Project Horseshoe 2012: Kickstarter and Training Designers

I'll report to you about two topics discussed at this year's Project Horseshoe conference.

Defense Grid 2's Kickstarter

So, I went to business school at MIT a long time ago, and one of the main methods of learning about business is carefully going over and discussing case studies. A case study is business situation where a company has one or more challenges, and decides what to do about those challenges. They usually have a bunch of data that that helps point the way toward what a good decision would have been.

Jeff Pobst of Hidden Path Entertainment presented what I think is the "perfect" case study about his company using Kickstarter to raise money for Defense Grid 2. They had a clear goal, they had a very large number of possible ways of going about it, and they had a mountain of data before, during, and after the Kickstarter campaign. We get the benefit of hindsight to see exactly what ended up mattering in all the confusion, and it even makes a good story because of the punchline.

If I understand things correctly, I think they were probably going to make this game no matter what happened with the kickstarter, but by doing a kickstarter they could potentially make a much bigger scale of a game. That makes sense, and I do think it's a fair use of the fundraising platform.

They asked for $250,000, but I think the REAL goal was to hit $1 million. What makes this case study so interesting is that they treated it like it was going to make $1 million, and they invested heavily and did tons of work to make that happen. They did so much work and tried so hard, that it created even more data for us to look at, to see what really ended up mattering and what didn't. While publicly, the project appears successful because it raised $271,726, Jeff's presentation showed that the real story is it wasn't as successful as it appeared. They really made less than $50k (that can be put toward development) on the kickstarter after subtracting all the costs they put into it. It was sure a good try though, and it meant they got to take a good solid swing at the $1 million mark, but not lose money in trying for it. It's also generous of Jeff to share this data with developers, so that we can all learn from it. Most companies consider it way too private to share.

Jeff Pobst seems to know everyone, so he was able to talk with Tim Schafer, Jordan Mechner and other big names about their experiences. Everyone says the video at the top of your kickstarter project is really important. Having a well known figure pitch the product also helps, and they felt they didn't have that so they put twelve different famous game industry people in their video, endorsing their product.

You have a lot of knobs to adjust in a kickstarter project. How many tiers of rewards should you have, what exactly should each one be? How important is the reward structure compared to all the other things going on? Is it super important to have some rewards that are really really expensive? Or does that only matter like 1% in the end? What about upselling people? That means getting a person who pledged to later decide to change their pledge to a higher amount. Jeff had heard that this was actually the single most important factor of anything: how good you are at getting that upsell.

There's a whole bunch of other things you might focus on too. Using Facebook and Twitter to make sure your current fans know about the kickstarter. Also, getting mentioned on various news sites. They hired a PR firm who was relentless in following up many, many times with every gaming site they deemed important to their cause. You can also used paid advertisements to get the word out: google ads, facebook ads, or ads targeted on specific sites like Penny Arcade.

Hidden Path also did some less traditional forms of promotion. They made new content in their current game that was designed to hype people for the new game. They even had the opportunity to work with Valve by putting some Portal 2 ARG (alternate reality game) stuff into their game, in order to promote Portal 2, and this also helped promote their own stuff.

Finally, Jeff had the clever idea of approaching companies too big to participate in kickstarter, and made them an offer. He said if those bigger companies would give him free stuff to give away, he could promote them and their brands through kickstarter. This also gave these companies reason to mention his particular kickstarter project. It took months of negotiation to pull off, but Jeff finally got 100 gaming mice from Razer and 600 video cards from AMD. He pulled it off.

And now for the look back at it all. Of all this stuff they spent all this time on, what really did anything in the final analysis?

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Project Horseshoe 2012: Conference Design

I was a speaker this year at Project Horseshoe. Horseshoe is an exclusive, somewhat secret, intentionally small conference about game design. It has a code of secrecy and a code of blabbing. I hereby invoke the code of blabbing in order to share knowledge with all of you. I'll cover some of the ideas discussed in another post, but here let's address:

The Design of Project Horseshoe Itself

A conference is like a game, after all, where the creators design "mechanics" which then result in certain "dynamics" amongst the players. The goal is for those dynamics to meet the "aesthetic" goals of the creators. That's called the MDA framework in game design (mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics).

My initial reaction to Project Horseshoe was that the conference was poorly designed because it didn't produce what I assumed the goal should be. But along the way, I saw that I was using the wrong "lens" to look at the problem. By changing lenses (a term from Jesse Schell), I realized the "aesthetic" goals were something other than I expected. With the right lens, you could say the conference achieves exactly what it wants to in a somewhat magical way. There is perhaps a lesson there when it comes to the design of any community (such as your gaming community or forum community).

