Hello again Ducklings! Today we're here to talk about the distant future where we plan to fund this project via a crowd funding platform.
Step One: What Do We Need?
Currently we're in this phase where Madame Evil works to gather resources that offer advice to how to successfully crowd fund projects via the major crowd funding websites.
What is our project?
How much money would we need?
What rewards can we include that don't drastically impact the scope of the project?
What is our studio's story?
What is important to show in our promotional video?
Step Two: Draft Out Answers
Now that we have a few questions to get started, we'll draft out some answers to them keeping in mind the tone of voice we need to maintain to encourage funding.
What is our project?
"An AI programmed for espionage has hacked your phone thinking you're their agent. Hack systems, solve puzzles, and chase down evidence all on your mobile device with the help of your AI partner." This would be our "elevator pitch" which is a pitch that you should be able to rattle off in a few seconds (or amount of time you have a client in an elevator) that focuses on the key aspects of the game. This is suppose to grab attention and leave the audience intrigued and wanting to know more. This is great to have as a tagline or to say at conventions when you're promoting.
For crowdfunding platforms we'll need that and more. When we're asking users to give money to our project, they want to know exactly what they're buying in to. To answer this question in more detail we'll have to turn to our GDD (Game Design Document) and pull information from there and format it appropriately for users.
How much money would we need? This one is more difficult to answer but also the most important. This would involve discussing with the team to form a timeline and weekly work hours as well as rate of pay. It also needs to include licensing for the team, tools we plan to buy, publishing costs, legal fees for the studio, operating costs for the time period and more.
Luckily, the team has been cataloging hours and discussing payment this entire time. These metrics help us to answer a few questions. We also have our reoccurring costs tracked for two years now which gives us a solid base to work off of. We've also been building a list of tools that would greatly aid us in our development. The most difficult task now is to figure out how far along we are, how much we have left to go, and how many hours can the team contribute per week. These will require analysis of all the metrics previously mentioned as well as the GDD, GANTT Chart, and team mentality.
What rewards can we include that don't drastically impact the scope of the project?
Rewards are key incentives that encourage users to fund us more money for the project with the promise of unique rewards for supporting us. These rewards can be in-game items, physical merchandise, special access to earlier builds, names in credits, or even in-game changes.
Which of these can we accomplish without destroying our timeline? Can any of these rewards be contracted out to other companies or services to limit the time the team will need to spend on it? What is the value of each of these rewards? How much additional funding will we need to produce the reward in question? These all need to be finalized before we even consider clicking the launch button.
What is our studio's story?
This one is possibly the easiest one to answer given how much effort we've placed into the Studio's branding. Evil Quacks has a firm grasp on who we are as a studio and what we're about. Safe to say this question is the easiest so far.
What is important to show in our promotional video?
For this we'll need visuals and key functionality down to show users what the potential of the game is. It needs to look interesting, polished, and most of all entertaining or worth spending money on. We have a few assets finalized and with the aid of video editing software we can put together a visual guide as to what we're hopping to achieve with the finished product.
Step Three: Profit
While mostly for the reference, this step isn't wrong but is more of a hope. After we have all our materials we can submit the proposal to the platform and then hit the launch button to begin our journey into creating the game with financial backing that doesn't involve spiraling the studio into debt with classic investors.
All of this will take months to gather and finalize which means this won't be happening any time soon but it's an important process to start planning for now that we're working on getting in our first round of assets and code for the main features is wrapping up for testing.
Thank you for joining us on this mental exercise, Ducklings and we hope you'll keep joining us as this adventure continues!
コメント