We're David Jimenez and Alejandro Santiago, two engineers at the European Space Agency. In our spare time we are developing Dimension Drive, our passion project. Dimension Drive is a game about all the things we love: space, science fiction, aliens, teleportation and great female heroes (Ripley from Aliens is our favorite).
We've put lots of energy, all our free time and even our money on the line for this project. Some people ask us if we are crazy for doing this, we normally answer positively to that. We hope it's the right kind of crazy and something good will come out of this. Being engineers we can mainly do game design and programming. So, in Januray 2015 we teamed up with a talented group of artists and musicians to bring our vision to life. We have been funding all the development from our own savings so far and before they run dry we decided to take a shot at crowdfunding. This article is the first of a 3 part article where we'll discuss in depth the process behind our Kickstarter campaign.
Pre-campaign work
We started our campaign preparation in Januray, just after we put the team together. However, work on the game and spreading the word started early on 2014. This is what we did prior to launching the campaign:
- Work intensively to polish an alpha build and have it ready for press.
- Create a custom website for the game that would serve as the focal point for all our marketing. Partly following the advice here.
- Launch a story teaser 2 weeks before the campaign.
- Create all the assets and produce the trailer. We followed the advice here and here.
- Talk to as many prior Kickstarter dev teams we could.
- Create gifs and graphic material to make our Kickstarter page stand out.
- Make sure all our direct contacts knew about our campaign launch.
- Showcase at Dutch Comic Con 2 weeks before the campaign.
- Share our preview page with as many people as possible to gather feedback and improve it. Special thanks here to Indie Gamer Chick and Nelson.
- Send press releases with our story, the alpha build and a short description of the game to more than 300 press contacts. Many of them with personalized emails following the advice of John Polson and Rami Ismail on how to pitch your game.
- Prepare our Steam Greenlight campaign. This gamasutra article helped us a lot.
Launch
We launched on April 14th 1:38 AM CEST (yes, in the middle of the night) because we thought it would be better to end on a full day (we'll see if that works when we finish). In the first 24h we reached more than 10% of our goal and got selected as a Staff Pick.
First 10 days
In the first 48 hours we crossed the 15% mark and we got featured in a lot of medium to small sites with very positive feedback both on the game and our story. However, as of now none of the big media outlets has written about our game leaving us with very little visibility (more on that later). Of course it could be that our game or story is not good enough. This is always a possibility but we prefer not to think that way ;). By April 19th we were losing momentum and we got stuck at only 16%. We couldn't believe that after all the preparation and doing every, single, thing we were told to do we were already hitting the "Kickstarter slump". Sometimes you can be your worst enemy and only 5 days into the campaign we were already mentally defeated. Until on April 20th somebody (we love you!) pledged in one of the "crazy high" (1000€) tiers. That single pledge made us cross the 20% mark and put us back in the game. At that moment we decided that whatever happens we would fight till the end.
What needs to improve?
Unfortunately there seems to be no way of measuring the traffic your Kickstarter page is getting in a direct way. However, you do get access to video plays statistics. Comparing our data to other Kickstarters it's evident that one of our problems is visibility:
By the way, our Steam Greenlight campaign seems to be having a similar issue which is logical considering they are running in parallel. People like what they see but they don't get to see it.
Conclusion
It's clear that unless we manage to become more visible via big media outlets, youtubers or influencers it's going to be an uphill battle. We are, however, determined to fight it. We have several plans in preparation:
- Launch a public alpha build.
- Contact all our press contacts again once the new alpha build is live.
- Keep reaching to youtubers and influencers.
- Keep posting at least 1 update every 2 days (like we have done so far).
- Participate on Twitch live streams with other streamers.
- Do some more cross-promotion (a few with bigger campaigns).
- Facebook groups, forums and keep beating the drum on Twitter.
Do you disagree with any of our data or conclusions? Do you have recommendations on what we could do to improve? Let us know your opinion in the comments.
-David and Alejandro
PS: Dimension Drive is live on Kickstarter and you can also follow us on Twitter