Kickstarter experience / financing the game

[axelkothe]

How does the kickstarter experience of the relaunch compare to the original one?
Did you manage to get more coverage in the media this time?
How will the kickstarter money be used?

How do you expect to finance the second and third episodes? The kickstarter obviously only covers the first episode, but some of the rewards tiers include episodes 2+3 as well.

[Will]

I'd talked a bit about this earlier to Michael here, however he's what I said again:

Q. How does the kickstarter experience of the relaunch compare to the original one?

... we had quite a few people back us in the final few days of our campaign that simply hadn't heard about our project before the bitter end! It's fair to say that we didn't do a good enough job running into the first campaign to tell people about our game before we started. Also, being an obscure developer from Belfast that no-one had ever heard of, when we did start to try and tell people about what we were working on they weren't very interested!

Getting visibility was a big issue for us in our first campaign (and is something we're concerned about this time too), however, a lot of folks that backed our campaign the first time around have came back again, which we're really grateful about. The vast majority of the people that backed us in the first few days are folks that backed the first campaign. Now that we have as many of them onboard as I think we're going to get we're into new territory again to try and convince new people to back our project.

Also, from our failed experience last time, we gained quite a few contacts (press and other developers) that have helped us get the message out more this time. But we're under no illusion that we still have a tough road ahead of us!

Q. Did you manage to get more coverage in the media this time?

Getting media attention outside of Indie development websites and websites specialising in Adventure games has been difficult! But we expected it to be, hopefully before the end of the campaign Kotaku or Rock Paper Shotgun will write that feature story but I think we'll struggle to get on there. I understand that the mainstream gaming press is a bit tired of Kickstarter these days, and an adventure game from a studio nobody has heard of doesn't get page views. Hopefully the NEXT time we approach these people with a game, after the Empire Staggers Back has been a huge success they'll give us some column inches!

Q. How will the kickstarter money be used?

Sparingly!.. However if you're after more detail you can find it here.

Q. How do you expect to finance the second and third episodes? The kickstarter obviously only covers the first episode, but some of the rewards tiers include episodes 2+3 as well.

I go into detail about this in this thread from earlier.

[Will]

Oh, and regarding how the money will be spent this update we posted should hopefully answer all those questions, and includes a pie chart, because you can't discuss budgets without a pie chart!