“Like my tweet post tumblrspace!”: Never underestimate the influence of social media. Many people use twitter and facebook as a type of RSS feed for news for things they are interested in, so we made sure that we had a presence anywhere our audience might be. Developing these micro-communities gave us some great early support when it came to launching the Kickstarter. We literally had people waiting to donate.

Presskit: It’s best to have one of these before you need it. When journalists started asking for screenshots, videos, and game summaries we were able to simply point them to our presskit page rather than manually sending out materials to every inquirer. We also made sure it was clearly linked from our website. Sometimes journalists wouldn’t contact us and would just run a story with whatever information we had available on our site. Having our presskit easy to find was very helpful in that regard.

Preparing for Launch - All Ducks in a Row

If you don’t know, ask: There are a ton of things to consider before launching your Kickstarter and one of the best ways to learn the process is to ask someone who’s been through it (and preferably succeeded). We were lucky enough to take advantage of (creator of Cards Against Humanity) Max Temkin’s Kickstarter Office Hours, which I believe he has unfortunately ended, but there are plenty of successful people out there who will likely respond well if you ask them nicely for advice. We were glad we did this before putting tons of work into our campaign because we quickly realized that we needed to change how we were approaching some of our rewards and business decisions.

Doing research: We used the site KickSpy.com to search for projects with similar themes (space, exploration, survival, etc) and with similar goals. KickSpy gives you much more freedom while searching projects than Kickstarter itself, which will give you a better picture of what to expect. With this approach we were able to compare ourselves to other successful and unsuccessful projects to determine what aspects of their campaigns we should adopt or abandon.

Overestimate everything: Kickstarter is pretty unforgiving when it comes to making mistakes. Overestimate how much time it will take you to run your campaign. Overestimate how much money you need to raise. Overestimate how stressed out you will be. Overestimate everything... We estimated the minimum amount of funding that it would take us to complete the game and we increased that by about 15% to cover unforeseen expenses, plus another 8% to cover the fees to Kickstarter and Amazon Payments, plus another 2% to cover failed payments.

What happens if we fail?: This was a difficult question, but an important one we had to ask ourselves. The continued development of Lacuna Passage was entirely dependent on our Kickstarter funding and we made sure that was clear during our campaign.

The page and video: We wanted to keep our Kickstarter video under five minutes and spend as much time as possible speaking directly to our audience. Gameplay footage and bullet points are great for selling your game, but on Kickstarter that is not your goal. You are not selling your game, you are asking for funding. It’s tempting to describe every single feature of your game either in your video or in your description, but that’s what your website (and hopefully your devlog) is for. Since we had been documenting our development prior to our Kickstarter it was easy for us to refer people to those resources rather than clutter up our page.

Art is your best friend: When a game is still in development sometimes it can be difficult to show exactly what the game will look like when it’s finished, yet it should be no surprise that good-looking games do better on Kickstarter. Do whatever you can to put your best foot forward when it comes to visuals. With Lacuna Passage we made sure to have concept art available for any features that did not currently exist in our prototype. This helped us to have more visual aids than text on our final page. Also, don’t underestimate the importance of sound and music. We had numerous backers who cited the music as the reason they decided to back our project.

Deciding on rewards: This was one of the most difficult aspects of the campaign to estimate accurately. Problems will always arise and the costs associated with reward fulfillment may be extremely volatile. This is where the overestimation part comes in. Hopefully if you’ve planned for the worst then you can handle it when it comes. In our case, we avoided physical rewards as much as possible to cut down on production and shipping costs. Extra pledges don’t count for much if a majority of the funding has to go towards extraneous physical rewards rather than the development of your game. Digital exclusives ended up being our most popular option and resulted in lots of extra funding for very little extra cost.