One thing worries me, how do we make sure this doesn’t get lost in internal CIG communication and we never get that SC backing/shoutout…
Maybe one of the devs should contact Lesnick with a generic “Thanks and looking forward to that post” message so it doesn’t get lost that easily.
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[quote=“Wargrim, post:203, topic:1159”]
Example two: You spend the first 2 minutes of the video apologizing for video quality and for your computer, and reiterating the part about the seamless engine. For a video supposed to talk gameplay, this is simply not relevant! I am a fan, and you lost me there. Get to the point, get there fast![/quote]
Yes, because you’ve already seen the footage. But that wasn’t how it was supposed to be played out.
What you guys fail to realize is that a lot of our content has been done for a while. We’re working part time. There’s no way we can revisit everything on-the-fly as things happen. In the case of the video you’re speaking about, it was recorded PRE KS. And it took many days, plus editing, in order to do it.
It was made assuming it was the first time people were going to see the prototype in action. So a disclaimer was needed.
Of course, it’s not what happened: there has been tons of live streams since then, so the footage is “old”, boring, and frankly not too interesting. We had a debate in the dev team whether to post it or not at all, and decided it wouldn’t hurt to post it with a few explanations.
I’m not going to repeat myself here, but really, we have no time to remake anything. We can record new short videos from the prototype but that’s pretty much it. All the major content has been recorded weeks, if not months, before the campaign. We’re not gonna redo it now. We don’t have time for that. We’re frankly too busy with running the campaign, contacting people and demoing the prototype.
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Somebody give this man ten beers
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You kind of have to write their post for them with a “press release”, make it super low effort on their part, and talk them up. Game Journalism is super low effort and lots of people are in it just for the perks and don’t care about writing about games or trying to make it better.
Most of these people you’re emailing are not hard working professionals.
Anyway, I was putting thought into the Kickstarter page and how to improve it. Going to write that up.
Keep up the hard work! We have faith!
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Now, now, it’s not polite to huck beers at people.
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Might use that for a Ship Decal.
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@INovaeAndre If that is ok with @Kichae, the original creator of HUCK then be my guest 
That would be awesome!
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well you could say it’s A MOON
yeah I’d agree better to not go that route, there was already enough moaning in the comments. outsiders will see IB fans in a bad light if you don’t show moderation when possible. btw I agree it was a scummy article 
Let’s consider it a limited, non-exclusive license to I-Novae and the community and be done with all of that talk
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Okay so, I think the biggest issue here is the Kickstarter page, and there’s not much to go viral.
In my opinion, the Kickstarter page needs to be roughly half redone as far as its writing and composition, and I’ll be giving a lot of suggestions for that.
I mentioned some things to Keith on IRC before the Kickstarter launched that it really wasn’t being “sold hard enough”, but frankly I didn’t guess that no one on the team understood how to get a category on twitch and how important that it is, and that no one on the team knows how reddit works.
I would have looked over things a lot harder and double checked a lot more stuff, but I never realized. But that’s the past, and it’s time to move forward and try to work the best with how things are now.
The Kickstarter page since the initial day (which was mostly long time fans dumping money) only has about a 2.5% conversion rate from someone visiting the page, to actually pledging.
That’s average for Kickstarter, but average is really a bad thing. Your average Kickstarter includes things like “Help fund halloween costumes for my dog” and broken English “give me money to make this mobile game clone”. You want an above average conversion rate, and I think the KS page itself is a lot to blame for that.
Here’s what I think is a good example from a somewhat similar game from recently: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rockfishgames/everspace/description
They raised €420,252. Only €8.5k of that was on the first day. They didn’t have the long time fan base and mailing list you had for fans to dump a ton on the first day, but they still managed to end at a decent amount.
