The Kickstarter campaign is live!
Remember, Kickstarter works like this: you don’t get charged unless the campaign is successful (the funding goal is met), AND you can change the amount you’re backing at any time during the campaign.
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been months since we launched our little website.
We started working on this game with the core goal of building a community around the shared experience of enjoying sci-fi throughout our lives.
We’re building a sci-fi playground where we have the freedom to create in meaningful ways, where characters matter in an ever-changing universe. We want to craft experiences that you recognize from the things you love but can also surprise you by being unique and personal, by showing you that your decisions matter.
We’ve had many sleepless nights since we’ve started working on this game and still have a few more as the Kickstarter campaign launches.
We believe that we’ve got a strong game concept backed by desires as players we want to see met. The challenge going forward is to make enough Internet-noise to find other like-minded people who want the same things we want. And that’s where you come in.
The Butterfly Effect (No, not Ashton Kutcher)
The beauty of crowdfunding to me is how empowering it is. Instead of waiting for the industry to tell me what’s going to be available and trying to choose the thing that’s most likely to be worth my money, I can conjure what I actually want into existence with my wallet. And it’s cheaper and gives me more perks.
But, crowdfunding campaigns rely on a snowball effect. Some people who are incredibly passionate about a game will back it immediately. But most people who are hearing about it for the first time need a vote of confidence from existing backers before they’ll back. And how many backers they need to see varies from person to person. So, the first wave brings the second wave, the second brings the third and so on.
This is why if you plan on backing us yourselves, please do so as early as possible. I cannot overstate the importance of this, as a lot of media interest and getting featured on Kickstarter.com revolves around the first wave of backers in the first 2-3 days of a project.
Word of Mouth… And Keyboard
Generating interest and getting cool things by backing is great, but a campaign can’t fund without people finding out about it.
Unless you’ve got a big marketing budget and a bunch of media contacts, indie campaigns run on word-of-mouth. Here are some of the ways you can help us spread the word:
- Share and Like our Fan Page and our individual posts on Facebook!
- Tweet and retweet us (@jellyfish_games) on Twitter! Some campaigns owe their success mostly to Twitter
- Upvote our posts on Reddit! We post regularly on reddit.com/r/IndieGaming and reddit.com/r/BaseBuildingGames.
- If you’re part of any forums or comment on sites that might have interested members, post something there!
- Tell your friends, family, neighbours, grocery store employees, strangers on the street!
If we’re lucky, we’ll get the word out quickly and it’ll be easy street from there. But the more likely scenario is that we’re going to have a 30-day fight in front of us. So let’s fight for Astrobase Command together!
