The Andromeda Acolytes Kickstarter has passed $6500!
I've been speaking to backers and getting some very nice feedback, too.
There are eight days to go to reach $14k as I type this. If you hadn't thought about backing me before, I obviously wish to stir that thought in your mind. What I'm making is ambitious, and you'll also be helping to raise the monetary water level for all IF. HERE'S THE PROJECT LINK.
What might also sway you:
Today, I'm going to tell you about the IF competitions I ran that preceded the Kickstarter, because they're actually the wildest part of this whole thing. And since they weren't actually directed primarily towards those already involved in IF, they're the part that most of this audience might know least about.
Kickstarter Prep and IF Competitions
... I started on the Kickstarter prep a year and a half ago. The biggest challenge in these things is trying to establish a community or critical mass before you begin, including a sizeable chunk of people who are initially strangers to you.
I built a Discord server and programmed it with teams, a community-building idea described by Mike Rose of No More Robots (games) in a 2019 GDC talk shared to me by Dan Fabulich of Choice of Games. Dan is the gent who got me to take my Kickstarter prep seriously. So in equal seriousness, I'm grateful to him, while in Joke Land, my constitution wants him to pay it restitution.
To the competitions. I decided to invent a version of what had been proposed in the GDC talk that would be appropriate for IF. Also, I wouldn't be stirring up a crowd for a game release as was being done in the GDC talk, I'd be stirring one up for a Kickstarter. And finally, I wanted whatever I did to not resemble the Stanford Prison Experiment, which one audience member at the talk jokingly compared its proposed methods to.
So at this point I was venturing into unexplored territory. I began by vetting IF games to find ones suitable for use in competition. This was hard because most don't use scoring, most have walkthroughs, and those that do use scoring are often too old school. I eventually chose
1. Captain Verdeterre's Plunder by Ryan Veeder – a newbie-friendly time-limited scoring game whose highest score had never been established
2. Napier's Cache by Vivienne Dunstan – No score involved, but it's a character and story driven game of the kind I am pitching myself, and I regard it as the best example of this kind of game that is easiest to play. And
3. Necron's Keep by Dan Welch – A totally unheralded D+D game that frankly I believed only I knew about, at least in the IF circles I frequent. Not newbie-friendly at all, and with bugs, but detailed and lots of fun, and a good last comp discriminator.
I then contrived with the authors and keepers of these games to temporarily hide their help materials from the internet. (Except in the case of Necron's Keep, whose author I've never been able to contact. Logistically, that was okay. I was plainly the world's foremost expert on the game at the time, apart from its author.)
I set up servers with these games on them, and autorecording of player transcripts on the servers. Discord didn't offer certain user ID functionality I needed, so I had to build a Discord bot for that and keep it running 24/7. My friend Andrew Schultz was the Python brains behind this. I created text-adventuring boot camp materials. I solicited and promoted the competitions around the internet, ran them over three weeks and awarded the prizes. This segued into a beta test of the game on Steam, which segued into the Kickstarter launch.
However, the number of users who'd showed up in the Discord was factors below what I wanted, needed or expected. I had to nix the map-making and poetry-writing competitions around Napier's Cache, and reach back out to IF veterans to compete in the case of Necron's Keep, as I hadn't been able to build up a new player base that was in shape to tackle that game. This last detail shows I overestimated how far I could bring people in three weeks. As disappointing as all this was, other good things came out of it that were of a non-numerical nature. Acquaintances were becoming more like friends. Some IF folk spontaneously offered knowledge, advice or help. The Necron's Keep competition was a lot of fun and brought an unheralded game to people's attention. And my promotions created a general awareness of what I was doing in gaming circles relevant to this project.
All I've described above is completely outside the Kickstarter itself. That's a whole other set of work. Integrating and dealing with Steam, too, is a whole other set of work. When my Steam beta test broke on launch, Steam took 36 hours to reply – 75% of the time the test was initially planned to run. Dealing with Apple is also work. I am now an Apple developer, too. I have to keep my certifications up to date and notarise my app each time I rebuild it for Steam.
The strangers-to-community-build is the big element of the pre-campaign I could have tried again from other angles. I (or anyone) could have spent an infinite amount of time at this phase until I'd worked it out. Solving this for a mature, pure prose IF game remains a puzzle. But what I'd already tried was such a massive amount of work, and had cost me so much time, I didn't want to spend more time. I wanted life to go forward, so I began the Kickstarter.
In terms of how I've promoted the campaign from day to day and the manner in which it's grown correspondingly, I'm really pleased with my work. If the campaign doesn't reach the target I set, I think it will really just be because I didn't build a high enough pre-backership, that critical mass I keep referring to. I took some extraordinary actions to try to develop it but they didn't pan out. Nevertheless, here I am!
So don't delay, back Andromeda Acolytes today.
