Thoughts about the livestreams

Battlescape
1

I think they will have minimal impact on the pledges, simply because we already have hours and hours and hours of gameplay on youtube. The problem with the kickstarter isn’t lack of gameplay videos, but lack of awareness from the gaming public, and this won’t really change by flooding youtube with more hours of gameplay where half the time you are just following hutchins saying “3…2…1… turn left”. Most of what you did has already been done by other streamers, who have the know-how to do it with better commentary and less “oops, I blew up, lets wait 10 minutes until I get back there”. The combat parts were cool, but most people won’t watch 2 hours of video to find those parts.

Instead of “wasting” so many hours(8 devs times 2 hours=16 hours of work) with more “bland” and huge gameplay videos, I suggest you plan and film certain special shots and get other short videos ready.

Do something people can share around and actually get the word out.

Examples of special shots/videos:

-1min combat montage inside the 30km station, in the asteroid belt and in a canyon of lava(12 5 second shots, 4 on each area).
-1min “diversity” video showing all assets in the prototype, with a couple ships flying in the lava planet at night, rings, gas giant, trees, showing the stations, maybe speeding up some footage to show more stuff.
-1min “best of” footage with the best moments of todays livestream(and other dev videos)

I think it is much better to try to catch reddit’s(or other large communities) attention with a short and great video that gets shared a lot, than posting a “here is another couple hours of the same thing you already have hours of on youtube” that only people that have already pledged will watch.

I know you guys are short on time, but that is why you probably have to choose to either do those streams or do the planned videos. Or maybe do a shorter livestream with a few devs filming the shots for the videos.

I suggest you monitor how little this livestream upped the number of pledges(if at all) in the next couple of days and decide to change course in time for next weekend.

2 Likes
2

Read the first few sentences, tl;dr. Though I do agree there is most likely diminishing returns to the streams these days.

3

If you type “Infinity battlescape” on youtube, just on the first page you get over SEVEN hours of gameplay. :confused:

4

I disagree.

There was no footage out there until now that showed that many players coordinated flying. And for a lot of people that’s something that spurs their imagination.
Second of all. It shows that the devs are humans and that the game is fun to play together. Also something no streamer until now has shown to this point.

The Livestream had a visible impact. Granted, most of the pledge increase came from people upping their pledge. Also. It’s impossible to measure how much this stream had an impact during the next couple of days. There are too many factors that influence the funding, those can’t be divided up and distilled to show “this was done by the livestream”.

There were also tons of questions answered.

5

Even if the livestream does have a bigger impact than Im expecting, the next one is still going to have a much smaller effect. And unless there is something significant in the next couple of days that could also increase the regular “event free” pledges per day of 4 thousand, the effect of the livestreams would be quite easy to identify.

6

66 new backers today, 83 yesterday.

7

We were at ~$232k prior to the live stream ending. Now we’re almost to $236, it put us back on the front of /r/gaming, so it has been a modest bump that saved today from being a disappointing funding day.

6 Likes
8

And if more streamers are broadcasting next time, it will have even greater impact. So it is worth doing it again.

9

This might be a bit too much of a wishlist, but here goes…

Given that your next livestream will be the last before the end of the KS, you should try and get as many people in as the prototype can handle. It should be planned with some time in advance to make sure that you can get enough people, and if you can’t, that you can get the prototype to some new people that are available at that time, get them up and running and deal with any tech issues before the stream starts.

If you can get somewhere between 20-40 people on the server with it still being stable (it doesn’t necessarily have to play well if you can still get the point across), then you should go for some combat in a couple of locales, possibly with the streamer acting as an observer. I would go for fighting in the ring system and in the canyons at the very least, because they are interesting and dynamic environments that can showcase strategies or at least allow people to imagine the strategies they’d use.

I’d end the stream “formally” with a 10-20 minute Q&A, where the dev team read questions out from the chat and answer them. But there’s no reason to stop the stream at the end of a given period of time, just keep going until the viewer count is low enough for it to no longer be worthwhile. It’s also worth pointing out that this stream is pretty much your last chance, so you should be prepared to go all-out for it.

4 Likes
10

Absolutely true. Players working together suggests achieving more interesting goals than simply having a bunch of solo players converge on a target to blow it to smithereens.

