I have been non-posthumously awarded a special golden ring. August was a busy, incredible month. Lots of travelling, planning, entertaining guests. Very few video games.

Now that it’s over, Sara and I are double-married (ie. two wedding celebrations, one in Alberta and one in Montréal), we’ve taken a sleeper train across Canada, and Sara has completed and defended a Master’s thesis.

For our wedding, our friend made us these Spaceteam cake-toppers which I think capture our likenesses perfectly:

I did find a bit of time to work. Much of it was damage control on the forum, which become infested with spam bots (unfortunately they’re smart enough to get through the CAPTCHA filters). I think I have it under control, and additionally all Admiral’s Club members should now have the proper rank and badge so feel free to start your “Narcissistic Badge Vanity Threads” to show them off :) Currently the badge is only visible on your posts, so you’ll have to write something to see it. If yours is still missing, let me know.

While I was gone, certain balls that had previously been set in motion continued rolling. The embroidered patches have arrived:

The first batch of membership cards had problems so I’ve reordered them, but they look something like this:

And the magnets should be here in a few days. My fridge is very excited!

Soon I’ll have to organize an envelope-stuffing party to prepare, fill, and label 700+ packages and send them on their way to you. That in itself is going to take some creative assembly-line design.

Kickstarter Backers: Please make sure to update your address in the survey if you haven’t done so already.

The survey is also how you submit names for your custom controls and medals. They’ve been pretty fantastic so far. Here’s a small sampling of the new post-game awards you’ll be able to win:

• Miki’s Gleaming Rocket of Concupiscent Polish
• Honorary Wrongtown Citizenship in recognition of Exceptional Mundanity in the face of Certain Death
• Commander Chu’s Epaulettes of Prompt Prattling
• The Gold Wheel of Lactose Tolerance
• Commendation for Perfect Hair
• $5 off a Legendary Fishburger at Zolgun’s Fishburgers

Once everything is in, the game will be full of fun surprises like this. I’m looking forward to sharing them with you in the next version.

Space out!

– Henry

So… I spent the last several months planning, running, and then _re-_running my Kickstarter campaign:

• Spaceteam Admiral’s Club – Failed
• Spaceteam Admiral’s Club **Relaunch** – Succeeded!

…and, organizing a worldwide Spaceteam tournament. I want to share some of my experiences.

Quick Summary

The two campaigns were extremely similar on the surface, but I did more work behind the scenes on the second attempt. While it’s impossible to tell exactly what tipped the scales my best guesses are:

• Existing momentum combined with more aggressive outreach
• The Tournament helped keep the buzz going for the duration of the campaign
• Some unexpected exposure near the end

I think the experiment as a whole was an important precedent but I’m not sure how easily it could work for a brand new team/creator. I believe a large part of my success was because I already had an existing audience, from a game that I self-funded, and spent the last 2 years gradually building that audience.

Background

This was not a traditional campaign. The goal was to raise enough money to live for a year making free games. I chose Kickstarter over Patreon (and Indiegogo) for this campaign because:

• I needed an “all-or-nothing” goal so I could commit to making the games for free. If I promised to make free games and then ran out of money (eg. not raising enough on Indiegogo, Patreon supporters backing out, etc.) it would put me in an awkward position and wouldn’t be fair to supporters. It might mean switching gears and charging money for the games, and in that case I would want to redesign the game mechanics/presentation to fit that model. I need to know this ahead of time so I can plan. Because the Kickstarter succeeded I’m confident that I’ll have enough money to develop and release the games for free.
• Patreon is definitely growing, but Kickstarter still has a much larger audience.
• Patreon is better suited for short-form works that can be produced once a month or more. I’m still concerned that when I do try Patreon I won’t provide enough month-to-month value since my games are going to take 6 months or more to finish. Maybe a monthly developer diary with in-progress art & design will be good enough.
• This kind of project is very unusual on Kickstarter and I figured that would make it more interesting to the press.

Details

There are a lot, so this is mostly going to be a point-form brain dump. If you want more info on any particular aspect, just ask!

Things that happened in both campaigns:

• Talked to Kickstarter directly (by email and in person) about my project ahead of time to make sure it was within their guidelines
• Used Buffer to post to Twitter/Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn simultaneously whenever I mentioned the campaign
• Put links on my blog, forum, website, Twitter bio, email signature, every public facing place I could think of
• Asked my game industry friends/connections to spread it around at their offices
• Kept a database of Press & Community Contacts, where I stored emails of everyone who might be relevant. Categories like “Champions”, “PayPal donors”, “Translators”, “Potential Collaborators”, “Business Cards” (collected at conventions), “Interested in Accessibility”, “Interested in Customization”, etc.
• Did an informal press release, to sites that had written about Spaceteam in the past, and others. A site I discovered during this process: http://gamespress.com/
• Posted in some relevant forums (Geek & Sundry, BoardGameGeek, etc.)
• Whenever people emailed about the game (with praise or bug reports), I told them about the KS
• Made a promo screen in the Spaceteam app itself linking to the KS (bit worried that Apple might not like this, but they never complained)
• Tried to contact celebrities/influencers that might help. eg. Notch, Wil Wheaton, Penny Arcade guys
• Got propositioned by a lot of services that claimed to help KS campaigns with flash-traffic, promotional services, or private networks of backers. Decided to say no to all of them.

