The first week of the Kickstarter is over and it is looking good so far with almost half of the needed funds reached in only a week. Kicktraq is currently projecting a final number of about 660k.
Looking at the current daily pledges however shows that a lot of media attention is required to boost the numbers. The worst day had only 6600 dollars. Assuming the worst case, that some days make even less money, it could be a little tight at the end.
So here is my idea to promote the kickstarter:
DISCLAIMER: I don’t know how realistic/doable this is, it is probably something the devs already thought about and evaluated themselves and dismissed it as a shit idea.
Nevertheless let me explain, probably won’t hurt.
Publishing a single player planetary tech demo for free (not an early build like the current prototype).The demo should only serve as an advertisement and demonstration of the engine.
This could look like that:
only one planet (the one with green) and a star available
planet has a ring and a “station” where the player starts
the station is only a landingpad attached to an asteroid, the players spawns looking at a giant ingame billboard that urges the player to pledge
the player can control the helion and explore the planet
Thats it bassically. People love free stuff, a lot of people saw the reddit post for example but only a hand full of those people pledged. A very limited free tech demo would certainly garner similar attention (probably much more) and yield a higher conversion.
Well you’d have to make it very clear that it’s just a demo, or people would say that there’s only one planet, no real solar system scale or whatever. However, if you want this, why not just release the prototype to the public? of course there are a few problems with releasing any version of a far from finished prototype, because it doesn’t represent the final game.
Maybe the billboard call-to-action should include a countdown aswell (xx amount of dollar until goal reached). But I guess this would actually be quite a lot of work todo, but it would definately pull in a huuuuuge crowd). And If you really want to go all out enable the oculus support too (success guaranteed)!
The prototype as it now is doesn’t work because you need to connect to a server. No basic server would survive that load.
You also can’t use the prototype because some backers would be angry, like the dev tier backers. Maybe they would feel cheated that everyone gets to play it early, even if it is just one old version.
You could call it “experimental oculus rift support”. Maybe even the rift users alone could guarantee the success of the kickstarter.
Lets hope a drastic option like this won’t be nessesary.
