We did it! An expansion for KeyStone was funded through cosmetics and other perks, and released to the community. Thank you to everyone who plays KeyStone, gives feedback, and reports bugs. Extra thanks to everyone who backed the project, and to the beta testers who helped make sure the expansion would be polished and fun!

With the expansion out the door, I thought it would be good to reflect on what went well, and what could have gone better. This reflection will focus more on the process of funding, developing, and testing the expansion, NOT the creative design process.

What Went Well

Better than expected financial support. Based on a survey I sent out before the campaign kicked off, and from looking at similar projects, I was optimistically expecting around $1000 in funding. The final number, including PayPal donations, was $1876.87! I knew a lot of people enjoyed KeyStone, but seeing how many people were actually willing to fund the project’s continuation was hugely motivating for me.

I delivered everything I promised (with some early and some extra). The campaign ran from August 20th through September 20th. I said I would deliver everything 2-4 months after the campaign ended, but ended up finishing in a little less than a month and a half, and releasing on November 2nd. This was in part because I started working before the campaign ended.

The “extra” that I delivered was 13 extra cards; I promised 45 based on the funding level and the expansion ended up with 58. This was primarily because the AI feature turned out simpler than expected, which left me with extra time for card development.

The funding led to better art. Shiraq, KeyStone’s artist, was really engaged during the creation of this expansion, and that was in part thanks to the fact that I could pay him for the most important pieces. These included the awesome new terrain, and the completely new Void Thrasher skin for the Amon unit.

The beta tester feedback survey. With no prompting from me, the beta testers starting putting together a feedback document during the second half of the expansion’s development. I quickly realized that the fact that I hadn’t already done this myself was a huge mistake, so I jumped in to ensure I was getting the most helpful feedback possible.

I asked people to rate the power level of every card from 1 to 5, with 1 being “too weak to even have fun with”, 4 being “powerful but fair” and 5 being “strong enough to create balance problems”). By averaging everyone’s opinion, I was able to find the outliers that were too weak or too powerful and make adjustments. In general there was a lot of consensus about power levels, with everyone within a point or two from one another.

I also asked testers to rate the fun level of every card from 1 to 5, with 1 being “I don’t get why this even exists” and 5 being “this is one of my favorite cards ever”. Unlike the power level question, these answers were all over the place. Some cards would get 4 or 5 from a few people, and low scores from everyone else. Others would get 3 from almost everyone. I consider the first category more of a success. It’s impossible to get everyone to like everything, but as long as everyone has a few cards they’re excited about I’ve done my job.

What Could Have Gone Better

The beta tester perk (with the $40 price tag) was not a good way to get testers. I created this perk to get a consistent group of testers, and I set the price high to ensure that I didn’t get too many. Only so much testing is required for an expansion, so if I was required to test with too many paying customers it could end up slowing development down to a crawl.

Turns out the $40 price tag was too high though. Literally zero people bought the perk directly, and only a small set of people paid for the $100 bundle that included beta tester status. A lot of these people didn’t really want to be beta testers, they just wanted to contribute a lot to KeyStone.

In order to get a little more help I gave each tester a chance to invite a friend or two. This (in combination with the AI feature) turned out to give me just enough people, although there were still times it would have been better to have a few more.

A better way to get the right number of testers would have been to set a much lower price, but to put a limit on how many people could buy the perk. I’ll probably do something more like this next time.

The timing for the preview stream was awkward. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have time and energy for the preview stream, so I waited until the last minute before scheduling it. It turned out the only possible day to do it was Thursday, the day before release.

It would have been better to give more warning and schedule the stream on a weekend, so that more people could tune in. It also would have been better to have a week or two between the preview and the release date in order to give people something to discuss leading up to the release.

The preview stream wasn’t advertised in-game. Due to some file management issues I did not have the exact version of the map that was live just before Unnatural Experiments, so I couldn’t easily add an advertisement in-game. I will have to manage this better next time, as the actual game is the best place to put news like this.

The mix of feature and card-related funding tiers was not intuitive. I wanted to get funding for the AI feature and new cards, and I wanted to be transparent about how much money was going towards each, but the system I ended up with was a little math-heavy. People ended up asking a lot of questions.

I’m not really sure what the right answer is for next time. It would be a lot more intuitive to just have all funding go towards cards at a fixed amount per card, but I also want to develop new features and game modes.

While there is always room for improvement, overall the campaign was successful and the development of the expansion went smoothly. If you have any thoughts about what you liked or didn’t like about the campaign, please leave them in the comments below!