Ask HN: Our Kickstarter project is failing

What marketing have you done so far? For the kickstarter, not just the game.

And to answer the question, your weakness can be shown as a strength. Rally your team and do a big last minute pus: "This hidden gem of a game has only a week left! Help get it funded!"

For Kickstarter, it's all about getting PR. That's what you should spend all your energy on.

Hmm... here is some constructive criticism in the hopes that it helps. Please note that I am making a snap judgement but that is what a lot of people do to Kickstarters, so it is probably somewhat applicable even if it is harsh.

The graphics are lack luster in my opinion, at least the screenshots are not that attractive as compared to other pixel art I have seen. They are quite simple overall. Animation of the characters when moving is really not good, it is Atari console level graphics in a lot of ways.

The camera work & lighting in the pitch video is really poor. Some of it could have been said better as well. It was obviously recorded on web cams with no color correction and no punchy editing. I think that hurts a lot as well.

I had a quick look, and my first thought was man those screenshots look like they are from old video games. I get the difficulty of creating games that runs on a variety of platforms, and that it will take some time, but I doubt the average viewer, read the text past the screenshots. So my first advice is to photoshop or re-create some of your screens, with a disclaimer it was for illustration purposes.

Probably not imho, but as they say where I live, "Shy bairns get nowt!" I would say to me, it doesn't appeal visually, most of those similar projects I have seen succeed in their funding tend to put a lot of time and resources into making their kickstarter project look "wow!". Also I have read on various occasions that like making games, kickstarter is an evolving learning process, and you don't lose everything this time around by not getting a slice of the pie. Thankfully fresh pies seem to get baked everyday in our economic system. Once you learn to roll with the punches, and toughen up a bit (cause you ain't failing you're learning) I am sure I will have the delight of one day being entertained by one of your creations. Good luck (from a fellow homebrewer)

Your reward tiers are pretty good, but the video goes for a full minute utill you get to the actual game. Lots of talking heads doesn't make the user want the game!

Has anyone else written about the game yet? You want it covered in other places than just Kickstarter. Are your existing fans sharing/promoting it? Have you made it easy for fans to share content about the game outside of Kickstarter? If you don't have a group of people excited about the game already and willing to promote it, your project will probably not succeed. There's nothing wrong with pulling it and retooling.

I own gameskinny.com and we cover a lot of kick starters. I will just give you my opinion straight up. Based on your pledges you did not build a community ahead of your kick starter. You have 800 pounds or so which is 10% of your goal.

This kickstarter is done. That doesn't mean you can't have a successful one again. Build a community of like minded people. Get a forum, post some info on our forums, talk to people in RPG forums. Get 500 people who would fund you for 20$ so that when you launch the next kick starter at least 100 of them do.

I didn't watch the video, but I read the description. How much do you think you can accomplish in 3 months? 3 months, 3 people, 8000 pounds, that's hardly living money, never mind development costs, and any costs you have to pay for kickstarter for the physical rewards, etc. I wouldn't put my money out for some people who have no track record of delivery, and there's no plan for what will be delivered for the money, or what the end product will entail, what you intend on doing with the product afterwards.

Also, anyone who stumbles across the page sees a project that is nowhere near funding, and doomed for failure. If you can, get a lend of 4 or 5k, and get your family and friends to pump the money into the kickstarter. If it's close to funding you might get enough to clear the goal, and your money back from your loan.

Also, your goal deliveries are october (for early access?) yet your funding is for 3 months? what about the other 3/4 months in between times? What sort of money are you going to spend on marketing the game when it reaches the app store? All this information should be on the kickstarter page. You've also had no updates in the month, which would be disappointing to see if I was a backer.

Overall lack of professionalism is the problem. It looks like a highschool student project. Art (not just the game-art) is sub-par (sorry!). Next time you should involve someone who knows how to assemble a professional presentation. Knowing when to call in help is the best skill you can learn.

My advice would be to plan how you'll deliver the game anyway after not getting funded. Certainly it would be nice to have £8,000 in preorders, but it looks like you'll need to continue working on it in your own time until you finish. Many games are completed this way, and you can do it too.

