So our Kickstarter failed. And while that might seem like a negative starting point to this “post-mortem” of B.R.O.V.E.R, the truth is we are all insanely proud of what we accomplished since the Dark Side of the Jam back in March. It takes a lot to plan, create, and coordinate a game AND a Kickstarter between people that are working full time and half of whom are on a totally different continent. But we did it and even though it wasn’t successful there aren’t any regrets here. And while there aren’t any regrets, we certainly did make mistakes. In this post we’d like to share what we believe to be our three key mistakes:

Our Mistakes in List Form

1. Not Polishing the Game:

We spent about 48 hours developing the core of the demo and a couple hours polishing it up a bit and making it work. The demo was great and really did demonstrate the principal idea behind the game, but it was rough. This was especially evident when compared to some of the more polished games on Kickstarter.

The decision of how much time to invest in the development of the game before looking for funding is tough. You want your game to look its best to attract backers, but putting together a sharp demo is a serious investment. We erred on the side of less time up front hoping the idea would shine through. And that may have worked, after all we did have a playable demo, but that leads us to our second mistake.

2. Not Enough Pre-Planning and Development of the Kickstarter:

Our initial Kickstarter page was great, it had a video (voiced by Nick) and really did an all around good job of displaying and articulating what our concept for B.R.O.V.E.R is. But that’s all we had - the one static page. We really should have planned our updates, videos and team blogs way before we launched. Having a consistent stream of interesting material would have kept the Kickstarter active, shown that we were committed and maybe even attracted some more backers.

For example, we never got to share this excellent concept art done by Jose:

We didn’t sit still during the campaign, we got advice and worked at getting the word out every day, but things didn’t seem to be clicking - and then it clicked. We are an unknown team, and unlike a few notable examples, we needed to grow an audience organically. That can be a very slow process. And that turned out to be the team’s final nail to the coffin (to continue along this mortem theme): a serious misunderstanding of marketing.

3. Not Knowing Jack About Marketing:

Our team has little to no experience with marketing, and this definitely attributed why B.R.O.V.E.R.’s Kickstarting campaign went largely unnoticed. It just didn’t even get enough views to stand a chance. We launched the Kickstarter first and then tried to generate buzz. We didn’t tell anyone about it until we pressed the launch button, giving us no time to build an audience. We sent copies of the demo to reviewers, submitted press releases and kept up a consistent broadcast on our various social media fronts. But it was too little too late. We needed an average of $667 pledged every day to meet our goal, which is difficult to get for a project and team that no one knows about. The thirty days were up before we knew it, but you can fix that: get as much done before launching your Kickstarter as you can, and start telling people about the project as soon as possible.

What Will The Future Hold for B.R.O.V.E.R?

As of now we aren’t planning to continue to develop B.R.O.V.E.R. We’d really like to thank all the amazing people who supported the game. It is incredible how kind strangers on the internet can be. We were able to get great feedback and advice during the Kickstarter which was immensely helpful. We are going to be releasing the demo for the public to play and the team is on the lookout for future projects.

We do have some really exciting news however. A few weeks ago we were invited to be on a panel discussing game development at NASA Ames. On August 8th, Chelsea will be presenting B.R.O.V.E.R. to NASA employees and interns at one of NASA’s Summer Talks. We’re not sure if the recording will be made public, but we will try to share the experience with you here on this blog.

Lastly, we really would like to state again that this was such an amazing experience. We are truly proud of what we created and would like to thank everyone again for their support.





Good luck and Happy Developing!



