When one suffers do all suffer?

This week more troubling news came out of the Kickstarter community as Mike Nystul from Axes and Anvils and Cairn announced that he had “screwed up” and was “out of money.”  This has, of course, stirred up the backers of those projects, as well as observers in the Kickstarter community.  Yet beyond these two small groups (less than 1000 people backed the two projects) has this caused any ripples into the larger Kickstarter community?  Doing a quick Google search I found only about 15 articles about these two projects failing.  Between them they raised only $50,000 so maybe the money is too low? Then again when Haunts: The Manse Macabre fell on hard times the internet was abuzz about “Fully Funded Kickstarter Game Goes Belly Up.”   A similar Google search pulled up over 100 articles before the search started pulling up unrelated information.  So why the disparity?  

Was it the money involved?  As I said Cairn and A&A raised over $50,000 collectively yet Haunts raised only half that with $28,000.  From a money point of view this latest story would seem to be raising the stakes.  Could it be that there are more people involved?  Haunts had over 1200 backers while Cairn//A&A had just under 1000 so does a few hundred more people equal ten times the coverage?  Probably not.  

The simplest answer is that video games are more visible to the public at large and even the larger Kickstarter community.  Cairn/A&A are actually break-out successes in their fields raising thousands more than their original goals while Haunts barely squeaked by.  Yet at their core Cairn and A&A are just very small niche projects in the smaller community of pen and paper role playing.  Haunts is very much a niche video game, but by the mere fact that it is a video game it allowed writers to try and extrapolate the problems of one project to the whole of Kickstarter.  

The community has been weighing in on the Cairn/A&A issue all week.  Zach of Lesser Gnome Games has openly worried about the future of his own role playing Kickstarter thanks to these issues.  He worries that some of the cache that Kickstarter has built up in the community is lost by this development.  Fred Hicks from Evil Hat Productions weighed in saying, “This is perhaps an illustration that you can't just dive into Kickstarter without having a real business plan -- and at times a real, pre-existing, successful business -- to handle all the maybes.”  He also brought up a comment from the Kickstarter Best Practices Facebook group saying, “Kickstarter is not a Credit card.”  All of these are good comments and bring to my mind the overarching issue: businesses fail.

As much as Kickstarter states and emphasises that Kickstarter projects are not for starting a business, a project very easily becomes a business especially in the gaming sections of the site.  As most entrepreneurs and business followers will tell you lots of startups fail, at least half of them will never make it to year five.  

Source: Created from data from Longitudinal Business Database 1977-2010, Census; Business Employment Dynamics 1994-2010, Bureau of Labor Statistics

In the end it sucks that these projects are failing.  Just as much as it sucks when a local restaurant fails, but does that mean all restaurants are failing?  Most likely no.  So I suggest all Kickstarter creators take this event as another example of what not to do and plan for it accordingly!  Make a business plan, prepare, seek outside help and consult those who have gone down this road before.  There are plenty of ways to succeed, but there are far more ways to fail and the surest way to fail is to not prepare.  

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The Mind of... March 28th

Today is March 28th, 2013 and welcome to The Mind of...  

A key part to Kickstarter projects, and I think a lot of social based projects in general, is putting yourself out there.  Bringing the audience into your world and explaining what you’re doing and why.  So to help that along I’ve decided to start a new story type called, “The Mind of...”  so you get to see inside my mind a bit and see what I’m thinking and doing.  

For now I’m focused on getting back into the swing of things so I can move forward.  I took a break from things because of some minor surgery that made me not like sitting at desks for a while.  Which is not a fun surgery to have when your job is sitting at desks for long periods of time.  As is my way I’ve sent out several interview questions, received a few back, others are unanswered, while sending out requests for interviews to still more people.  It’s a constant cycle that takes a lot more time and effort to keep on top of than I thought before actually doing it.  

Battle Worlds: Kronos

Welcome back to another Kickstarter Conversation!  Today I am pleased to be joined by Colin Gilzean producer at KING Art Games who is here to talk to us about their latest project Battle Worlds: Kronos.  Thank you for joining us today Colin!

Thank you for having me.

First off let me start by applauding your team for making games for people like me.  Seriously first you make a great adventure game like the Book of Unwritten Tales but now you’re doing a turn-based-strategy-game?  With Hexes even?  Can you give us the rundown of the game?  

We are, just like you, huge fans of the genre and grew up with games like Battle Isle and Panzer General and Advanced Wars. Nowadays there are only a handful of games in this genre, but most of them can barely compete with the experience from back then.

So we decide it is time for a new one and figured we’ll give it a shot. Of course we’ll continue to develop Point&Click Adventures, as we are working on  “The Raven”, but having so many dedicated and committed people, it was easy to decide to take on this challenge.

Lost Vegas

Welcome back to another Kickstarter Conversation!  Today I am pleased to be joined by Olivia Wells director of a documentary that strikes remarkably close to my home town, Lost Vegas.  Thank you for joining us today Olivia!

Thanks for having me!

Having been born and raised just down the road from Vegas in the small town of Needles I’ve come to think of it as my “home city” as it were.  I’ve seen the were all the normal people live that keep that tourist attraction running, is that the part of Vegas you’re sharing with your film?

The aim of our film is to show all sides of Vegas, so yes we will be exploring the glam of the Strip, the normal residents (especially those who devote their lives to alleviating homeless), and last but not least those who are living on the margins of society. One of the themes of our film is to highlight the widening gap between the rich and the poor in America, and we are using the microcosm that is Las Vegas as our focus on how this gap affects this city’s inhabitants.

Telepath Tactics #2

Welcome back to another Kickstarter Conversation!  Today I am pleased to once again welcome Craig Stern of Telepath Tactics fame to talk to us.  Though this time we’re in these much nicer digs, welcome back Craig!  