Things that happened differently in the new campaign:

• There wasn’t nearly as much press the second time around (maybe they considered it old news?)
• However, lots of momentum from the first project
• Announced the new campaign a week in advance, with a mailing list signup (got 1800 names)
• Used mailing list, old KS, and new KS to provide updates
• Targeted specific journalists that had written articles about game funding/new models
• Organized a worldwide Spaceteam tournament with 25 regional venues, global high scores, and special achievements to unlock (this is a whole ‘nother blog post!). These were a fantastic success and kept people playing and talking about the game throughout the month
• Posted a blog entry about the campaign/philosophy to the Gamasutra member blogs
• Paid for a service called Kicklytics that provided some useful meta-data about the campaign. The Cross Promotion Opportunities were fascinating if only because they introduced me to a bunch of other interesting campaigns.
• Cross-promoted with a few other Kickstarter campaigns (limiting myself to Local Multiplayer cooperative games only). Approached by several others and felt bad turning them down, but felt they had too little audience overlap.
• Wore a Spaceteam button on my shirt every day (probably didn’t help much, BUT… one time I went out jogging and almost decided not to wear it, and then after my run I discovered one of those Just for Laughs hidden-camera gags and they ended up filming me. They probably didn’t use the footage and the badge would have been much too small on the screen… but I thought it was a funny coincidence)
• Tried to start an official Reddit AMA, but was not approved (I assume because of the crowdfunding angle?)
• Instead, started a Reddit discussion about my philosophy (should have done this sooner)
• Mid-way through the campaign, added extra tiers at $500 and $1000 to entice high-level backers to give a bit more
• Near the end enticed all tiers to go one tier higher, with a calculation of the difference it would make (eg. “if everyone at Tier 3 goes up to Tier 4, that means an extra $10,000!”)
• Promoted a Facebook post for $43 (which apparently reached 19,224 people and resulted in 148 “actions”). This was the only time I paid for any traditional advertising.
• Made a Thunderclap campaign to get a bunch of people to Tweet at the same time
• Got selected as a Kickstarter “Project of the Day”
• Wil Wheaton tweeted about the campaign (thanks Wil!)

Lessons Learned

• I had no way to measure the actual impact of most of the things I did. To date, the things that have generated the largest download spikes (by far) have been:

  1. A mention by YouTuber Jenna Marbles (that I had nothing to do with…)
  2. A mention in a Reddit thread about “Your favourite game that no one has heard of” (that I had nothing to do with…)

  Lesson: Just try stuff and don’t stress out about whether it’s going to be “worth it”.

• Constantly sending emails/posts/messages feels like you’re spamming the same group of people over and over again. In fact, only a handful of people see it each time. And each individual person might only see three or four messages, even though you are sending out hundreds. After promoting the first campaign for a solid month, it ended and I still got told by a lot of people that they were just hearing about it. _Lesson: You are being exposed to your own marketing 100x more than anyone else. Trust others to tell you when it is “too much”. No one knows about your project._
• I worried about the campaign pretty much constantly. I didn’t feel like I could start working on the new games/Lexicogulator/etc while the KS was running since I would be neglecting it and blame myself if it failed. This is a hard lesson to learn and I’m still second-guessing myself about it. Lesson: Don’t do this. You need to take breaks.
• Even if your game already has 2 million downloads, that doesn’t mean you can reach 2 million people. I’m sure putting links the in game helped, but the only people who saw them were people who still had the app installed and who opened it during the month of the campaign. Lesson: Numbers only mean so much.
• According to the statistics my first campaign apparently had a 99.6% chance of success. It failed. So I honestly had no idea whether the second one was going to work until the very last day. Lesson: Unusual projects follow unusual patterns. When you’re trying something new, sometimes the rules don’t apply.
• Tournaments are hard work to organize but a lot of fun.

Well… I hope that helps for now. I’ll add more if I think of it.

Talk to you soon!

