How To Raise $30,000 For Your Indie Game On Kickstarter

so those were your early days right you're scrambling you're working your butt off and then you did your kickstarter campaign right what was that like what are some tips you can provide my audience well i i will say um the main reason i think we launched the kickstarter was we wanted to put out a feeler to see if there was enough interest in the game to merit us finishing it that's a great question seriously yeah that is a good thing i think for anybody making a game like maybe don't do kickstarter do a youtube channel find some way to prove that the game you are working on there is an audience for it and they're interested yeah yeah um i would say just some like general kickstarter thoughts um i would say first get a lot of feedback from people um set up your page well your well your kickstarter is always gonna take longer than what you're thinking so prepare for that get a lot of feedback

um from other people um be very careful with your rewards because we kind of learned the hard way that like some rewards try not to do your thing if you if you can avoid doing physical rewards just yeah i don't know unless let me let me do a little side note here i'm at the point in my career where physical rewards sound amazing because if you've got the money just pay someone to distribute t-shirts because what my rewards were uh for never song it was all effort on my part like for example creating creating playable characters for top tier backers right they would send me a portrait and then i would make their illustration yeah and then you could have a playable character or portraits of of backers in the world like a custom portrait of their face that stuff is free but it's really not because it takes time

so you got to weigh that you know do you have the capital to pay for t-shirts then do that but if you don't then you're going to have to work your butt off late into the mid into into the night uh doing free work essentially yeah yeah the uh we we had one um more high tier reward um where the person would get a statue in the game yep and then uh he would he also had um he could design three levels and um i can't remember exactly what else it was but thankfully we got up really easy because this guy was super easy to work with oh he was yeah he was great he was really um really supportive yeah he he wanted the game to be better not necessarily just to get i want my stuff so that i feel like we kind of dodged a bullet with that oh yeah you do need to be yeah i don't very careful i mean you've had more kickstarters than us so you can probably speak to it better than me but

um i think we really lucked out with our kickstarter we had i don't think even one negative comment because we launched our kickstarter in 2017 and we didn't launch our game until 2020 um and that's a long time for people to wait it's like where i gave you money where's my game and everybody was just so supportive they're like take as much time as you need we understand this is taking a while and they were very excited about all of our updates yeah everybody was really supportive so i don't know if that was just uh a unique case or if most kickstarters go like that i think i honestly i think people care more about social social ramifications than they do about getting what they want so a social ramification this is me just speaking purely from a business perspective but a social ramification would be they send a really nasty email to the creators of

a project that they really like it's like you don't want to send a nasty email to to um to the the guys that scoop them like you don't want to do that that's that's you don't want to be not their friend right so i've found that with kickstarter everyone's very friendly because they like you the moment you turn the project into something that a business would do like we're only gonna pitch the pedestrian as a game we're not going to introduce ourselves we're not going to be personal in the kickstarter then you actually set yourself up for a lot more uh well thousands of people wielding pitchforks wondering where their game is so it's really good to be personal um yeah and next to that note um i will say um that is very true and i think one of the things that really helped us keep um keep the kickstarter positive was we had a lot of communication um we released i don't think we missed an

update we we released an update for kickstarter every every month for three years yeah um and and they were very substantial updates too we we didn't leave anything out to make sure um our kickstarter backers knew all the nitty gritty and it's like hey this is exactly why it took a little bit more time this month for us to get this thing done you know like i think the more honest you are with them the more they're willing to be understanding i think so i think so too i think it's really good to be honest they're they're i don't know about you guys but there were moments where i i was like this isn't ideal but i'm gonna make a decision here and it's gonna piss off a few people but it's too hard to pass up the business opportunity um so what happens here's an example what happens with a lot of kickstarter campaigns is you're in the midst of this 30-day campaign and you're so excited because you're raising this money you never thought it was it's a dream come true you never thought it was gonna happen

and then you start over promising we're gonna make a switch game just we need 10 grand more and we're going to do it on switch we need 10 grand more and then we're going to release it on ps4 right you start doing all these uh what you would call um what do you call them guys like tears or whatever yeah stretch goals goals yeah and you reach those goals and it's not a kickstarter function it's just something you can do with the updates you can post an update that says if we if we raise 10 grand more then we'll do a switch copy for me i did that with pinstripe and i i promised i got excited and i over promised i promised an ios version i was like okay we can do ios i just need 10 grand more well you don't know how much this stuff costs you have no idea when you're starting out i don't know about you guys but i had no idea how much it would cost to port to ios porting in general is a nightmare oh i know it's crazy especially ios i mean ios is particularly rough and it took me i did follow through on my promise

admittedly i planned on backing away from it because i was just like this is impossible but we ended up releasing on ios last year so the campaign was in 2016 and so it took me 16 17 18 19 20 21 like five years or whatever five years to finally get started on the ios version uh yeah and we didn't bring any money like we we made like five grand so we actually made less than we put in because it cost seven grand to port it to ios um there's other there's other opportunities so this is just a warning for all of you listening to not over promise here's another example uh you you this one's big though but if you promised a steam version and then epic games comes to you and they say we will give you 200 grand to do an exclusive license with us plus residuals you're gonna have to decide do i want to go to my kickstarter camp like ooblets did this is that the game

ooblets uh yeah they had to figure out that they took the deci the business decision of we're gonna take the money from epic games and we're gonna give you guys an epic version um which pissed a lot of people off primarily because it was poorly worded they did not do a good job with how they updated their audience one thing that happened with me here's another example is apple came to me and they said we want to partner with you and we want to do it's not exclusive but it was kind of exclusive it was you can only release on google play i'm sorry apple the apple store you cannot release with google um you can still do steam totally fine but you you just can't do google so i kind of dodged a bullet there because it didn't affect steam at all right yeah and i got to to make a substantial amount of money from apple uh because we didn't promise an android version so this is just really important advice do not over promise if you don't have to

you can say we'll release on mobile but you don't have to say we're going to release on google or ios can you imagine guys if i had promised to my backers i'm going to do android and ios i would have lost out on the best business deal i have ever done which was apple arcade it's just keep it in mind now it's really hard it's really hard to say no steam keys like you can't from the beginning say no steam keys on a kickstarter campaign because steam is like the default if you don't offer a steam key then what's the point of the campaign at all you know right by the way guys feel free to download my free 2d game kit below it's totally free it's my treat to you i used this exact 2d game kit to make a game for pewdiepie in 14 days and then i got to play it in front of his subscribers which was really awesome so download that use it however you want it's my treat to you yeah okay