Kickstarter, and a Small Budget Indie Game with a Heart of Gold
I think the the most crushing thing that can happen to someone is a dream unfulfilled.
Before you understand my article, and why Kickstarter is something I NEEDED, you really need to understand my story. Otherwise, it’s highly likely this would be nothing more than a rant.
 I came from a humble background, as a QA tester for mobile games making $10 an hour, if you’re anyone that knows anything about the professional industry, testers are as disposable as they come. The position of tester usually comes packaged with the promise of some day being promoted to a management, but in ore than 95% of cases is nothing more than dangling carrot.
After 2 years of testing, lay offs hit, and I was faced with the harsh reality that no companies wanted to bother hiring an experienced QA tester. They’d much rather cultivate and grab the entry level guys that were willing to make $10/hr and just stoked about the experience. Basically, after 2 years of waiting for that carrot, the game industry had dumped me like yesterday’s trash.
 So I took my savings, moved somewhere cheaper, and decide to start learning how to make games. Fast forward two years later, with 3 mobile games under my belt, I still found that “indie experience” is not even remotely regarded in 95% of the cases. The game industry, yet again, gave me the giant middle finger. Now I was in a rut, I’d moved to a city that had no real game ecosystem and no one wanted to bother talking to some guy with no hard experience out of state.
 At that moment I decided that I would put every single spareable penny I had into creating something legitimately acknowledgeable in the game company, If I was going to lose every dollar to my name, it would be doing something I loved.
 Ultimately what came of that is my retro platformer “To Challenge a God”, and its alpha demo. It’s a fairly nice looking (from what I here) pixel button presser with its own individualities.
 A game doesn’t just magically make itself, it takes planning and concepts, oh, and of course, a team. I won’t bore you with specifics but $6000 in credit card debt later, I realized I was dangerously on the verge of:
-Not being able to feed myself
-Amassing an amount of debt I would have no recourse of pulling myself out of
And to show for it, I had a product. Despite how bad I wanted to do more with it, I couldn’t.
So then it hit me, KICKSTARTER. did my research, I saw games without demos, that didn’t look as good as mine reaching their funding goals. Games that had set a goal more than twice what my intended target had also reached their goals. I became inspired, I felt like I just needed to believe in myself, and that people would see the potential my game had.
A lot of times just putting yourself out there on Kickstarter is the public push you need to get noticed.
 What was supposed to be a really exciting and nail biting experience was nothing of the sort. Despite writing to tons of editors, all of the sites were covering the same Kickstarter games. (Out of respect I won’t mention said games) No one bothered to write me back, despite good-looking screen shots, a solid pitch, and something playable.
 This was incredibly infuriating to me. Indie games used to be about discovering the small upcoming guy with something promising up the sleeve. These days, noteable people (who are barely indie because they’ve got a static team and money to fund a handful of projects) are able to use their names to conjure up HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars via crowdfunding only to deliver broken promises to their fans while they sip fancy mojitos and swim in the money of backers. Products that have raked in millions, deliver broken products and skate home with millions, and the backlash has landed on me, the little guy trying to make it in the game world. For crying out loud, we backed an Ostrich Pillow and it raised over $700,000. The new mega man style game raised over a million dollars with just concepts.
I also felt it was incredibly unfair to bracket my fun platformer with a unique tail, in the same categories as games gunning for 2/3 times as much. Games with this level of discrepancy in development costs are obviously going to be two MAJORLY different beasts. You can’t simply say, your turn-based strategy game doesn’t interest me because I’m writing about a steampunk sidescrolling space-shooter that graphically laps circles around your game, I mean you could, but really?
 There’s definitely no delusion here, my game is definitely not going to be the next Final Fantasy, but it never sold itself to be, and the demo didn’t sell itself to be anything near final release. It sold itself to an enjoyable run and button press platformer much like its inspiration, Mega Man. The truth is, I didn’t have money the to add another 3 levels to my demo, incorporate moving environments, and destructable items. I wanted to, I really did.
 What I did make was a memorable hero, and incorporated as many core mechanics as I could with a budget I realistically had to go with. We got a fun boss fight in there, a brief chase scene, some cool enemies, and I even got a voice actor on board!
 It was humble on budget, a fraction for what the other guys were asking, because I wanted to gain the trust of the indie community as a developer and focus on delivering a fun experience rather than creating a game where sparks ignite from every NPC, Enemies, and Boss in the game.
 The fact that I could not find a central editorial to cover my game was unreal to me. With just one article, I have no doubt my game can reach the crowd it needs. My game has the statistics and community interest to prove my project was worth more than being treated like ET on Atari. So what’s up editors, can I get some press before my campaign runs out?
I spent a lot of time writing this article based on my personal life and experience trying to get my game out the door, I hope my followers enjoy reading it, if you support it, spread it like wild fire! Crowdfunding has become a stomping ground for big budget indies and the little guys trying to get their start are getting rolled over :O
