Kickstarter Debrief

Chin up, kid, we ain't done yet.

So the Kickstarter didn't exactly go to plan, although development will continue (albeit at a slower pace). Let's go through some of the whyfores and withertos.

This blog post contains significant extracts from an update I've already published on Kickstarter. If you happen to have read that, you'll want at most to skim this.

Kickstarter Summary

Let's start with a few facts shall we? Because there's nothing like the truth.

The first demo was launched in late March 2022.

The Kickstarter campaign launched mid-June 2022.

The campaign reached 53% of its target with  153 backers.

It's worth noting that while I could release a game for the target of £5,000, I was really looking for at least £8000 to include a couple of the stretch goals. I could cut them but the soundtrack and subplot are both really important to the game's design.

Here's my funding chart:

It's a good way to tell the story of the campaign. A very cold, very slow start, then nothing at all for a week. That spike around the 25th of June was the result of a feature in the naughtylist.news newsletter (which you should honestly all subscribe to).  Then there's a slow and steady rise (too slow! too steady!) before a big boost in the final 48 hours - which was sadly no-where near enough to get over the line.

Success breeds success. I really think if been at 80% or more in the final 48 hours, the spike would have been even bigger. If I'd gotten to 50% in the first couple of days, it would have drawn a lot more attention. No-one wants to get their hopes on a struggling project - but if it's at or near its target, it'll almost guarantee a return, so people are more interested in backing.

What Went Wrong

The number one reason I  think the campaign failed: time. The project was always on an accelerated timeline - I poured a lot of my own money into it and I needed it to start generating revenue fast.

I announced the game and launched the first demo build in March this year. The Kickstarter went live in June. From a totally cold start I had like 10 weeks of build-up to the campaign.

That is nothing.

Pretty much every successful game takes 6 months to a year, from its first demo, to get any amount of traction. It takes time to build the trust of players, to get the word out amongst the competition, to convince people that it's worth getting their hopes up on the project. So many games die in the first 3-6 months, a lot of players don't even look until the game is a year old and on like a 0.6 release version.

None of this is news to me, so why did I think I could do it? Hubris, probably. Naivety. I really thought my art style would cut through and make ten, a hundred times, more noise than I did. I was just plain wrong about the impact the art style would have.

Because I've launched from no platform, everything I've done has had a fraction of the impact I needed. Every post, every launch, every tweet, every advert, every stream, every email, needed to have 10x, or even 20x, more impact than it did. Every time I released a new marketing ploy, it under-performed by an order of magnitude.

Most projects launch with a boost - like 30% on day one - then build on that momentum, and success breeds confidence and more success. Because I launched almost completely cold, I got 2% on day one. And honestly I was grateful for that because I thought it'd take a week to get my first backer.

If I could do it all over again, I'd make sure I had another 2 or even 3 months of promotion and content updates (even if only small ones, like The Notebook), with a Kickstarter pre-signup page live and ready. Even that would have be running on a tight timeline - but I think it would have made all the difference. A platform to launch on. 300 followers on launch day might just have gotten me off to a 30% start.

I think from a marketing point of view, it's worth pointing out a few things about the game that have made it harder to engage with the wider adult gaming community:

• Limited colour palette
• Novel artistic style
• An older protagonist
• All original characters (no rule34 stuff)
• A suggestion of Themes and Politics and Stuff in the story
• A slow paced start
• References to movies made 80 years ago

I mean, fundamentally, it's not a (monster/college)-girl fucking game where you play a jacked up jock.

Don't get me wrong - I'm super proud of all these things and wouldn't have it any other way.  But they each played a small role in limiting my audience, making them harder to find. 

It turns out most people don't really want something New or Different or Challenging. Or at least they don't think they do. You know what people want? A Sonic The Hedgehog movie. No - TWO Sonic The Hedgehog movies.

I have no doubt my audience is out there. I've found the first 150 of them.  But building that is going to be just a little harder than I anticipated.

What's Next

This is not the end, everything is fine. I will continue development and work out a way to continue to self-fund it. This probably means working part-time or doing some contract work for a couple of months, just something to give me enough income to commission the rest of the artwork.

Private Dick: Lipstick & Lies will get finished. There really isn't a huge amount to do and £5000 really isn't a huge amount of money to find.

Everything just slows down, that's all. It's not how I wanted this to go down but what are you going to do? There's too much good stuff sitting here to not finish it.

I'm not sure what to do about itch. I now have an alpha demo, a Kickstarter demo, and a SFW demo (intended for streamers). I've basically got three versions of the same game online now, and it's messy.

I've already rolled the SFW stuff as an option into the next build - so now you can switch into an SFW filter at any time. Which means no nudity and a clear prompt before any sexual scenes. So I'll definitely unpublish and probably delete the SFW demo.

But where shall I release the next build? I like a clear history, I like an archive. I think it's nice to be able to see the very first release and devlog, and I think it's nice to have a permanent record of the Kickstarter demo. Even though it failed, it still represents a huge landmark for the game.

So I think I'll resume development on the alpha demo page. I'll add a wee devlog to mark the change, and I'll post future updates there. The Kickstarter demo will remain, unpublished but visible, as a reminder (perhaps precautionary) of what happened in this summer '22.