Voted. The lack of a video on the Greenlight page is something to fix as mentioned by various commenters.

Consider a Kickstarter for episode 2. Episode 1 did well enough on Kickstarter to justify a reboot.

Here is some feedback before my bedtime.

First, about the project page previewed.

The thumbnail I would rank better than good. The overall art is good. The bubble text is well done.

There is no pitch video yet. Lack of a pitch video is can be tolerable for campaigns in other categories, but for indie games a pitch video is now almost mandatory.

I suggest choosing either the thumbnail image or the project's description to put the information that it is for PC, Mac and Linux. It can be as simple as having the platform logos (Like Tux the Linux penguin) in the thumbnail or adding "PC/Mac/Linux" at the end of the description.

The music samples don't seem to fit together. The samples could have come from different games.

At the top of the main body of the project page (Below the description blurb) is the blue and white "Latte Deconstruction" logo. That logo is good, but it should be relocated because that area on the page is very valuable space.

The grammar and wording could be tightened up a bit, but is already close to good enough.

The character biography section is well done. There aren't many recycled character poses which is very good.

There was excellent use of animated GIFs.

Animations cycles are very good. Transitions between cycles, such as when the Latte character stops running, are still rough. That is to be expected from a work in progress.

The core mechanic of moving blocks is easy to understand. I can't tell if it is fun or not because it might be too easy looking since being able to reposition blocks like that grants almost too much freedom. If I recall correctly was an episode of Extra Credits that talked about the need for the game designer to understand which specific qualities like foresight or reflexes the game would test the player on.

Back in 2012 there were so many puzzle platformers on Kickstarter that many people have been burned out by them. A challenge is to prove to strangers that your game is a puzzle platformer worth making. I wonder how well the game would play if with constantly-scrolling levels.

I don't have an idea what the scope of the game is. Details, like how many levels are planned, are indicators a project has been well thought-out and helps a potential backer decide if a game is worth their pledge. How many hours of gameplay there is has become a common way for some people to value games.

It appears you released a game before this, so that is something to link to as evidence you can deliver a game.

Second, about the reward structure.

I've tracked each individual reward tier for campaigns with my graphs to see how different types of rewards perform. The structure I see in the preview is decent, but there could be a lot of optimizations made.

There is a $8 early-bird tier with only 500 slots. When full, that reward tier would bring in $4,000 (13.3% of the goal). After that is a $10 pre-order tier that can be considered to be the main reward tier. That means you would be competing against other indie games in the $10 class. Different classes, such as campaigns where the $5 and $15 tiers as their main tiers, behave differently and there are different levels of expectations from potential backers. I don't know if your game can compete in the $10 class without offering more value. The problem is reducing the price of the main tier has the trade off of needing to aim for more backers to cover the same goal amount. Regular Kickstarter users can now shop around about where to make pledges.

There is the opportunity to drop physical rewards from the campaign to lower the minimum goal. Rewards like backers being able to design a character or getting a non-player character version of themselves into the game are the type of reward that do well. Coffee-related things like fake coffee stains should go well.

Third, a bit about promoting the game.

With Kickstarter's platform becoming increasingly competitive, a strong launch is becoming more and more important. That often now means gathering fans before launching.

I assume "15 de febrero" is February 15th. That day is out of sync with the blogger cycle, out of sync with the weekly traffic cycle on Kickstarter for regular backers and in sync with the monthly cycle. I do not know the length of the campaign or what hour in the Eastern Time Zone it will launch, but a lot of potential pledges can be lost by ending at a bad time.

A Prefundia post is something I've started recommending.

Getting familiar with Reddit sooner rather than later is another recommendation. There are places like /r/gamedev's Screenshot Saturday where indie devs can help and critique other devs' work.

There is the opportunity for you to run a bilingual campaign. Kick-Heart is an example of how to run a multilingual campaign with different sets of instructions at the bottom of the main page.

Linux support means there are options to promote it to Linux users like myself who are very vocal on Kickstarter.

A playable demo would beneficial. You could have the users of this forum help playtest it and make suggestions on how to refine it.

One of the most important things is to know who your primary target market is like age groups. An all-ages adventure can be difficult to actually achieve. Many Kickstarter backers are people who grew up on classic PC games and there is a general distaste for games that are too "casual". It is possible to run a campaign targeted towards children, but you need to target the parents to buy it.

Sometimes an initial Kickstarter campaign can be used to prepare for a second campaign. Backers and feedback from the first campaign can strengthen the second attempt.