One thing they did is reach the #10 all time post on /r/gaming from someone reposting a gif from their Kickstarter page: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/top
They bumped up earning €25k from the day that got posted.
https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/004/240/021/f77d45835b62465c4fe663c2fddd104f_original.gif?v=1438362902&w=680&fit=max&q=92&s=71b37d103c3f876dc774cb2b68bc6c15
But that game was in development a while longer, and from an experienced studio that did Galaxy on Fire, so they had more material to start with. Lets just talk about how to improve the KS page itself with what we have to work with.
First, you’re starting out with tons of huge embedded videos.
While it’s true that videos have a higher factor of attentiveness to them, and that a Kickstarter with at least one video is much more successful than one with 0, they tend to be viewed far less because people have short attention spans.
(I’m going to be pointing out issues of how it doesn’t cater to low attention spans, which is most people, a lot)
Now, lets get to the meat of the issue. Compare how Infinity’s starts to Everspace’s
There’s 3 pages of videos even with the 1200 vertical pixels I have on my monitor.
Everspace’s is far quicker, catchier, and gives someone some takeaway and hype even if they never view them.
Infinity’s should start something like:
We are a small, newly founded, independent game studio building cutting edge technology that allows us to create unprecedented new gameplay experiences.
Our team consists of virtual reality and game industry veterans who’ve worked on games including Gears of War, Gears of War 2, Unreal Tournament 3, Microsoft Flight Simulator 10, and Forza Motorsports 2.
[ row of icons just like on the forums: https://forums.inovaestudios.com/user_avatar/forums.inovaestudios.com/inovaeflavien/45/154_1.png Flavien https://forums.inovaestudios.com/user_avatar/forums.inovaestudios.com/inovaekeith/45/151_1.png Keith etc… ]
Our founding member, Flavien, has been working on the technology for the engine to make this game happen for many, many years. Now, with your support, we are ready to work on this full time to use that technology to get Infinity: Battlescape complete and in your hands.
In-game videos, fan, and press reactions
- “Imagine if these guys had millions of dollars … When you have something like this built, and it’s already this amazing, imagine the potential.” - Livestream Kickstarter fan premiere.
- Developer interview live stream
- What is… Infinity Battlescape - fan preview
- 30KM Station Flythrough
- etc (honestly not a ton to work with here with review stuff…)
Next, you’re starting with “seamless transition”. To you, and people following infinity, the seems like the feature. But in reactions from every day people, they don’t seem to care as much. They’ll say KSP did it, or they’ll ask “so how does this effect gameplay? Why should I care?” It’s giving lots of credence to people saying it’s just a tech demo.
Kickstarters often start off with ‘who we are’ and ‘why you should back us’. You should make it clear out of the gate
The next part should be the core features concisely with more “excitement” to it. Sell it. Tell them why this is a cool thing:
[Highlights and Gameplay header image]
Our own engine (this page needs work. List of features like 1:1 true to life scales while most games do at best a 1:10 scale, physics and physics based weapons, etc.) built from the ground up to make this game possible.
Seamless transitions from space, to asteroid fields and rings, in and out of space stations, and all the way down to a planets surface with no loading screens.
[ https://youtu.be/aaEKgiYApCU condensed into a gif that links to this full video ] [ https://youtu.be/ktv15FTHm3s condenced to a gif that links to this full video. Should probably put a play icon over them, too, I suppose. ]
Epic space battles with at least hundreds of concurrent players per server, across a true-to-scale planetary system consisting of many Battlescapes.
[ There could be a better image to use here. A lot of what I’ve heard is saying there would be big epic battles, but there is really no indication of that. ]
Control ships from small, nimble fighters, powerful bombers, up to kilometers-large capital ships to work together in a team in massive, asymmetrical team-vs-team-vs-team space and interplanetary combat.
(do people really care about canned basic descriptions of the ship types? They’d rather hear about hardpoints and outfiting their ships and the various weapons and have a mock up of what that looks like! Grappling hooks to wrangle capital ships that are too close to a planet to have much leeway in their maneuvering thrusters that you can roll them over and make them crash, hi?)
