Kickstarter Postmortem (a.k.a. FAIL)

First off, I would really like to thank all 9 guys that pitched in to my Kickstarter project.  + 5 Karma all around for you awesome people.

I set the Kickstarter goal at the crazy high amount of $5000.  I knew it wasn't going to make that, but I was curious to see if the Unity3d community would get behind me at all.  And they really didn't.  But I can't blame this on anyone other than myself really.  I didn't push it at all, probably because I don't like asking/begging for help, and on top of that, the money wasn't really able to be spent the way I wanted to.

Kickstarter is very very strict on what you spend the earned money on.  I was actually needing the money most to fund a game competition I wanted to run to get Games onto We Are Battle.  That killed my project I believe, because why does a successful Developer need 5000 dollars to start a website?  And what would 5000 dollars really go towards?  Exactly.

Also, to be successful on Kickstarter you have to have great rewards.  Yeah, my rewards were totally lacking.  But unfortunately I've seen that most Digital Projects on Kickstarter die a sad death.  Especially video games.  The only games that are really funded I've noticed are board games,  because then you typically receive a thing in the mail.  

Thanks again to the awesome guys that ponied up,  and showed that they believed in the project.

Good night, and good luck.

Action as opposed to complaining

Recently, I launched a beta of my first real Unity game:  Twitter Of The Dead.  What surprised me the most about the experience was the lack of real support for Unity games.  But then just as I was about to give up, I was sent this shining ray of light on Twitter:  Unity Blog link.

Long story short,  I didn't read the comments on that Unity blog link and received this from Kongregate:

At this point we do not support Unity3D games on our site, so I'm afraid we can't approve it. 

Yeah, that was a bummer.  Especially since I had been playing the game on Kongregate's site for the previous 2 days, and had optimized my game to fit in their iFrame system (I'm not bitter really).  This left me with very few options.  Yes, there are a couple of Unity portals online, but the bigger ones (which are still tiny in comparison to their Flash-centric siblings) tend to be backed by a game studio.  I'm talking about blurst.com and musegames.com,  I didn't really apply to either, just due to my game not really fitting their format.  Which brings me to my new Kickstarter project.

Introducing WeAreBattle.

Instead of being a defeatist, I'm going to make the game Portal that I would like to post games to.  Also I've wanted to setup an XBox Live Audio Chat system for Unity for a while now, and this will help me allow to do that.  I'm tired of game portals being more about the website, and not really focusing on the quality of games, and their game developers needs.

Check out my kickstarter project here, and maybe if you feel the same way I do, we can make a freakin' cool place for games,  and help get you game devs more in touch with the people playing your games.