If the campaign succeeds Kickstarter has a 5% fee and then there is another fee to process credit cards that varies from 3% to 5%.

The developer of Xenonauts posted a guide for non-US project creators. There is a section about obtaining an Employer Identification Number.

With a $30,000 goal you would need to aim for 1,200 to 1,500 backers to reach 100%. For an small indie game project to get more than $10,000 usually requires significant effort. It can be very hard to get to 500 backers. I strongly suggest trying to find ways to make the minimum goal smaller.

I'll take a longer look at the project preview link (Found it on the IndieDB page) tomorrow. From what I quickly looked at there are a lot of things that would cause the project's momentum to stall out with a goal that large.

After a lot of delays, and the hard part of coordinating approval from multiple devs, I've finally posted to Reddit's /r/gamedev. Below are links to a Pastebin for a trimmed version of my Kickstarter guide and the Reddit post.

pastebin.com/NL2H78Nv

reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1k67t0/a_lobsters_guide_for_video_game_projects_on

No rush but the postcard badge isn't appearing on my profile (Greetings from the "Okanagan Valley"; confirmation message was received April 23rd). I've been noticing that I haven't been earning any new backer badges on my profile, such as the devotee badge even though today it says I've visited for 15 consecutive days. Its the badges I care more about than rep. I waited until now to bring it up because I saw that the system was being worked on.

Thanks in advance if it gets fixed. I'll go back to lurking the forum now.

You're what Malcom Gladwell calls a "maven," someone who's an information specialist who "accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others."

I consider that a compliment.

In a college leadership course's test I came out clearly as a ENTJ fieldmarshal type which means I like to take charge when there is a leadership vacuum where others might be hesitating or confused. I was tired of seeing the same mistakes over and over from even large Kickstarter campaigns, so I decided to do something about it.

I've been compiling a free guide for project creators based on my Kickstarter experiences (550+ backed; helped reboot multiple campaigns; skimmed entire Recently Launched feed since December 2011). Watching Kickstarter's ecosystem grow since May 2011 has been amazing.

A big obstacle I have with finishing my own guide is that I have a 11.4 litre plastic tote of notes on scrap pieces of paper to go through and having to reread the collection of messages I've had with devs. Now that a college semester just ended for me, I began refactoring my guide yesterday. I eventually hope to share it with the Construct 2 forum.

Even though KS currently only accepts projects from U.S. and U.K creators, there's nothing standing in the way of a multinational team designating a U.S. or U.K. team member as the campaign lead and pulling off a completely successful (and legal!) project.

Kickstarter can approve projects from project creators of other nationalities than those. One requirement for Kickstarter project creators to fulfil is to have a bank account in the United States to transfer the funds into. As a Canadian, to open a bank account in the US would require applying in-person at a branch of a bank that can handle foreigner accounts, a minimum deposit amount in US currency to cover fees, a valid passport, another piece of government provided photo identification like a driver's license, submitting Form W-7 for an IRS ID, then submitting Form W-8 for income tax reasons and utility bills that show a home address. Kickstarter can provide a 1099-K form for project creators that shows how large the payment was that Amazon processed if the project gets funded. It is also important to learn how to later close the account if you won't need it, but know that same account can also be used to collect otherwise withheld advertisement revenue from web game portals like Kongregate and for transactions in US dollars to avoid losses from repeat currency conversions. I haven't done this myself yet, so I might be missing something.

I hate this trend of having topics in this subforum that should be in a different section but are here simply because its popular or something.

I agree with alspal that Construct 2 General is not the best place for this thread.

Impressive. The demo ran very smooth for me on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64-bit.

dl.dropbox.com/u/90056670/Construct2/spaceblaster_node-webkit_test.jpg

I was one of the backers of Haunts at the $5 tier and didn't ask for a refund. I've backed a lot of Kickstarter campaigns aware that this kind of outcome was eventually expected to happen for a percentage of them. I am also currently studying project management in college where a whole part of the curriculum is explaining how software projects fail.

There is still some hope that this game could be saved and I am watching this story unfold carefully. It is the first real case of a funded project from the Video Games category that has admitted things have gone disasterously wrong. How the project creators react to this situation, like how they offered refunds, will provide a precedent for the next imploded project to look to for guidance.

