I really like your suggestion to relayout the page. Here are two more suggestions:
- Don’t use images over the full width at all.
- Use a small version of these bubbles to introduce the team: https://www.inovaestudios.com/CompanyOverview/Team
Yeah I meant to have bubbles with my links there, but the forums didn’t format them.
It doesn’t format images if they are inline with other stuff. But that’s the idea: a single row of the forum portraits with names by them.
Speaking for myself, who ends up having to do a lot of the concept / graphic design work on this: I spend on average 3.5 to 4 hrs in Traffic in these hellish roadways in Seattle. Because my current paid work company is shipping a game by end of year I also average 10/11 hrs a day working currently. I have daily PT for 1 hr every other day from some leg injuries. We all have a life outside of Infinity with unfortunate obligations. That leaves me very little evening time, which often amounts to helping with streams or helping people in our test build. And this is without GF or family obligations.
We are all excited and doing as much as possible to make this a success, but our lives don’t just pause during this crazy ride. We could have put a lot more together from concept art / KS plan standpoint pre KS, but that would have pushed the Kickstarter out even further and we felt it came the time where we had to show what we had for many different reasons. Nothing can be absolutely be perfect. We are juggling a lot and trying not to burn out looking at you Hutch 
, and suggestions like reformatting what we already have in a more attractive and concise narrative, that will grab the attention of potential backers faster and has the potential up our pledge rate is exactly the type of feedback we need and appreciate.
I know it’s hard being outside looking in, and we are all motivated to meet our goal and beyond, but this is what we have and this is what we need to get out and have people see. All of you are helping us get there and know that the team is immensely appreciative of everyone’s efforts.
4 Likes
So it’s that artists are impossibly tied up, eh?
Honestly the Kickstarter took me quite by surprise, myself. I’ve been on-off following Infinity for almost a decade, but I think there was only like 11 days noticed before the KS actually launched?
I did try to minimize how much new art stuff would be needed. The main thing is just the composition and needing thumbnails. But it could still really use some new art for the for the 4 things I noted, even though 2 of those are quite in depth.
I believe you in Hutch. By Grabthar’s never give up. Never surrender!
Keep it up Inovae. I’m trying to answer comments and general questions when I can. I don’t have the artistic talent nor the twitter account to reach out to people so I’ve been leaving that to others. I’ve just been busy with classes/homework. There’s only so much time in a day.
Inovae I think that, given the circumstances, you guys are doing great. If we can get it battlescape funded(which I think we will) you’ll have the money to start working full time and get more monies during post KS donations as people see your progress. If, at the end of the day, the scope of battlescape is still small that’s okay. I have confidence it will be a great game.
OK, but at the weekend, someone must have a couple of hours to do some basic reformatting of the kickerstarter page.
At the very least, 5 minutes to put the “highlights” section back to the top.
Then maybe take out a couple of gifs that don’t look so great and replace with one or two of the fantastic screenshots that have been dripping out.
Next up, just resize some images that don’t need to be so big, as they interrupt the flow of text. Thinking of the corporation logos specifically.
You don’t need to go crazy, just a bit of tidying would help.
Edit: Actually, looking again, the gifs aren’t so bad. And you do have some nice images. But somehow my overall impression is lots of big embedded video pushing important stuff too far down the page.
Especially those live streams videos. They will only be watched by someone who’s already half sold on the game.
I’d keep the message at the top about having a working prototype, but put the actual videos at or near the end.
I dunno if I agree with what you suggested (partied all night…) but that gets kudos for effort at least. Nice work.
@INovaeAndre
You guys need a couple of interns… What you describe sounds really gnarly.
If you guys make the KS I really hope you try and hire a few believers who are willing to sign on for only humble salary or (worst case, hopefully not) mostly volunteer the way you guys have been up to now.
Sometimes I don’t think you guys understand. If we make only the minimum (which seems to be the most likely scenario if we’re successful at all), current dev team members with good paying jobs will be the ones leaving said jobs to make very humble salaries, in some cases making much less than they currently do, there will be no $$ to hire these “helpers”. Some of us will still have to be free/part time receiving no salary from INS whatsoever as there will not be enough money from the KS to fund the entire dev team.
We’ll look into the suggestions for the KS page, but tbh, don’t expect a complete overhaul with a bunch of new content, that’s just not in the cards. Most of us are running on 4-5 hrs of sleep per night as it is.
The damage model is going to be a power management gameplay feature, not a comprehensive art based visual damage model. On the art side, at the most it is a damage skin, no mesh changes. It’s likely visual damage will mainly come from a decal system, which is not currently implemented in the engine as of yet.