Have any of you developed games in the past? If not, finishing this game on your own and releasing it will be a great learning experience for all you. Your game, to be blunt, looks like a student project (and it seems that two of you are in fact students.) I don't usually fund games on Kickstarter unless they're made by teams with clear track records or are very highly polished, and there's nothing that jumps out at me from the Kickstarter page as really differentiating your game from many others.

There is something to be learned from reasonable Kickstarter campaigns that successfully complete their funding. First, the video. I get the feeling that a lot of the successful video pitches are professionally produced, even though they're often made to look casual. And there's a lot of emphasis on the videos.

You guys put your main emphasis on making the text part informative - maybe too informative. I think it's no coincidence that many successful KS projects look like they're already finished. Maybe a lot of them are indeed already finished, but the rest are certainly faking it very elaborately. There's good business sense in doing that: Kickstarter has become somewhat of a pre-order platform, and people are used to ordering what they see, not what it might become after funding.

I don't mean to be overly critical towards crowd funding, but one of the big illusions "sold" by crowd funding platforms is that anyone can get their pet project funded. In reality a lot of the people (if not indeed most of them) you see doing well on Kickstarter are extremely well-connected on social media or otherwise well-known. Crowd funding is a way of leveraging that kind of clout. If you don't have that, it can be tough even getting your message in front of the right audience.

One does not simply walk into Kickstarter. Successful people put a lot of effort into looking like they are just casually letting the world know about their thing and, behold, great fame and money follows. But that's not what's actually happening behind the scenes. Crowd funding is not the big equalizer, it's just another way of leveraging marketing potential that already exists.

If you can't put a check mark on at least two of these three things I talked about (professional production, pre-existing audience, potential for runaway virality), chances are it's not going to work out.

So honestly, no I don't think you'll reach your funding goal. However, that doesn't mean it's a bad project. In fact, I would love following it over time to see what you're doing. If you feel strongly about the concept, consider doing it on the side or taking a few months off - this is the kind of project that looks like it could very well be implemented as a hobby. Use that development time to churn out videos and blog about your progress. Slowly build up that audience. By the time you're done, you'll already have customers and fans lined up.

Doesn't seem to me like the kind of project to fund via Kickstarter.

Get a demo working on other platforms and show it around. Run forums. And when there's some traction, think of the best way to fund it.

Something like this is not going to find enough of its potential target through a Kickstarter. Also, many potential customers may not be convinced with the idea if they cannot try it.

You may also want to reconsider your pricing structure. At approx $5 to get the full game I do wonder why I should bother doing the Kickstarter. You didn't mention the non-Kickstarter price so I'm going to assume it will be approx the same. So I could probably just wait until the game succeeds and pick it up for about the same cost - then I don't need to worry about the game's progress or whether it fails in development.

I would actually like more games like the old Start Flight and Star Control and whatnot. I don't think I'm willing to fund something with such ugly graphics, though. It's tough for me to even pick out the characters from the backgrounds. Maybe you should hire a graphics artist?

Is it legal to sell your iOS promo codes that way? I am sure that is against the terms of service, and to make matters worse those people won't be able to review the game in the App Store.

What have you done outside of kickstarter to promote the project?

I think that is key.

The kickstarter is just the hub of a marketing push.

Have you pointed anyone on any forums, social media or blogs to your kickstarter?

One crucial question is left unanswered: What do you need the money for? Why should I pledge now, if I could just wait with my purchase until it's finished?

Each campaign only runs for a limited time.

However, the kicker if you like, you can use as much time as you need to gather the audience before running it.

At this point I see no other solution but to gather all your parents then make them feel guilty.

Bake a cake, buy some bottles of cheap wine, hand written invitation cards, then throw them an investors party.

There must be a presentation screen with slides on it, a speech must be written about future careers and the parental influence therein.

It will be a hard sell but you wanted to learn about business.

