Ideas for the Kickstarter

Battlescape
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@innociv Put the side by side images in proper img tags:

<img src='//inovaestudios.blob.core.windows.net/forumsavatars/original/2X/c/c49df1a91ccce4fcfdaaf63e7c871ea9aa59d770.jpg'/><img src='//inovaestudios.blob.core.windows.net/forumsavatars/original/2X/e/ea22b01c227b67a9677ef01c1c8fde6843df4ed1.jpg'/><img src='//inovaestudios.blob.core.windows.net/forumsavatars/original/2X/6/6313ceaa8e8fe271f2c6d3cb0e913f4a091514e2.jpg'/><img src='//inovaestudios.blob.core.windows.net/forumsavatars/original/2X/a/ad92f5dc52296ea2ed8ef8a11513a81e4755240f.jpg'/>

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I strongly suggest another small change to the Kickstarter campaign, to appeal to peoples bargain-hunting mentality and give them logic reasons to pledge during the campaign.

As a long time follower, I am under the impression that the offered Kickstarter rewards prices are heavily discounted in comparison to the planned retail price:

I didn’t find any mention on the I:B Kickstarter page of this bargain, please change that!

Some interested visitors on the campaign page may defer to buy the game until it is released, because they see no reason beside the supporter badges and decals to back the project now.
But for I-Novae Studios it makes a big difference if someone pays you $20 now or maybe $30 in 2017.

For me personally one paragraph on the Kickstarter page from Star Citizen was the single reason I backed them during there campaign and bought Elite: Dangerous only at its release:

We need your support! […]
Finally we are offering the pledge slots a discount to what the final digital price will be. Like Guild Wars 2, the basic game will be $60, but for the very early backers we are offering the entry tier at $30. But hurry! Slots are limited!

tl;dr: Inform indecisive backers that they save money by backing Infinity: Battlescape now!

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267

Ty fixed.

Definitely looks nice, I’d say.

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Not true…Chris promoted Elite before they passed the line…there are more examples too.

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If we are talking about the format of the Kickstarter, for me it is mostly seems like the top part is out of order, I thought that the ordering was a bit confusing and I got that feeling like ‘wait did I miss the basic overview somewhere?’, but I guess I am just another user with another opinion.

I would have:

  1. What is Battlescape
  2. Highlights
  3. Then a bunch of those videos and media
  4. Spaceship with Concept Art
  5. Stretch Goals
  6. Everything else in whatever order

For me personally, I think of a new person coming to this game, that they would want that basic 1 paragraph overview, followed by a list of the core game features (1 & 2) so I have a general idea of what the game is about. Yes all the seamless transition videos are good, but just bump those down just a bit IMHO. I do like how you guys have put important phrases in bold like hundreds of spaceships etc

Other than that small reordering, I think you did good showing off the seamless transitions. However there is one other big thing that is going to sell this game that you have not shown off enough:

Large Battles

I think this is your main selling point (along with the seamless transitions) that no other game can do. Is it possible for you guys to load up the prototype and say spawn a few hundred AI ships in a furball up in space around some rings, and maybe around an asteroid mining station, and down on the surface of a planet in that canyon, and just take a few screenshots of them all duking it out, all weapons firing full action shots, so people viewing your KS page really get that sense of how epic feeling the game will be.

I think of a vision you could play off of for an epic space battle that most every sci-fi fan will be familiar with would be Star Wars EP 3 - The Battle of Coruscant. That feeling you get at 45 seconds into the movie when you see those small ships dip down from space and open up into a huge battle field with hundreds of other ships firing. Play off those emotions…

While I agree there might be some angry backers, I would try to setup a date and time in the next week convenient for you guys and ask ppl to just sign up in a thread if they could make it (just wing it :smile: ) and just take ppl on a first come first serve basis. For those that have bough developer tier access just have them send you guys an email with a screenshot of their KS page if they want in.

Even if you only get like 30 ppl that can connect, I think it would be cool to just record the raw video of a bunch of players fighting (I assume you have a god mode freecam), then just add an epic background track and throw that up on the KS page.

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I would also add a small “battlescape in the press” before it all, with link to the imgur(mentioning it was first page in reddit) and what you guys think are the best gameplay videos or articles(just the link). Then I would swap the “Seamless transitions” with the “what is battlescape” part so it showed up first, and would send the corporation logos further down, because nobody cares about logos. I do agree with most of innociv’s ideas.