In November I gave a very short talk at MIGS in which I explained that I’ll consider my Kickstarter campaign/experiment a success whether or not it reaches its funding target. If it doesn’t hit the goal then I’ll learn some lessons about how to approach this funding model in the future, I’ll feel better about charging money for my games, and perhaps most importantly, Spaceteam will get a lot of new exposure. Bringing Spaceteam to more people is the motivation behind not just the campaign, but the other new features I’m also working on: multiple languages, In November I gave a very short talk at MIGS in which I explained that I’ll consider my Kickstarter campaign/experiment a success whether or not it reaches its funding target. If it doesn’t hit the goal then I’ll learn some lessons about how to approach this funding model in the future, I’ll feel better about charging money for my games, and perhaps most importantly, Spaceteam will get a lot of new exposure. Bringing Spaceteam to more people is the motivation behind not just the campaign, but the other new features I’m also working on: multiple languages, options, and The Lexicogulator. In this post I’m going to talk a bit about languages.

Multiple languages

The first four translations are finally finished. The latest app update, which coincided with the Kickstarter launch, lets you play the game in English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian. More languages are in the pipe, including Russian and Japanese (that one should be interesting!) This has been quite a task, and I’d like to extend a big thank you to all my translators:

• Luis Alfonso
• Noelia Verdura Barajas
• Andrea Neri
• Antoine Monteillard
• Fabian Koglin
• Lasse Schiano

It’s worth mentioning that all of them contacted me to offer their services, so they were already fans of the game and understood the humour. I’m really happy that we were able to do this in such a communal way. It was a pretty loose process that took several months, and I switched back and forth between various tasks as more translations became ready. Here are some tips for others planning to translate their games:

• Make it easy to resize labels and buttons to fit words of different lengths. A button name in German might be much longer than in English.
• Make sure to translate words that appear in images and sounds as well as in text. In my case I had to make new images for the Loading Screens, the Exit sign in the Waiting Room, and the robot voice* that says “asteroid”, “wormhole” and “hyperspace” (although we ended up only changing the voice for the Spanish version)
• Provide context to your translators for every line that needs to be translated. Words can have different meanings in different contexts. For example, I use the same word “Exit” for quitting the game and also on a sign above the door in the Waiting Room. These are two different words in all the other languages.
• Puns and jokes rarely translate directly. If your game has a lot of jokes in it, make sure your translators understand what they mean :)

Of course, in addition to regular intelligible sentences, Spaceteam has lots of sci-fi gibberish that I construct from word pieces making the translation much harder. For reference, the original English version of Spaceteam has about 800 regular words and 1700 word pieces (prefixes, noun-, verb-, and adjective-parts) that I combine into the control names and instructions. You can get a basic sense for how the pieces fit together by looking at the Translation Tool. In English, words don’t have gender and can often be used interchangeably as nouns, adjectives, or verbs (sometimes all three!) and I exploited this fact a lot. For example, “Drain the Grease Pump!”, “Grease the Pump Drain!”, and “Pump the Drain Grease!” are all perfectly valid instructions in English. Here are some special grammar rules I had to add to the name generator to support the additional languages:

• Verbs Go After Noun (in German, commands are given as “ !” eg. “Fluxfield engage!”)
• Add Articles To Names (eg. le, la, l’)
• Double Intervocalic Rs
• Hyphenate Compound Nouns
• Hyphenate Compound Nouns With Double Letters
• Don’t Use BaseParts As Adjectives

There were actually fewer rules overall than I thought there might be. I think we got lucky because the instructions are all in the imperative voice, which is often simpler. Some other things that I had to deal with:

• I had to change how symbols are displayed because of a “clever” shortcut I had taken earlier (more detail in this previous post).
• I wanted to support what I called “Runtime Localization” or switching languages within the game (eg. you can play in Spanish even if your phone is set to English). This meant I couldn’t just use the built-in localization mechanism on iOS (NSLocalizedString). I ended up building a system for switching languages that I can now use for future games.
• Entering 57 achievement strings in 4 languages on 3 platforms is tedious and boring.
• Android-specific: because of limitations of the tools I was using on Android I had to write my own functions for converting Unicode strings (eg. with accents) to uppercase and lowercase. Certainly not something I expected to do myself!
• What do you do when several different languages connect at once? In my case I picked one language as the master, but I might change it to pick names and instructions from all the languages for even more chaos :)

Anyway, this was another learning experience and next time I localize a game it will be that much easier. I hope you enjoy playing Spaceteam in French, German, Spanish and Italian…

Et n’oubliez pas de travailler en équipe… comme une équipe de l’espace!

Und denkt dran, zusammen zu arbeiten… als ein Spaceteam.

Y acordaos de trabajar juntos… como un equipo espacial.

e ricorda di lavorare come una squadra… come un vero Spaceteam.

*If anyone’s interested in how I made the robot voices: I typed the words into TextEdit (I use a Mac) and used the Text-to-Speech function to speak the text using the Zarvox voice. I then recorded the output with a program called Audio Hijack. However, because Zarvox is only available in English, for the Spanish version I had to spell the words phonetically so they would be pronounced properly (eg. “Hee per ess pa see oh”)