How Starsoft raised $66,691 on Kickstarter
Isn’t making a game free?
If you are a solo developer, making a game all by yourself, it might seem that it’s free to make a game. The only currency you pay with is your time. That is, if you can do all things such as coding, art, music and writing yourself. To speed up the process, or to be able to do things that you don’t have the skill for, hiring freelancers or teaming up is usually a great idea.
And suddenly, there is money involved. Making a game, where the development can take several years can be costly, and depending on how much outside help you need, you might not have the funds to do so.
Let’s do a Kickstarter! Easy money!
So an easy way to get money is to start a Kickstarter, right? Wrong! Even if it seems easy to see someone put up a kickstarter, raise tens of thousands of dollars in the first days, it’s NOT. The entire process of hosting a Kickstarter campaign from preparation to finish and actually fulfilling the goals of the campaign, is a LOT of work.
So to help you succeed, we’ve done a lot of research and interviewed several awesome people who were on Kickstarter. To get both sides of the coin, we will have both successful and unsuccessful game studios.
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Savior by Starsoft Entertainment
First up is my favorite Kickstarter so far, Savior. I absolutely love the trailer, which is so well cut and in sync with the music. Their story is told in a very captivating way, and I’ve seen the trailer so many times. It’s no secret that a good trailer is super-important.
I got the chance to speak to Weston Tracy, founder of Startsoft Entertainment, who recently had a crowdfunding campaign for their game Savior.
Using advanced branching dialogue lets Sam free members from the cult.
First, can you tell us about the game?
Savior is an action adventure platformer. It's based around in-depth combat, parkour and a quest system. You'll be tasked with repairing a broken society and reuniting its people. It differs from other games in the genre in that you can change the minds of your adversaries and win them to your cause. You can also repair the broken buildings and equipment around you to aid you in your quest.
I've been playing 'Metroidvanias' for 30 years. In that time I've built a long wish list of features I've longed for in these games. I'm excited to finally implement them, and realize the potential I've been dreaming about.
I'm also a fan of examining and challenging belief and part of the game is challenging the cult that the top-worlders are born into. You'll engage in branching dialogue where you can gain chunks of EXP by making arguments that reveal a flaw in the cult's logic. Every time you do, you'll plant a 'seed of doubt' in your discussion partner. Once you plant a few seeds, they'll snap out of their belief and you'll get a big boost of EXP for freeing one of them from the cult.
Could you tell us a little bit about the team and how they were involved in the campaign?
There are 10 of us now. We have a couple of programmers, 4 artists, a composer, a business advisor, a sound engineer and a writer. During the campaign they were mostly just promoting and helping me write updates. One of the artists helped me a whole lot in getting our trailers together. Obviously our composer worked hard on the trailer music.
How long in advance did you start preparing for the Kickstarter, and what did you do?
We've been working towards our Kickstarter campaign for 4 years. Mostly building and posting GIFs of different exciting game-play moments to build a community. Putting together a compelling trailer took so much more time and energy than I thought it would.
A shot from the incredibly well crafted trailer
On launch day, you had an incredible start with $14,000 and 305 backers! How did you achieve that?
We sent out a press release to our press list and we posted our trailer on our Twitter and Facebook accounts. We tried a small ad on Facebook, but it didn't drive much traffic. We were lucky to get two big backers on day one, donors we didn't previously know. I think we reached probably 10s of thousands through the articles and social media posts.
During the middle and end of the campaign, did you have any particular strategy?
Frequent Twitter and Facebook posts, and a campaign update every few days. We also reached out to our bigger Twitter followers and asked them to tweet about the campaign. Other than that, not much. We were also heavily featured by Kickstarter, surely that helped.
There's a trend on Kickstarter that there's an uptick at the end of campaigns. We were mentioned by some prominent Twitter accounts, specifically Yong Yea and Strong Bad : )
Did you use any paid marketing or any outside help?
Just a Facebook ad. It had negligible impact. But Kickstarter was a big help. They featured us for the first two weeks on their game page.
What do you think is the most important part of your campaign that made it successful?
It was far and away the trailer. Having a tight, compelling trailer is 80% of the battle, I think.
If you could turn back time and redo the campaign, would you do something different?
Yes, our trailer was too long. I would've made it 1.5 minutes instead of 2.5 minutes. I also would've divided PC and console copies into two tiers and been a bit less conservative on our launch date.
7 tips from Starsoft to new indie Kickstarters
Limit or eliminate physical rewards.
Make sure you have as big a following as possible before you go to Kickstarter, 3-5 thousand twitter followers, at least. Kickstarter won't generate much traffic for you.
Use animated GIFs on twitter to build a following, nothing I've found is as effective at communicating your game and getting people excited.
Make sure your trailer is short (1-2 minutes), and it gets to the heart/action of your game in the first 10-15 seconds.
Music is the most important part of your trailer, make sure it makes your spine tingle.
Communicate exciting game-play, don't worry about story. Gamers want gameplay.
Depending on your game size, you probably won't get a full budget from Kickstarter. Ask for what you need to push forward to the next goal, like getting bigger investors.
And by that, we conclude this interview with Weston Tracy. If you want to know more about Savior, make sure to:
Check out Starsoft’s website
Wishlist Savior on Steam
Follow Starsoft on Twitter
Check out Savior’s Kickstarter page (Learn from this amazing trailer!)
We will be back next week with another very interesting interview. Follow @bluegoogames on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter to get updates.