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I think we all have an idea of what is “the good” kickstarter. But I would just say to everyone to keep in mind that we are not the creators, just a community trying to help an indie studio to be funded as it deserves it.

I can confirm that they’re listening to community A LOT already, and the video of seamless transition has been remade at least 2 times just because of feedbacks.

There is a lot of content, so the kickstarter page is effectively a little big, but it’s not something really important for a potential backer. The only problem of I-Novae studio is that people mostly don’t know it exists !

See what happens when a mainstream makes I:B visible :

dailypledges.png940×270 17.2 KB

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272

Yeah bickering on and on about how a video is placed on the KS or what text should be what size is IMO pointless.
The only real impact we can have is getting more streamers/websites report on this game actually EXISTING. If they show up on the ks page they pledge that’s the skinny of it.
Our job is to make them show up on that KS page!

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273

One thing that confuses me about some of the dev replies is with regards to the time they have available. Time will always be a difficulty, but you guys are trying to sell the population on something that will be your primary job for the next ‘x’ years. There shouldn’t be any excuse about any other job, this would be your only job if you acquire the funding. I feel like that is the fan opinion with regards to how they interpret this project, everything about the developer communication and efforts seem half-assed. You guys are doing a poor job marketing Battlescape and then when the fans, that seem to care a lot and have been around for many years, give you suggestions - you give negative or non-progressive replies.

You guys are in desperate need of PR management in addition to a complete overhaul of your marketing. The fact that many games have gotten much more money with much less to show and a smaller overall concept should indicate to you all that you have some SERIOUS ISSUES THAT REQUIRE IMMEDIATE FIXING; with each passing day it becomes less likely that you will even hit your minimum KS goal.

Also consider how your attitude / approach as devs is interpreted with the additional piece of information that this project has been in existence for 8+ years. The specifics don’t matter to most people, they’ll see that and become immediately disinterested. You guys really need to switch into overdrive, because your approach makes it seem like you’re not very serious about Infinity or it’s potential future.

I believe that Infinity: Battlescape has potential and it’ll be sad to see that potential unrealized because of some fixable issues.

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274

In many ways, I agree with this. That’s why I started the thread, after all.

Our criticisms may come across as ignorant or inconsiderate to the developers, and that makes it even harder to do so because many of us consider them as ‘forums pals’, We’ve been a part of this community for the better part of a decade, and know there are real people with practical life concerns behind the forum avatars and KS campaigns.

But at the end of the day, we, the community, want to see the KS succeed - and it’s disheartening to see the INS team only giving the campaign a portion of their time. Sure - they’re giving it all of their free time - but the fact that the team hasn’t elevated this campaign to the highest priority - above their current day jobs - is shocking. How many team members do you have - 6? So take turns, 2 people at a time, taking a week (or even 3 days) off from your day job so you can devote your full attention to this effort. It reeks of lack of team leadership or faith in your product.

You could say it’s easy for me to be an ‘armchair quarterback’ and tell you what you should be doing without any concept of the effort. Well, I launched a website three years ago, and took two weeks of leave in order to do so. Yes, I had to save up for this free time, and yes it was disappointing when the venture ultimately failed - but at least I know I did everything in my power at the time to make it a success. Can you say the same?

With that dedicated effort, you could answer 90% of the KS campaign comments (aggregate the common Q & A’s into a FAQ so you can copy-paste to save time), host and schedule ongoing play-tests with increasing numbers of players, work with your community to crowd-source new media etc (I guarantee we could come up with a stock of cool videos for you to distill and showcase), etc, etc. The list goes on, and countless very good suggestions have been made in this thread as to where you could efficiently dedicate your efforts.

You know these posts are being made out of passion for the project and desire to see you succeed. I hope you can read what may come across as harsh criticism and assess it objectively. Can’t at least some of your team afford the time off to improve your chances of success? If the answer truly is no, then I"ll stop trying to argue this matter and just go back to hoping for the best. But that in itself raises questions about the efficacy of this team, even if funded.

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Everything in life is circumstantial and their circumstances in life are private just like yours, mine and everyone else’s. These ridiculing comments are as if you guys are telling the deveopers to quit dragging ass and start being superhuman! A loan, really…

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I think this is a must for I-Novae, you need an official video of combat, of dog fighting that is straight to the point. Showing off your networking and proof of combat. Right now the only real combat videos are posted by journalists and a journalist isnt going to post a video of another journalists combat experience. If they dont have time to check out the pre-alpha at least give them access to a nice short video of combat that they can post in their articles. At RPS for example most of the people reading the article are of the belief their is no combat or actual networking in the engine yet. Just a tech demo and a planetary video.