Start each match humble, then progress through each battle to outfit your teams capabilities and tactics with extra mining rigs, stations, and more to help win the longer war. Drop in and out of an ongoing match at any time.
[ short gif of the mining rig on an asteroid ]
Various environments to use to your advantage, each that must be mastered to give you and your team an edge, all which you can seamlessly travel between or even fight between in empty space as the battle demands.
[ Horizontal strips of images of the various “battlescapes”. Different planets, moons, asteroid fields, stations, and all sorts of other places you can fight]
Newtonian physics, atmospheric flight modeling, and 6 degrees of freedom controls.
You can skip off a planets atmosphere by barreling into it at the “wrong” angle, whip your craft around to fly and shoot backwards, and the gravity of nearby bodies effects your crafts handling while your thrusters try to compensate for it.
I think people aren’t even really noticing your “Highlights” section because you have sooo many embedded videos before it, and the Kickstarter in general is full of lots of rather redundant images.
Images are good, yes, given low attention spans again and blah blah, but when something is 85% images, many of which are roughly similar, it becomes monotonous and people lose focus. So I’m saying to remove some, and for others to slice up to compact as pretty thumbnails.
If you read the Kickstarter word by word carefully, you get lots of information, sure. But people don’t do that and you can’t expect them too. You need their money, so you need to make it easy for them to part with it.
Also, your vision of how the game plays seems very unclear to anyone unless they pick up things from a developer interview. Again, you can’t expect people to spend hours absorbing information to find out it’s something they want to back! You need to play to their short attention spans.
You also need to talk about stretch goals as if they’re included to sell them more, with concepts and so on, which is what I did.
You talk about some goals as if they’re part of the game, as the stretch goal part at the end is there to make it clear that that won’t actually
Continuing on, Everspace really has a lot of nicely condensed images and such, and great concepts on there.
Where is the paintover/mockup concept that shows what a carrier bay full of ships ready to launch looks like?
Or the concept for the damage modeling that’s a stretch goal?
It doesn’t have to be in engine and actually working, but you need to show people the dream that you can actually make happen! Marketing is pretty much “fake it until you make it” to an extreme degree.
While your whole humble guys working in spare time to make this and not really knowing a lot about marketing works to start with, to make I:TQFE actually happen and to raise 5mil+ for it you have to become something more than that. The humble inexperienced thing is going to wear thin.
Continuing on after highlights, going into more detail and such and adding more now that you’ve gone over all the key features and gameplay stuff that make I:B what it is:
[ Images here are out of place. Just ditch them. Maybe just use one short image for alone, and one that has people flying in formation? ]
[ This part is roughly fine but… slice those images up? Tbh, the concept art from the second from the last isn’t that great. What about the concept art that’s on https://www.inovaestudios.com/Battlescape ? Emphasize about how the match would be like a long war with you doing things on the battles between, and that it resets at the end?]
When we originally set out to build a space game we came to the conclusion that there wasn’t any technology vailable that would allow us to realize our vision of a seamless transition from the surface of one planet to another without loading screens. We hate loading screens and, as life long space game enthusiasts, we resolved to build the technology to accomplish this ourselves. The fruit of that labor is the I-Novae Engine - a revolutionary new game engine capable of bringing you gameplay unlike anything you’ve ever experienced before.
For the first time in video game history we’re able to give you a glimpse of what a broad range of alien worlds could actually look like if you were standing there in the flesh. The best part is that we recognize our gaming community has a tremendous amount of creative energy and, as long as we reach our $800k stretch goal, we want to make our technology available to you via modding tools!
[ Weather and Anomalies header ]
If we reach this stretch goal, we’ll be able to make the Battlescapes even more dynamic, with ways to use storms and other volumetric effects for a combat and tactical advantage.
