Shadowrun Dev on Kickstarter: "Put Your Ego Aside and Communicate with Your Audience" - Polidicks

[QUOTE]Kickstarter is just a service. Sometimes amid all the doom and gloom, people forget that. Kickstarter is meant to connect creative people to fans who are willing to fund interesting projects. Two weeks ago, problems with that service were highlighted when veteran developer Peter Molyneux was called out on the mishandling of his first Kickstarted title, Godus. The Godus situation showed many of the ways that Kickstarter projects can go wrong. Kickstarter drives over-promise, over-estimate, get delayed, and get cancelled all of the time. "It's best to have something people want," he replies. "That's what happened with Shadowrun Returns. We were meeting a pent-up need. There hadn't been a Shadowrun game really since 1993; the one I made in 2007 didn't count and actually made people's hunger for a Shadowrun game even higher. After that, you have to be believable. People have to say, 'Yes, this is a team that can actually deliver.' In this case, [Harebrained CEO and original Shadowrun designer Jordan Weisman] and I have been shipping videogames forever. That lent credibility. Jordan being the creator of Shadowrun lent credibility. There have been Kickstarters by very famous people that have not met the audience's expectations. "Much has been said about over-promising on Kickstarter funding drives. Kickstarter only gives you money if you make it over your funding goal, which tends to drive developers to promise almost anything and everything to reach that mark. According to Gitelman, being able to say "No" to your backers is important and doing so increases your credibility. [B]"We tell our audience exactly what's going on and we say 'No', which surprises them," he tells me. "They say, 'Hey, can you add this feature?' and we say "No, it's out of scope, out of budget.' instead of 'We'll look into it.' We'll say, 'We have looked into it and we can't do it.' [/B]They appreciate the credibility of people who treat them not like investors, but like a valued audience."[/QUOTE] [url]http://www.usgamer.net/articles/shadowrun-mitch-gitelman-interview[/url]

Planetary Annihilation's kickstarter went pretty well, they managed to deliver on the vast majority of their stuff but I haven't played in a bit so who knows how it's doing now. But yeah they make a good point, fundamentally you're trying to sell a product and you've got to be realistic in what you can actually deliver, instead of endlessly adding on new features that people want it's probably better to just work on your core design and make sure you can at least deliver some of what people want to a high quality rather than deliver everything half assed.

[QUOTE=Rapscallion92;47236257]Planetary Annihilation's kickstarter went pretty well, they managed to deliver on the vast majority of their stuff but I haven't played in a bit so who knows how it's doing now. But yeah they make a good point, fundamentally you're trying to sell a product and you've got to be realistic in what you can actually deliver, instead of endlessly adding on new features that people want it's probably better to just work on your core design and make sure you can at least deliver some of what people want to a high quality rather than deliver everything half assed.[/QUOTE] They sort of did ok with PA but the game itself turned out not very fun to play at least last I tried a couple of months ago.

[QUOTE=Rapscallion92;47236257]Planetary Annihilation's kickstarter went pretty well, they managed to deliver on the vast majority of their stuff but I haven't played in a bit so who knows how it's doing now. But yeah they make a good point, fundamentally you're trying to sell a product and you've got to be realistic in what you can actually deliver, instead of endlessly adding on new features that people want it's probably better to just work on your core design and make sure you can at least deliver some of what people want to a high quality rather than deliver everything half assed.[/QUOTE] It's suffers from trying to do too much really. As a game it would work significantly better with flat maps and the lack of the orbital stage. But those are the things that allowed it to have a successful kickstarter. It was fairly obvious Uber thought the same thing, which is why that other kickstarter of theirs, for the ctulhu versus robots RTs actually had flat maps.

[QUOTE=wraithcat;47243502]It's suffers from trying to do too much really. As a game it would work significantly better with flat maps and the lack of the orbital stage. But those are the things that allowed it to have a successful kickstarter. It was fairly obvious Uber thought the same thing, which is why that other kickstarter of theirs, for the ctulhu versus robots RTs actually had flat maps.[/QUOTE] That game looked way more interesting than PA.

[QUOTE=wraithcat;47243502]It's suffers from trying to do too much really. As a game it would work significantly better with flat maps and the lack of the orbital stage. But those are the things that allowed it to have a successful kickstarter. It was fairly obvious Uber thought the same thing, which is why that other kickstarter of theirs, for the ctulhu versus robots RTs actually had flat maps.[/QUOTE] Its possible to have galactic/global maps done well. Populous: The Beginning is IMO one of the best RTS's ever made, very underrated, and it did 360 degree global maps (they were actually designed maps though, not random generated ones). The hooks in PA work very well and are still really damn good. The problem with PA last I checked was that there just isn't any real depth to the actual game, however. Only 1 faction, with cookiecutter tank/air/etc units. The planets are just basically randomly maps that are just bad and effectively like playing on totally flat maps, etc. Interplanetary stuff is really all it had going for it. and it was interesting but not [I]deeply[/I] interesting. It was primed to be the successor to supcom but SupCom: FA is an infinitely more deep and epic game despite not having this galactic scale to it.

I actually Enjoy playing PA but in all fairness, it was considerably after launch when they fixed up a ton, and its the only RTS I play If you want to see a truly failed kickstarter, take a look at the iexpander Iphone case [url]https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/108290897/iexpander-an-expansion-device-for-your-iphone-4-an[/url] Its a battery case for the iphone 4 that adds extra power and memory storage. Its been stalled for how many years now, and its outdated anyways since the iphone 6 is out