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I guess they just randomly decided one day to make a KS. Why would they plan economically and time-wise days, months, years in advance? That’s crazy talk!

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And it’s their Kickstarter to manage. How about we let them manage it? If it fails, that’s on their heads.

Or at least it was until members of this forum started shitting on the people writing about the Kickstarter because they weren’t as soul-suckingly cheery about the project as some may have wanted.

Criticism such as “you should have taken a full month off work to manage this kickstarter” aren’t constructive. That’s not feed back. That’s entitled whining. It’s well beneath what I’ve come to expect from this community, and I’m beyond dismayed to actually see it happening.

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279

I guess you define ‘shitting on’ as people who offer concern and constructive criticism along with specific advice as to the execution of their ideas; as some forum members have done above. It seems you also label the word ‘entitled’ similarly based on your usage.

It is human nature to want to help others succeed - especially when they identify something worthy of their attention that is not developing into it’s full potential.

I suppose you don’t care, that you’d prefer I:BS fail in order to satisfy some internal sadism?

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@cakensworth, I think the point that @Kichae was trying to get across was that constructive criticism is very much about tone of voice and how you say something (as opposed to just what you say).

At this point, dictationally jousting is a waste of everyone’s time, and commenting about what could/should have been done is of little use when we should be focusing on what we can still do.

=)

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281

We have a healthy 21 days still to go. While this can seem short, it is still a substantial amount of time for garnering public interest and raising support for INS and I:B. As long as the community keeps up the effort to get noticed and evangelize the kickstarter, we stand a good chance of meeting funding levels. I hope that we go well passed the minimum amount and meet some of the higher tiers as I can only imagine how much of a sacrifice the devs will have to make to produce the game with minimum funding.

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Yes! Really! I take it you’ve never tried to start a business before…

I understand the the desire to stick to constructive criticisms and the feeling that some statements in this thread including my own have not been constructive. You’re absolutely entitled to your opinion and I respect it however in my own opinion I do feel the comments were constructive, or else I would not have made them.

By expressing my surprise with the team members not taking a significant amount of time off from work to focus on the Kickstarter, I am genuinely hoping they will consider this course of action. Particularly during the last, critical week of the campaign.

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I can’t help but feel there is a serious disconnect between what we’re doing and what you, as a community, perceive what our efforts are.

We’ve all taken days off for the launch of the campaign. Allright, that’s not the entire month, but you just can’t realistically expect everybody to be gone for a month. Most of us are employed and each respective employer would probably not appreciate to see their employee take the month off, even unpaid. That’s just a matter of a fact.

Personally, I’ve been working full-time for the past 3 years and I invested around $100K of my own savings to get this KS out of the door. I couldn’t afford it to be delayed more.

Every single minute you’re here, claiming we are lazy and “don’t care”, is a minute we are collectively spending to sort out e-mails, contact/recontact people, analyzing what sites are speaking of us or not, helping or speaking to streamers/youtubers, guiding/tutoring them to have the best experience. Doing interviews, even to minor sites. Answering questions on forums. Replying to comments on the KS page. Replying to everybody who contacts us through private messages on KS ( that’s hundreds ). Putting tweaks on our content. Producing new content ( each of these vids is hours of work ). And so on…

I’ve been working 80+ hours a week just this month, going to sleep at 4-5 am in average. I know others are in a similar case.

If that’s your definition of being lazy and not caring, then so be it. I can’t physically do more.

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284

Don’t be sad, Flavien! We believe in you!

Nobody goes through years of building a project to then give up on it at a critical time. It seems obvious to me you’re all doing everything humanly and reasonably possible to make this Kickstarter work, and that should be worth a huge amount of respect.

I feel like this thread, while trying to be helpful, is misguided. At the very least, the thread title is pessimistic and not a great thing to see at the top of the forum (perhaps “Ideas for the Kickstarter” or something?) We all want this to succeed, but it has to be done I-Novae’s way - just as it has been from the very beginning. Otherwise we lose the collective vision we have for this game.

After all, we’re all here because we believe in it, aren’t we?

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