[ concept/mockup of some weather here. Ideally you’d want to show like a large capital ship, partially in engine at least, and/or photo-chopped, to show a carrier or something partially emerging from a cloud with the cloud being tugged along by it, and fighters launching out and pulling the cloud along behind them even more sharply. You could even use the station and have it in a super low orbit in a gas giant, enough to scrape the clouds, with its thrusters keeping its orbit from decaying. ]
[ Ship Customization header ]
[ stuff about hardpoints, with a mockup?.. ]
Visual Customization
Many of our reward tiers include limited edition skins and/or decals. Here’s some examples to give you an idea of what your rewards could look like.
Here we have the basic, generic, Hellion Corvette.
Please keep in mind that these are examples and do not represent the final limited-edition skins and decals.
Using the same Hellion Corvette for this example, here it is with a decal applied.
We’ll also have skins that you can think of like entire paint job changes.
[ Replace the parts in the middle that I removed here with slices or something that link to the full size image like other examples I gave. There is too much of the same thing over and over that makes people miss the important stuff. 2 pages of tweaked skins to scroll through doesn’t sell people. ]
[ Make the stretch goals an image! With a concept or icon next to each goal indicating what it is! ]
NOTE: We do not want to fall into the trap of feature creep, a common pitfall of both Kickstarted projects and big-budget AAA games. Some stretch goals, such as a second faction and player constructed infrastructure, will be unavailable if we do not raise enough money during the Kickstarter campaign. Other stretch goals such as modding and built-in corporation support may be added after the game ships if we continue to raise funds post-Kickstarter.
[ these are like some of the few images that are actually appropriately placed and stuff and don’t need changed. ]
[ Make this a table! ]
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@innociv I think you nailed it with this one. Nice in depth analysis AND a well thought out solution!
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Wow! You nailed it!
edit: funny, I hadn’t read @joshuakuehn s post before writing my reply, and yet we used the same expression
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While I disagree with you on other topics - you have hit this spot on and I have to say that’s a great analysis.
I think it’s possible for the reformating of the KS to be done - I think it’s too late to come out with concept art for many different things(unless they already have it laying around). I’m pretty sure what we have is what they’ve got.
Organizationally I agree with you 100%. Great post!
That’s some good detail, but I believe @INovaeKeith and/or @INovaeFlavien have said before that they don’t have time to back and change things…or were they talking about the engine? Definitely can’t go back and change the engine and the videos from before - so chances are they don’t have time to change the kickstarter either, especially since we’re over a week in already.
Regardless, I agree with you on all points. It might be worthwhile in the future to consider these points before any of us go advertise.
New artwork or creating content, there is no chance, absolutely no time. Retooling and reformatting is interesting and I"ll make sure Keith and Flavien get a read on this.
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Is there really no time to create some new concepts/mockups/prototypes too? I don’t really get that.
Like if you made an alternate damage skin for the ship, you can give an idea of what damage looks in a gif made frame by frame with photoshop or something in after effects.
Absolutely doesn’t need to be new stuff working in game. But you need to advertise the features, market it, hype up, sell it.
And like you don’t need to make a working weather system that has hurricanes and lighting, but if you can get some basic static volumetric clouds that look good enough for a still shot, and enhance it a bit in photoshop for the physics interaction you might want with them? There you go.
I’m not getting why that is terribly harder than the whole atmosphere thing. Clouds aren’t much different than deferred volumetric fog, right? You’re just working off the z-buffer and some procedural data in post. Hard to get really nice in real time, but probably something you can get a screenshot of at the right angle to enhance.
Or just a painted concept, but working off ingame for a start looks much better and convincing.
What else is being done this month that makes that impossible @INovaeAndre ? Because like I’ve said, this entire month should be 99% dedicated to marketing the Kickstarter and pretty much nothing else. You need its success to make the game as good as possible.
That’s how all the other companies that have run successful Kickstarters have done it…
I get people here work full time elsewhere and stuff so they can’t actually work full time on this during this month, like many established studios with other investors or their own company’s savings have been able to do, but still.
If the plan was to work on getting the game ready for dev access backers and alpha backers a month sooner by working on playable things during this month, then that’s a mistake, tbh.
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