An odd design decision was that Haunts was being coded with the relatively young Go programming language, which is making it more difficult to find a replacement programmer or outsource. Poking around what files the developer made public on github, it looks like the artificial intelligence was scripted in Lua and (As a fan of Lua) that makes me wonder why they didn't just make more of the game with Lua rather than Go.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)

Here are two thing that I have recently developed some concerns about for the backers community on Kickstarter.

First, I have seen posts about people that aren't in good financial situations that are still scraping together hundred dollar pledges for multiple campaigns. I prefer to back at a basic tier and then might raise my pledge later after giving it some thought. Impulse buying big rewards can become very expensive very fast. There are some games I have just pledged $1 for now and wait for them to go on sale after launch (Like being in a Humble Bundle). As others have said before, don't pledge what you can't afford to lose.

Second, I've seen posts about how some people have become addicts to browsing and commenting on Kickstarter. I've seen profiles for backers that only backed a few campaigns yet have made over 200?300 comments. I am also seeing more profiles with over 200 projects backed (The highest I've seen is a backer of 1301 projects). Looking at some of those profiles, I would say that Kickstarter addicts are willing to back some of the riskiest projects and could lose a lot if we start seeing a lot of projects start failing to deliver.

One of the main things I regularly look for when backing a project is clarity in what the project is. When you enter a contract, it is a good idea for both parties to know the terms for what each side wants.

I don't need a game to be 80% done when it launches on Kickstarter. I'm often fine with seeing screenshot mockups because a good mockup shows the effort, thoughts and direction of the game designer have already taken some ordered form.

Project Eternity from Obsidian has been doing a good job with their project updates giving more specifics after also being vague at their launch. I expect this campaign to start filling in some information gaps that way too.

I'll be quoting this project's main page for what clarified some things a bit for me.

"Pen & Paper RPG ($60 Reward Tier): Gather around a table and enjoy playing Old School RPG the seriously, really old school way."

If there is a pen&paper version an assumption is that the video game's mechanics will play like a standard one with maybe a twist or two. That makes sense considering the experience the project creators has with pen&paper RPGs. If it is some innovative new system that works well both in video games and pen&paper (probably not) then it might still be an interesting development.

"You gain exclusive access to our forums where Tom and Brenda will chronicle every phase of the game�s development and invite your feedback into the game�s design. You vote on design decisions when the team needs your input."

It seems they want the backers to help define what the game, somewhat like Double Fine's backer feedback approach. One thing I liked better about Double Fine's project was that the point was raised that if things did go horribly wrong it would likely still be entertaining enough to be worth backing.

It is hard to critique the $1million goal when the scope of the game isn't said, but that amount should be enough to make a game with production values higher than many indie games but not enough to expect an AAA production.

"We have never taken VC or angel funding and have resisted two buyout offers so we could stay this way."

They did say they haven't sought help from venture capitalists so they had to pay the bills somehow even if that means making... Pettington Park (It is on their blog). The reason that Loot Drop may have chosen Kickstarter is that while casual games pay the bills they don't fully satisfy the needs of staff that would rather be making a hardcore RPG they can have pride in.

As GenkiGenga said, the developers could suddenly announce this game is text-based. I still backed it because of the creator's backstories, but I feel more uneasy about this campaign than I often do. I've seen many campaigns and from my perspective it was not done up to par with other high profile projects. Some things don't seem to be fully thought out, such as what if most backers want one game with both designers' full efforts rather than the two games stretch goal splitting the designers' efforts apart. I prefer to think it was just rushed rather than an attempt to scam backers.

On a tangent, Kickstarter posts have been appearing frequently enough here that it might be more organized to have one main Kickstarter news/launches thread in Open Topic. The large Kickstarter threads on the Good Old Games forum (thread has 104 pages and growing) and NeoGAF are good examples.

I am most excited about WebGL shaders in r100, especially learning what the first shaders available will be. After seeing the glass filter demo on the Aug 14th blog post, I have been wanting to make a game with an ice cave setting and jagged pieces of ice using that effect in the foreground. Different shaders will likely inspire other games I will want to make designed around showcasing the visual effects.

Greetings.

I'm a Canadian working on my bachelors in business management.

I first found out about Construct 2 when it was advertised on Reddit's /r/gamedev and see a lot of potential in its future.

Most of my gaming is indie gaming. My hobbies include growing carnivorous plants, collecting movies, watching anime and solving speedcube puzzles. I guess Kickstarter is now added to my list of hobbies as I produce episodes on YouTube about it.

I lurked the forums since March due to the bug where you can login on the arcade but couldn't login to the forums. Now that I can login, it is time for me to join some discussions.