News from the Kickstarter Underground

So, you thought I was gone huh?  Guess what? Mercenaries LIVE FOREVER.  :)

Neither a certain social "game" company's heisenbugs, nor their associated shills, can kill me.  But, that's another story, for another kind of flame war. We're just warming up the fuel line right now.

Won't lie to you, we're in trouble, again.   

Sit back, I got a tale to tell.


PART 1 : PIMPIN' AIN'T EASY. 

Pimpstarter was NOT a solution we wanted. Expending community outreach effort, exposing the project to public scrutiny, and the image of "begging for funds" weren't liabilities I was willing to take. If anything, rolling a kickstarter campaign meant we have to DOUBLE our efforts in the project, and now we have everyones eyes on us.

Trolls, flames, haters, come along with the territory. We'll handle it.

Kickstarter, for us, introduced liabilities and advantages. The maneuver is risky at best. We get to reach the audience before our game is out, however, it requires us to take on a heavier load. We also have the ability to test our concept in public view.

We're not "indies"; isolated in our own rooms, brooding over game delivery. We take our game production seriously, we don't hold delivery for five freaking years to make a baby project.

We wanna show this engine to the public and test our strength. Kickstarter offers that solution, with a cost of community outreach effort.  Not a bad deal if you wanna take it.

We can't go on the road physically, while showing off our prototype work. We're a crew that rolls through Skype, Dropbox and Git, and nothing else. We do not have a physical office, and we've been developing this game primarily online.

We have a severe disadvantage by being a crew working through the pipes, and our only solid path to community outreach is by raiding online forums.

So I greased up our guerrilla skills, and swam through the ocean of forums. There are wild sharks out there, and you think I'm a troll? Guess you haven't seen what Reddit does these days. The forums of the world are filled with people who hate content creators, mediocre minds who can't grok games, nor appreciate it, firing whim after whim after whim, just like any other back seat Designer.

There are honest gamers out there, just hard to find and hard to reach in this ocean of piss-poor mediocrity and endless memes.



So I landed in France, like my gunrock ancestors. Or was it like the Vikings? Wait wait, maybe I was seen as a Saxon invader? Bah.

In any case, I only had my wits and Google Translate by my side. She was nervous and giddy, and my jargon gland was dense, excited. She had a hard time swallowing my English, and she did her best groaning out what I meant in French. Not bad for a rookie counter intelligence agent.

Of course you know what happened. The editor came in and told us our attempts at French made absolutely no sense. And they loved it. A few forumers picked us up and looked at the concept work. Discussion was triggered. Conversations were made through Google Translate, once I started easing up on her, instead of just jamming through.

Seems she likes a gentle touch. Bah, I'll train her properly someday. Gentle, can get rather dull over time.

We reached other shores, and even hung out with a couple of Viking channels on the way. Good times, good times :)

Don't ever be afraid to crash the party, show your cool, and show your guns. That's the price you pay for going guerrilla.

PART 2 : PROTOTYPES AND GUNS, LOTS OF GUNS.

We're getting close to a full blown Alpha. Draupnir is still a work in progress.

But hey, you still gotta fire your guns right?

Prototype videos, prototype interfaces.  Show em, throw em, pimp them. Test them with the audience, check for bugs and glaring errors. Check to see if it even looks cool.

We're not gonna be "diplomatic" about the next few lines here; we are sick of the pitches asking for exhorbitant amounts of fuel. We're not talking about the veterans, those crew chiefs deserve the numbers they pull, they got the past operations behind their belt. We look up to them for delivery, and we've been studying their pitches as well.

What I'm worried about are the new folk; people in the same category as us, new to the game, wet behind the ears, kicking and screaming. If you're asking for fuel around the 300k+ capacity, with a freaking powerpoint deck and BARELY any content? No crew? No assets? You're outta your freaking mind dude.

And that kind of costing just looks bad for everyone. It affects the honest crews too. We all get lumped into the same boat, no matter how we wanna cut it.

We don't wanna seem like we are pointing fingers, but please, Kickstarter isn't some Farmhouse Cash Clicker. 

PART 3 : FUTURE OPS.

Just got an email from the folks at Desura, as of this writing.

Expect us.

Our Kickstarter page isn't even 25% of our existing content. We got way more guns to show. We intend to make the kickstarter a unique experience, designing the game and rolling out production LIVE.

We're not selling people any vapor.  We show you the solid stuff first. We're gonna earn that with our Patrons. 

People don't realize, a Patron can pull their pledge at ANY TIME. We gotta keep them engaged and informed. We're under public scrutiny now, and our project is not yet complete. 

So how do we sell that?  We sell the process of developing the game itself. If you don't like how we roll so far, pull the pledge, no harm, no foul.

We'll show our patrons that we can handle this, and show them the prototypes as we get them out of the engine room. You'll see us grow, and evolve. We're not just sitting back and musing over the pledge count, we're rolling out more work that we have to show. Our crew has decided to update content, small or big, at least on a weekly basis. This is not an easy task. 

The backer count matters to us far more than the fuel count. If we have backers, the fuel will come. 

Straight from the Underground, keeping it real dude.