The game just isn't very compelling. I've seen better graphics in Ludum Dare Compo games, and there's already other space exploration games out there (Starbound for instance).

Just focus on finishing the game, and then sell it. Maybe try Greenlight on Steam. It almost seems as though the game was an afterthought to your pitch and campaign...

I'm a long-time retro RPG gamer. After about a ~2 min glance at the page and skipping around the video, I couldn't find a compelling reason it's better than an average RPGMaker game. I'd look for successful pixel/retro kickstarters and try to emulate what they did.

I see a lot of people emphasizing on building a community and I agree that it helps a lot, but community alone might not be enough to get you the amount you would have preferred.

Below is an example of a flash based game with very simple graphics, which was successfully funded, mainly because of a decent sized community behind it. But, the developer still didn't get the amount he would have loved.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1554254835/learn-to-fly...

This is not really helpful, but I love the music sample! Sounds great.

I'm going to be cruel here.

I'm pretty sure you've got no hope of getting funded.

You're three guys barely out of school who are talking about your huge, sprawling vision, and all you have to back it up is a handful of samey-looking coder art. You've got a buggy abandoned year-old demo. You don't feel like people who can even begin to finish a small game, much less this big dream.

If you guys want to be a game dev team, then narrow your scope. Build a name for yourselves doing smaller games, learn something about promoting yourself. Build an audience. Or work on this in your spare time, and produce a compelling, polished first chapter of the story that gets people saying "wow! I want to know how it ends!" when they play it.

When you have fans who are willing to give you a few bucks for a good, finished game of limited scope, THEN you can consider a Kickstarter. Because a lot of what makes a Kickstarter work is ACTIVATING YOUR EXISTING AUDIENCE. Sure, you get people hearing about you and your work through KS, and you get your fans promoting your work because they want the KS to succeed - but if you don't have any existing fans who trust you to deliver on your promises, all you're going to get is sympathy pledges from rich relatives.

Also? Find someone for your team who is actually training to be an artist instead of letting the comp sci major who kinda likes to draw handle all the art duties. Or have that coder who kinda likes to draw go take some serious art classes. The existing art is high school notebook doodle level, those big crude head shots of your different races really screams "amateur" to me. (As do their names. Greens, Reds, Pinks? That's screaming that your world building is superficial. Your elevator pitch is "explore a vast and beautiful galaxy with rich stories at its heart"; what you're showing is neither beautiful nor a compelling narrative base.)

I applaud you dreaming big. But you are not ready for this yet. This campaign is the first failure of many you will encounter on your way to realizing this dream of making a Cool Sci-Fi Zelda; if you stay on this path you will fail many more times. Ideally you will learn something from every failure, and the next one will be an excitingly new kind of failure; eventually you'll run out of easy ways to fail and start finding some modest success. Good luck.

I mean this in the nicest way: I'd just like to point out that before Kickstarter, pretty much your only option would have been to scrounge up the money yourselves, invest it along with your sweat, blood, tears, and time into making the game, and then release it only to find out that it doesn't resonate with your target audience. With Kickstarter, you're able to discover up front if what you're making isn't what people actually want, and save yourself the wasted effort.

There's only one bit of tangible advice I have for you - and I haven't ever run a successful Kickstarter, so take it with a grain of salt. I've worked in games, and I know that they always take way more time and effort than you expect, even with aggressive cutting/scoping. Whenever I see a game Kickstarter with a target this low, my estimation of its failure probability (even if it's overfunded!) is around 80-90%. It tells me that the people involved don't really know what they're getting into. The lowest game Kickstarter I ever backed was Radio the Universe with a target of $12k (but ended up bringing in $80k), and I fully expected it to fail.

Your project looks like an amateur student game. I felt bad and didn't want to say so until I reached the "Who Are We" section where it turns out that yes, sure enough, y'all are amateur students.

If you shipped this as a complete project on your own without Kickstarter then it'd be a great portfolio piece. It would definitely help you land job interviews. It's just not something that people are going to give you money for on Kickstarter. The bar is quite high these days and your project does not meet it. I'm sorry.