This is a pretty significant reminder that people gave this guy money to make a game.
I'd never really done... game design, before? I mean, the stuff in [Super Mario Bros. Crossover] I did, but that was all kind of laid on top of something that was already there. It wasn't starting from scratch. So when you're designing a game from scratch, you pretty much have... infinite possibilities. I mean, you do. Well, sort of. Like, anything that's possible to experience through a controller... and... a screen, you can do that. So you have quite a lot of... options. So it's really easy to get stuck... just thinking about all of the possibilities and "oh, I wanna make the best game ever!" And you're like, "Oh I want the character to fly and get all these power-ups that change him in to different things, and all these enemies and bosses..."
It's really easy to design too much stuff that you don't know what to do with. And another problem is with having so many options is you might never make up your mind. You can be like, "We're gonna make a platformer, and we're gonna have some different characters." And who are these characters? I want... all the characters to be really different, but then you're like, "I don't know how to do that. I want all the characters to be pretty similar. What should they have in common?" You can keep getting yourself in to these loops, where you're like, oh the characters being so different isn't working out, let's have them be the same. But then you're like, they're too similar, it's boring. Then you're gonna be like, "I want it to be different again." That's just like, one example? The point I'm trying to make is that you need to pick a direction. Maybe the direction you pick isn't even the best one ever. But what does that mean? If you have infinite possibilities, is one of them really the best one? Or, are all of them the best and you just have to pick one and make it the best? So, that was one thing I realized a few weeks ago. I picked a direction and we're going for it.
And doing a Kickstarter, having backers... that ended up being a lot different than I thought it would be. I kinda learned right away that once people give you money they treat you a lot differently. Cuz like, they've... given you something? And they want something in return. Even if you're doin' your best. And no matter what you do for them, it's not good enough. So if you do a Kickstarter, crowd-funding thing, expect to deal with people... not being happy with you.
So I don't mean to harp on this guy yet again, but this video really makes it sound like his Kickstarter plan was to ask for a bunch of money first and figure the rest out after his pockets were full.
It has been a year and a half since his Kickstarter ended and he hasn't shown anything for it. Judging by what he says in this video, he's just been kind of screwing around for the last year and a half and only just now picked a direction for the game. That's not even touching on how it sounds like he completely mismanaged the game's budget.
$50,000 for basically nothing. Meanwhile, you have Freedom Planet, which ended at half that cost, and in 11 months has had screenshots, video, and a frequently-updated playable demo. What has the Super Mario Bros. Crossover guy done?
One of these projects is doing the right thing. The other isn't. It's stuff like this that can give Kickstarter a bad reputation.