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.