That said, I think @AngryMarine has a very good point - posting a huge block of gameplay footage really isn’t doing a whole lot. People are finding stuff like the group flying video that @Crayfish posted - with the nice whoops-boom moment. That’s the stuff that’s getting you backers.

If you’re going to do one more, for pity’s sake do a scenario that suggests the sort of gameplay that you actually plan to have. Present the classic battle of 10 guys going down to the surface to attack an installation, only to be met with 10 guys coming up. Show it from both viewpoints.

Its a shame you don’t have two types of ship. Can you quickly tint the skins and ammo to show the teams?

Alternately, set up a scenario that’s even more complex. Ten guys going down, three going up. The three are waxed in short order, but the ten are delayed such that just as they think they’re going to be able to capture the factory, a group of ten reinforcements arrive. Perhaps from two directions.

[they’ve just finished off the three and are on the way down]
“That was sweet. Three kills, no losses.”
“Dave is such a kill stealer :)”
“Dude, you were taking forever.”
“Okay, spread out a bit and find this factory.”
“Hey, I can see it. It’s just below me. That’s your… left side.”
“Yup, I see it. We got this!”
“Wait, I’ve got some ships coming in.”
“I see them. It looks like three more guys. Should be fun.”
“What? No. This is a group of seven. We’ve got two groups coming in.”
“That’s ten total.”
“Yeah, I can add.”
“Well, let’s hit the smaller group first.”
“Too late, they’re already on… aw crap. I’m dead.”

The more the merrier.

2 Likes
11

+1 for scripted, curated event with goals, short focused timespan, dedicated Q&A, and as many in the game as feasible. Also NO REPAIRING :stuck_out_tongue:

12

Just sat there cursing KS for not offering alternatives to CC payment, repeating “lemme fucking donate” over and over again during the stream … Seeing people actually having to practice and coordinate their flight and warp manouvers (not only the combat) in order to avoid certain death amongst so many other immersive things really did it for me.

Flavians crashes were the best, hands down … Made me push into the backrest of my seat pretty hard.

13

Yeah, it was pretty great. My only small criticism would be: not enough HUDless and 3rd person views. I understand that flying without seeing where you are going is hard, but I’d love to see some beautiful views, like the sun setting behind the Hellion for example, without the HUD getting in the way. Plus, I think it helps get a sense of scale when you watch something from both first and third person view.

14

The results were a little better than I expected, but I have to remind you guys that the question is not how much we got, but how much another of those streams we would get. And from the looks of it most of the money came from upping pledges, not from new people.

The only thing about that livestream I see on /r/gaming is a 1 minute video of it that is very similar to what I described in my first post. This video had 7 times more viewers than your livestream, so I believe this made a much bigger impact than the livestream itself.

I imagine if you guys actually planned ahead on what shots you want and go executing one by one, the videos would look even better. And posting one short but impressive video every 3 days on reddit is probably going to bring 10 times more money than another livestream could.

edit: And somebody seems to have just removed a 2.000$ pledge, making today a negative day. Another example of why having more people pledging is safer than just trusting people to up their pledges.

15

If you want to do that, you should let people in the prototype fly the helion with different skins…

16

It was only possible for me to record this video because the livestream happened. But I sort of agree with you original post.
While the livestream was fun, it could have been even better, had it been more focused. But its very hard to coordinate such a thing with this many people!!

What would really make the livestream way cooler in my opinion:

There are already two separate teams (red and green), but they don’t work because its hard to tell which colors you are and the recticles alone also are quite faint in the heat of the battle.
The solution would be red/green colored lasers. Red lasers for the red team, green lasers for the green team.
Then it becomes clear which color you are (just look at your shots) and what is happening on the battlescape. The battles would also be much more cinematic (it would look very star-wars like). And you could fight until one team is completely destroyed.

Tagging @INovaeFlavien and @INovaeKeith

1 Like
17

I heard women are great at marketing :wink: here it is my 2 cents…

also it would be nice to schedule a day for mass player testing, like having a big brawl or a colective racing/tour. I am game! o7

1 Like
18

You should check with the devs for the time and date, think they have that planned.

19

Here you go Anarch0s. Keep up the fun stuff:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EdchtJXcI-lG-S24Qq2zp8zokjXK5Ry13mAhJUbbFkc/edit

20

I just modified the laser effect file a little bit to make it red:

I think it really looks cool.
@INovaeFlavien What are your thoughts on the red/green team laser color idea?

7 Likes