I’m not talking about a month. You need a lot more than that to create proper momentum unless you are a very established name (which this project isn’t yet).
That is why I would say, start the promoting now, like right now. People that would support the kickstarter won’t give up because there is too much info about the game. People that normally wouldn’t do it will know about it before the kickstarter shows up.
And by doing early promoting (like 6 months before) you can get great feedback and even ideas on how to improve your eventual pitch. Understanding what people like or not about the project and what they expect from it.
That’s a good point. I did thought it would be better to wait, keep on working, then publish a ton of new stuff in a flash to have a surprise effect like NMS had. But maybe the reason i am thinking this way, is in fact the lack of new content we get to see, because i believe I-Novae simply does not have new things to show… i hope i am not right
X: Rebirth failed because it’s single player. People would rather play with their friends in a decent game than alone in a great one. I know you want to get this right but you’re getting passed by and Battlescape is just going to slow you down even more. I know I’m just going to be disregarded but all of my friends think the same thing. We really have no interest in Battlescape and would much rather just purchase contributor packs for the actual Infinity MMO. A lot of them are getting impatient. Most are starting to buy the packs in Star Citizen since its closer to release and saying they’ll just buy your game if it comes out.
GDC is mid-march and our target for the release of the Kickstarter is immediately prior to that. The ramp up to that date is scheduled to begin in January. We’re working on a major content release as a part of that ramp up, I just need to finish the company and Battlescape websites which I’m working on right now. Also, if you live in the Phoenix, AZ metropolitan area we’re trying to organize an art gallery featuring all of our artwork to launch during the Kickstarter campaign. Anybody will be welcome to show up and speak with me directly. We have about a ton of moving pieces we’re trying to bring together to launch this Kickstarter. We understand most of that isn’t visible to you guys and perhaps that’s just because we mistakenly think most of that isn’t particularly interesting. We’re doing the best we can and we hope to have it all ready soon.
An art gallery in Arizona?
Please promise me you’ll never use the words “art gallery” again to refer to this event, at least until after the Kickstarter. Single greatest resource on the internet is teenage boys with more money than sense, and while they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity I think art galleries are officially a teenage-repellant if they contain anything but poorly drawn genitalia.
Mind you, I’m not saying I wouldn’t prefer for Infinity to be entirely absent of the bad kind of teenagers, just that I’d rather have Infinity with teenagers than a cancelled project without.
Anyway, with regards to the ramp up, I expect that at least a few people on these forums have some level of presence on websites like Youtube and Twitch; do your plans involve any form of encouragement for them to talk about I:B at a certain point in time? Here I’m thinking anything from a (more or less) playable prototype to just a selection of footage to edit and release at a certain date or even just a trailer suitable for rebroadcast on Twitch (with a clear statement that doing so is allowed and even encouraged). Basically something to get a lot of powerful word of mouth happening at the same time. Personally I’d even accept a “Feb 26th would be a great day to go talk about us on Twitch”, though my reach is unlikely to be more than a few hundred people as I’d be unwilling to do so anywhere I wasn’t already well known.
I mean hell, you never know, someone here could be a friend of someone in the Yogscast. Easy way to make half a million, if you ended up on their main channel at the right time.
Sounds like a plan (well, of course it is).
Would absolutely love to go to the art gallery, if it is indeed a gallery of the artwork of the game!
Will you be releasing the art on the websites too? I’m sure everyone who won’t be able to attend would love to be able to see, or will it be in one of the Kickstarter tiers?
That sounds like a great idea.
I won’t hammer on the same topic anymore but just to make it clear. Get the game website (don’t really know why putting effort on the company one) asap, and that I mean like right now!
Get a blog going, and a news page, gallery press kit etc, plus twitter so things like what you just mentioned don’t get lost. And that should take you maximum a week. Get a template for wordpress or something else, it doesn’t have to be fancy, it just needs to exists. You can iterate on it after!!
The new Inovae website took ages to show up and as a member I didn’t even get a notification that the new forums were up, I can’t imagine how many people you lost with that move.
We need to see Kotaku, Polygon, RPS and whatever other outlets mentioning things like these and talking about any new updates you do!
I love when ppl say things like this
I didn’t meant to come out as arrogant, I’m also a game developer and went through similar processes.
Nowadays you can create a solid enough layout using available templates. It won’t win any awards but it will convey the message you need.
here is a good example:
http://dear-esther.com/
We aren’t using any templates. The website has been coded by hand from scratch.
Well, they have already started to promote it. The problem is that they were releasing blog posts that were only visible on twitter, or facebook, while their website seemed stagnant. Not to mention that there is no InfinityBattlescape.com, and the battlescape section in the company website just says “coming soon”.
What they could do, once the websites are finished, is to get all blogs and info up at once with a big kickstarter countdown, and then just start sending the website link to all gaming sites to see if they get some coverage.
This place needs to be jump-started into a state of hype and community-building asap.
Oh, and when the I:B site is up, there needs to be a page with all the info that has been released about it so far. Maybe somebody could start making a summary of all the dev’s posts about the game so we can have a better picture while the official “about” page isn’t up.(unless keith intends to release the website with something similar in the next few days).
I’ve forgotten the answers to some questions all ready. (a joke about space wales, space bunnies and space ponies) Now the answers are scattered all over different post. One place would be nice.
It seems that Clifford Bleszinski (Epic Games) hasn’t heard about Infinity, he finds No Man’s Sky as being insane that it is being developed by just four people. Developing what exactly, we really have no proof of procedural generation only a concept.
Or Limit Theory.
Well, LT is insane
Well Limit Theory does not need to deal with floating point precision problems like I-Novae do, but as an example of one man making a full 3D game by himself sure.
Surely @INovaeKeith knows Cliff personally, perhaps Cliff was even his boss. But Keith did say that his former colleagues at Epic Games aren’t actually that interested in what he is doing now at I-Novae.
Yes I know Cliff personally and no I never showed Infinity to him. The only designer at Epic I ever showed Infinity was Lee Perry when I ran into him at GDC about a year after I quit. Once I finish getting our new website up I’ll shoot cliff a message since he’s talking about NMS now.
Limit theory has double precision now too(I think), and bigger planets(not real scaled though).
And as “one man job” goes, Limit theory seems much more interesting than No man’s sky. I still haven’t found a good reason to be excited about NMS, though, to be fair, they haven’t shown us much yet.
Bad news for the developers and the game
The studio has been completely flooded…
Reminds me of that april fools joke of Flavien… but this is for real
Sad 67890