Thanks for having me!

When last we spoke of Telepath Tactics it was a brief comment about how the Kickstarter had failed but that you would continue to work on the project.  It has only been 2 months or so since the last campaign, what have you been doing in the interim?

A lot! A lot. I've kept chugging away on improving the game; it now has support for attack animations, improved enemy AI, improved player interface, a "rally" function that moves everyone at once, support for dialog trees and branching campaigns, a dialog editor, you can now use Cold attacks to freeze water and create walkable ice bridges, and so on. Seriously, I have three posts full of details on everything I've added and improved since the Kickstarter.

Based on your last update to the previous Kickstarter campaign you’ve had some pretty strong feedback it sounds.  What did your previous backers want you to focus on?  

They wanted me to focus on single player, on mod support, and on improving the game's graphics.

How important is it to update your artwork?  That seems to be an expensive and time consuming addition to the program.

"Expensive and time-consuming" is a good way of putting it. Creating a new attack in Telepath Tactics takes 5 minutes; creating a new animation to go along with that attack takes a few days to a week.

That's just the nature of game art: the more impressive the art, the bigger a content bottleneck it creates. That was the secret of the old ASCII roguelikes (and their more recent descendants like Dwarf Fortress): when you strip away the bottleneck, you can do so much more to stuff your game full of content and awesome mechanics.

My own personal opinion is that good visuals are nice, but they should be secondary to having strong and engaging interactive systems. Of course, that's just my perspective. Most people don't think about the trade-offs inherent in development; they just want nice visuals. And hey, that's fine. I'm the developer, it's my job to make the magic happen. If playing Mary Poppins with the proverbial spoonful of sugar is what it will take to sell people a tactics game with deep mechanics and mod support, then that is exactly what I'll do.

False Advertising

Welcome back to another Kickstarter Conversation!  Today I am pleased to be joined by the lovely ladies of JAMFILMS.  Jen, Avery, and Michelle have come over to talk to us about their film, “False Advertising.”  Thank you ladies for joining us!

Thank you so much for having us! We really appreciate it.

So your film is a “feature length documentary about how the media negatively affects women's body image and self-esteem.”  Can you tell us a bit more about the film?  

Yeah, definitely! False Advertising is about the media and how it negatively affects women’s body image and self-esteem. Women are taught from a young age that looks are the most important part of who they are and, sadly that is where their value lies. Unfortunately, there is a strict mold one must fit to be considered “beautiful” in today’s society. This is a direct result of the limited portrayal of what is considered beautiful in the media today.

In our documentary you will hear the stories and experiences of young women from all different backgrounds; stories about how the media has negatively affected them and those around them. We believe personal stories are very important because stories are easier to relate to than statistics and facts. We have had the pleasure of interviewing a couple plus-size models as well as some women in the industry who act and sing. We believe it is important for people to see how the media affects all women - even those in the industry. Also, a couple of the girls we interviewed have started organizations to help girls of all ages combat the messages the media is sending. Some of the organizations include The I Am Movement started by Lissa Lauria and Love Your Flawz and The Giving Keys started by Caitlin Crosby. We believe it is also important to show how women are working to make positive changes in our society. Essentially, we are all working together to accomplish a common goal; to change how beauty and women are portrayed in the media.

In the end, the goal of our documentary is to help women, and men, start thinking critically about the media and how they define what is considered "beautiful." It is detrimental to women of all ages when they internalize this ideal of beauty and strive to become it. We want women to know they are not alone in their feelings of frustration, inadequacy, and insecurity and, with each other, we can hopefully change the way we view beauty and ourselves. We believe the media can be used for good but in this day and age the majority of what is being produced isn't cutting it. Women of all ages, types, size, and color need to speak up and share their stories. After watching our documentary, we hope it will spark much needed conversation about these issues and empower women to stand up and fight for change; change in the way the media portrays women and beauty. We hope that after watching our documentary everyone will view the media in a different light and see it for what it really is: False Advertising.

Write the Future

Welcome back to another Kickstarter Conversation!  Today I am joined from across the pond by Tom Hunter who is talking to us about his “Write the Future” Kickstarter project.  Thank you for joining us today Tom!

Thank you for the opportunity. One of the main things that first drew me into Kickstarter was the sense of a shared experience linking all of these cool people and projects together, and it’s great to see that conversation extending out to the blogosphere as well.

Plus reading the Kickstarter Conversation blog introduced me to a whole load more cool stuff, so it really is a pleasure to be invited to chat here with you.

Your main title seems to leave out one of the biggest things, in my opinion, about your project.  That being your project is organised by the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction literature and taking place at the Royal Society in London!  Sure that’d be hard to put in the title but those are kind of big deals!  Tell us more about what this is all about.  

You’re right, being invited to do organise an event like this at the Royal Society is definitely a big deal, and they’ve been great (and very trusting) in letting us in to use their space in this way.

It started out with the Royal Society approaching us to host the main ceremony event for the Clarke Award, which is taking place on the same evening as Write The Future. That’s always been an invite only event, which makes sense for an award ceremony, but both I and they wanted to see if we could push that a bit, and since we’ve got the space in the evening and it’s basically the same set-up - chairs, a screen, a lectern etc etc - we just thought maybe we could use the space in the day as well and organise something a little different.

In that way Write The Future is very much an experimental event for both us and the Royal Society, and we wanted to reflect that in the programming where we’re deliberately bringing different disciplines together, and also in the way we went about promoting the event. So we’re going to have science fiction authors talking alongside technologists and futurists, social media and marketing experts and Royal Society Fellows conducting the kind of amazing cutting edge research that ought to be enough to inspire an entire next generation of Sci-Fi authors.