are developing right now, go ahead and start building that.  

For a conclusion, let me repeat this, our game is good, we do have a lot of great feedback who had tried it out. And even with that, we have had a very harsh time during the campaign. Don’t do the same mistake that I did. Build a fan base, prepare for marketing. You kickstarter is not going to explode just because, there is no luck here.

During the campaign:

Prepare to be working a lot, day and night, reaching more people, answering comments, creating media content. And remember to always be positive.  

Here is what I’ve been doing this past days. First, create posts daily on facebook, twitter and linkedIn. Not so daily to avoid spam, but posting on reddit and unity groups.  

Second, engage with your followers. Answer all that you can, always in a positive mood. I’m from Mexico and apparently we have a horrible mentality towards some of our own country to be doing something that others don’t. I have received comments such as “You have to do the game theme only from your culture” or just hate like “This looks stupid”. And yeah, be prepared for that. The first time that I got a hate chain I was a little let down, to see that kind of hate, I even question myself, is it worth doing this? Are people even going to like what I’m doing?  

The day after I found my answer by a comment of one guy who said “This is just so awesome, I want to play it right now”. I can’t describe how good it felt to read that comment. Then I just got to the conclusion that hate is everywhere, and that’s just how it is. Your game won’t be like by everyone. Some people will only try to drag you down. Don’t bother with them, focus only on the positive comments, comments that will inspire to go on. As my father used to say “If it was easy, everybody will just do it”, and yeah, you developer and I, are making the struggle to find the way to our dream. Not much people do that. And not much people will be successful, but it is worth trying.   Also, if you see negative comments, you can do 2 things, ignore them, or answer them pretty positive, invite them to play your game, if they refuse, then just start ignoring them. Don't waste your energies on that kind of people.

Finally, my last tip during the campaign is to take a rest when you can. As I said earlier you will find yourself all day in front of the computer just posting, answering, creating media; days will just pass in a blink of an eye. So if you can, set work hours and give it a rest. Let me warn you, if you are as devoted as I am, you will not find sleep easily. I find myself a lot of nights just rolling in the bed, thinking of what I should do to reach more people. That’s why I say, if you can rest, do it.  

After the campaign… Well I cannot say much as I haven’t finish mine. But I hope it reaches a happy ending. I will surely come back to write more when this happens. But probably the right thing to do is a postmortem to check what went wrong and what went good in other to apply it to other projects.

I’m willing to write about the creation of the game itself if someone is interested. I hope this experience avoid you making the same mistakes that I did. And if you want to share your project, tell me, I will gladly play the demo.  

That’s it for now, thank you for your time reading this.

Regards,

Mike Garcia

CEO of Dragon Vein Studios