2 Likes
I understand… I was trying to be positive. 300k for ~5 man team over 2 years seems thin. I really hope you guys make the 300k though. I reckon that will be the hardest part.
1 Like
The Everspace example I showed is just a shader and not mesh changes. It is pretty and hype, though.
I just hope you get that means you will have a much harder time building a “brand” that will lead to raising the $5mil+ needed to make TQFE.
If you want to end at I:B, then well sure.
You should have additional funding set up the moment the Kickstarter ends to ride the successful KS hype, like I keep saying. You should be building things in a structured way that regularly leaves something to show off to promote it to keep additional funding coming in.
But that’s not going to happen without someone that understands marketing better to organize and structure you guys.
[quote=“innociv, post:248, topic:1159”]
I did try to minimize how much new art stuff would be needed. The main thing is just the composition and needing thumbnails. But it could still really use some new art for the for the 4 things I noted, even though 2 of those are quite in depth.[/quote]
One of your first criticism is that there’s a wall of videos before you get to the information. Well guess what. Our original KS page wasn’t structured that way in the first days. We only added those because of the feedback of the community saying that the page sucked, and that we had to promote the seamless transitions a lot more, since that was one of the unique selling points of the project.
Everybody seem to have different opinions on what to do on that KS page.
10 Likes
Well they said it sucked, but did they say it should start with a long line of videos?
A lot of what is going on is perspective.
From your perspective, you’re developers, you know your game, you know what you like. But you don’t know all the missing holes when you put something to paper for others that you aren’t thinking about because you already know it.
And others come along, they’re fans and they have been following the game and know what it’s about, so it mostly sees fine but they see it’s not grabbing people. But they’re still lacking the perspective because they get what it’s about. They’re not fresh eyes. So maybe they just assume “dunno, people like videos?!”
I’m not fresh eyes either, but I’ve dealt with hundreds of that “fresh eyes” feedback myself on my own dev that I think has helped me grow to see the sort of perspective those people have even on something I know pretty well. And I was also talking with some people who were completely new to Infinity to get their feedback (and those are the most important people that you need to convert to backers, after all). And I’ve followed a number of successful and unsuccessful Kickstarters to try and gauge what works. So I feel largely confident in what I laid out except perhaps that the way I listed out the highlights might have text lost between images, and could maybe use little sub-headers.
Anyway, now that they’ve seen my analysis, they seem to think it’s good, at least. Most people don’t know what’s what until it’s in front of their face.
Fact is still that the conversion rate of people that view the Kickstarter to those that back is not very high. Even if my changes aren’t right, which is subjective yeah, something’s got to give.
You mean compared to other game KSs ?
Do you have studies or stats about that ?
I’m discounting the first day which was like 5%, which is largely from your mailing list and such giving it a big bump. Tons of successful KS projects do not have anything like that to start with to give such a comparatively strong first day to the other days.
Plus, you always throw out outliers in statistics.
Leaving that one out, or even leaving it in and trending the current rate to the end of its duration, you’re at around 2.5%.
Which is average, so it could be worse, but like what I said about the average KS project. Being average is rarely a good thing.
I don’t have data on the conversion rate for like E:D or Everspace and such, though.
1 Like
Ideally everyone would show a clear and brief mockup/illustration of their ideal KS layout… That way we could make precise and objective comparisons. I’ve had some ideas since KS day 1 and they’re actually somewhere between the current original KS page and what Innociv proposed, but I’m probably not going to have time before this weekend to mock it up.
Still no promised post by Chris Roberts. I am beginning to think that it did just get lost in communication.
It is almost vital that it gets made though and I am pretty sure everyone here agrees with that.
Give them some time. It might surprise you, but it does take some time to write extensive, well thought out and constructive posts. Especially if they end up asking for a prototype to test it out before writing something up.
CR in F42 (UK) now aik.
Someone on the community chat server commented that Chris Roberts has previously only posted about projects that had already been successfully funded.
That makes a lot of sense, why take the risk of looking like you’re endorsing a failure when you can simply wait for a while and look like a hero for endorsing a successful project.
1 Like
I’m a bit surprised that INS didn’t take out a small loan to cover lost wages of team members during the KS and have them take unpaid leave to the max extent possible during this month.
I understand certain working situations would make this impossible, but find it hard to believe that none of you have comp time or sick days on the books.
Opportunities like this don’t come around too often.
edit: I don’t mean to sound disrespectful - and I recognize you guys are working your asses off - but why not go all in? The opportunity loss is much, MUCH greater than any near term losses.