JA:Flashback - Managing a Dedicated Community

Gamesauce posted a new article from Full Control on their new game Jagged Alliance: Flashback,and how they handled high expectations of the fans.

First Encounter with the Jagged Alliance Community

After a hectic month of planning and discussions, the Kickstarter for Jagged Alliance: Flashback went live in April 2013. Even though we had been warned that the Jagged Alliance community was a very demanding bunch, we weren’t prepared for the massive amount of questions and demands that were coming our way.

This was our first Kickstarter and since we were in the middle of developing Space Hulk, we only had around three people dedicated to getting this project up and running, as well as supporting it when it was live on Kickstarter. We were only in pre-production of Jagged Alliance: Flashback, so we didn’t have much more to show than concept pictures and a general design of the game.

Kickstarter Challenges

First challenge with that approach was that people did not really understand the concept of pre-production, and they expected an almost finished game design document with all details already in there. The second challenge was connected to the first; if you have a very general design, people will automatically ask questions about the deeper levels of the design, which at this point was sitting in our heads. Lastly, Jagged Alliance is a hardcore strategy game with very advanced systems and a complex design, so naturally, the community wanted answers for something like “Will the weight of bullets influence the movement speed of mercenaries?”. JA1/JA2 have been modded for more than 20 years and turned into completely different games, which is also why it still has a huge following.

We spent the first two weeks of the campaign answering thousands of questions and putting out updates to try and explain the overall ideas we had for this game in smaller and more manageable chunks. The community was doubtful of our ability to pull of this game, having mostly done iOS games in the past. They wanted a lot more info before they were willing to support our project. As it’s over a year ago now, I can’t say exactly where the tides changed, but I’m pretty sure that our high focus on making the game moddable and working together with some of the modders and designers from the old games made all the difference. The questions didn’t stop though, and it was a battle all the way to the end of the project, where it was funded seven hours before closing time. We have 13k+ comments on a project with roughly 7,500 backers. I can honestly say it was one of the most exhausting, but also exciting, months of my life, which is also why we’ve limited ourselves to a maximum of one Kickstarter per year.

However, this article is not about our Kickstarter. It is about what you have to do to manage a community with an existing fan base that have high expectations for the game you are making, but I felt it was necessary to describe how it all started and take it from there.