Overfall - Early Post-Mortem

[Myrthos]

With still 9 days to go and at 2/3 of their goal, the Overfall devs decied to do a post-mortem already in order to analyze what went good and less good with the Kickstarter.

What Went Wrong So Far

1. Visibility

As mentioned above, our main issue so far has been visibility. We weren’t entirely surprised by this, because we didn’t have much awareness in larger gaming communities, big-ticket items in our development resume, or well-known figures on the team....

2. Early Bird Discounts We’ve learned that these kinds of discounts only really work for big projects. You need hundreds, even thousands of people waiting for you to launch the game. It’s a little unfair to dangle a discount in front of someone’s nose and then take it away when they couldn’t have reasonably known the game existed in the first place!

3. Not giving reasons to start discussions

We could have been more creative about giving our backers and followers topics to discuss about Overfall. To be honest, we were expecting more negative feedback - but we haven’t really received it! Perhaps we explained everything there was to be explained in the Kickstarter material - as of yet, there aren’t really many questions people would think to ask until more information about the game’s design is made public.

4. We should have released the Pre-Alpha Demo at the beginning

This one is definitely on us. We were nervous about the idea of releasing a demo because, well, the game’s a roguelike! Roguelikes live or die on the balancing of their procedurally-generated elements - but we haven’t done extensive playtesting of the game in its current form, so we didn’t want to give players an unbalanced or empty roguelike experience. Demos ought to be fun, right?

Fortunately, we did find a middle road there. Presenting a single, self-contained quest progression separate from the main story was a pretty good way of getting across the general feel of the game for the audience, and it gave a good initial taste of the game and a lot of opportunities for feedback regarding gameplay.

More information.

 

[Branthog]

Bingo on the Early Bird Discount.

I understand the intention. It's to reward people who jump in early rather than everyone standing on the sidelines and waiting and to get the project an early little boost of activity, so it'll draw interest on that factor, alone.

However, it has a long term impact of making a lot of *other* people who missed out on it come along and say "oh, I can't get this for $20 - I have to pay $30? I'll just wait for it to come out on Steam and get it on discount when it's $10, then". Especially since a lot of people have been burned by the concept of "get the game at a lower price than it'll be when it launches" only to have it launch at a bigger discount than you paid for it via Kickstarter.

And the Early Bird discounts are discouraging people from jumping in and backing at the time your campaign needs it *most* -- after it has gotten a nice early influx, but when it needs people to come in and help you cross that success threshold.

I think it is possible to accomplish something similar, though, by just having two different tiers where one is limited and the other isn't... and make them contain different things. They don't have to be significant. Just enough to make one of them justifiably 20% or so cheaper. The "early bird discount" just has this weird "reward/punishment" thing to it that people have to overcome and it is hard to do that even if they are aware of it and the influence it has over them.

Overfall is a great example. I would absolutely back it for $7. But when I discovered it, the $7 and $8 ones were gone. I could only back it at $10. Would I have backed it at $10 if there weren't any $7 and $8 early bird discounts in the first place? Man, that is hard to say. I just know that since there *were* $7 points available, I'm not really interested in paying almost 50% more than those guys for the same thing.

All in all though, I think their project looks interesting. I also like a game called Rogue Invader which is a black and white "1-bit" sci-fi video game. I felt it would get huge play, because it looks really interesting and has a clever style to it. But it is going to fail with only 15% raised and a week to go.

So a lot of their introspective criticism is hard to say "yep, that's totally the thing that did you in"... sometimes a few kickstarter projects hit it big from launch and others just stagnate and go nowhere. Even if they seem really compelling. There's just no predicting this sometimes and I've seen similar projects launch similar second kickstarters... and somehow they went from failing with almost nothing raised the first time to blowing their goal out of the water the second time.

A lot of it really is a roll of the dice. What is the release cycle of the industry like? What is the news cycle like during your project fundraising? What other projects are raising money around that same time? Will news outlets show interest in your game or look the other way? Will the right site give you a boost of groundswell support? Will Kickstarter put you on their staff-picks?

So much of this is outside of your control, unfortunately.

 

[luj1]

Ridicilous art direction, no wonder it failed to Kickstart when its target audience are 12yos who are not even on KS and don't have the means to crowdfund.

 

[michael_newman]

Ridicilous art direction, no wonder it failed to Kickstart when its target audience are 12yos who are not even on KS and don't have the means to crowdfund.

Where did you get the idea of project failed? Its still alive and probably gonna make it as everyone waiting for last 48 hours remind me function. Also post-mortem talking about how things could it be better if they had experience. I personally backed that project as i have been already watching their development just before their campaign. And guess what im not 12. Disliking their art is very understandable and i respect that. you might dont like cute anime-ish style or painterish backgrounds. But this doesnt give you right to call others who support this project 12 i believe. They just announced their project to public media just before KS so i think thats huge success gathering that amount of money without any fanbase.

Chris Avellone ‏@ChrisAvellone Sep 4
After seeing fantasy RPG PCs in the vein of Don't Starve, the Overfall (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peragames/overfall?ref=nav_search …) guys were nice enough to share a build! <3

Maybe Chris was 12 aswell who knows

Did you play their Demo? You should give it a try if you liked FTL or Banner Saga maybe. Anyway just my opinions.

 

[Wisdom]

I couldn't get over the dumb character heads. No $ from me.

 

[luj1]

What I said, too infantile art direction