What I was originally looking for was to maximize the exchange of good information. That's the lens I looked at the NYC Practice conference conference through last year, and that conference did very well at it. If that's the most important quantity, then you want presentations that convey as much information as possible in the most efficient way possible. I don't really mean the amount of data per second, but more like the number of ideas per second. The meat, the real substance. I was looking only for substance and nothing else. Anything that took time away from that—even fun diversions—was a loss. By having presentations (at the NYC Practice conference last year) that gave lots of detail on exactly what people are doing, working on, struggling with, etc, it lead to spontaneous hallway conversations of very high quality. Even at the start of a conversation, you know all sorts of stuff about the other person's beliefs and experiences. This leads to finding kindred spirits and it leads to heated arguments as well. It's intense. It's a crucible of ideas.

Horseshoe, by contrast,

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Valve's Employee Handbook

I thought this video was interesting:

Brain science also talks about focusing on strengths. If you're good at X and bad at Y, you might end up spending a whole lot of time on Y. In addition to making you miserable, it's also just not that effective. While at first glance you might think if you're bad at something, then it's easier to improve because there's so much possible improvement you could do, it's usually more like the opposite. If you're good at something, your neural pathways (as in, the physical structures of your brain) are better set up to do it, and you have more ability to learn and grow quickly at that thing. So if possible, develop your strengths. And find other people whose strengths are in your areas of weakness.

In a small company, we don't usually have this luxury though. Probably the lead designer of Portal 2 didn't do all the graphic design for the box it comes in, because Valve probably has a team devoted entirely to graphic design for marketing materials and packaging. (Meanwhile, I do both things.) That said, strengths-focus is definitely something even a small company should think about when adding any employees, or even contractors or volunteers. Just a little help in your areas of weakness, you could then have much more time to develop and use your strengths to an even better degree.

In other words, Valve's handbook's stance on that makes sense to me.

Ongoing Development

You probably haven't heard much about what I'm working on, but there are an overwhelming number of things in the works. The Puzzle Strike kickstarter is now behind us, and thankfully shipped on time. If you missed out on the kickstarter, the game will start shipping to everyone else in a couple weeks, and you can get it here. And here's what else is going on:

Flash Duel Online

We're working on the online version of Flash Duel at fantasystrike.com. If you have a star membership, you can see our progress on that right now, actually. We're focusing on functionality first, and we've gotten most of the modes implemented, from 1v1 to 2v2 to even the Dragon Raid. Flash Duel online also has animated 8-bit sprites for every character thanks to pixel artist Conor "BT" Town.

Yomi and Puzzle Strike Online

Yomi and Puzzle Strike have been available to play online for quite some time now on fantasystrike.com. For a while now, we've been working on graphical and UI upgrades that will make both games look a lot more polished. Thanks to everyone who supported the site so far, I just wanted to let you know we've been working hard to keep improving it, even though you haven't seen a lot of what we've been up to yet. We're actually spending far, far more on these upcoming upgrades than the total amount we've ever made, so it's kind of a big deal. We're still 2 or 3 months from getting these enhancements on the live servers.

The Yomi Expansion

There's 10 new characters in development for Yomi, and you can actually play them right now at fantasystrike.com in the non-rules-enforced mode if you're a star member. I'm drowning in graphic design tasks on the physical version, as I'm making 10 new card backs, way too many boxes, a totally rewritten rulebook, and other various supplements that need graphic design. Not to mention art directing a hundred pieces of character art (bad news: that part is going disastrously slowly and is delaying the whole project). As for the gameplay, the new characters are pretty varied, with several interesting new mechanics and styles. They are pretty balanced and working well overall right now, though tuning will be ongoing for a long time.

There will also be a 2v2 mode, a 2v1 mode, and a solo mode. I'm really excited about the 2v2 mode. It's been a lot of work to figure out how to make it feel like Marvel vs. Capcom style, be fun, and actually work right (emphasis on the actually work right). I think we got it! I also think 2v2 will knock your socks off someday.

SCG4 is Codex

Sirlin Card Game 4 is actually called Codex. While the Yomi expansion is my main focus now, I'm working on this as well. I recently finished graphic design for all 56 of the game's different card frames (oh my god), and I continue to refine the gameplay here and there over time. It will take years for the card illustrations and hundreds of thousands of dollars just for that probably (no idea how to pay for that btw, kickstarter I assume), and I don't even really want to start on that until Yomi's art is done. So that means even though the gameplay part of this game is actually practically done right now—all cards exist and have been playtested for quite a while—the release is far off. A game this deep and complex needs a lot of balance testing though, so at least we'll have plenty more time for that.

I've also been testing a pretty interesting free-for-all mode for Codex. FFA generally has problems in most games where it's too much about ganging up (make an alliance with your friend before the game starts, even) and eliminating whoever you want. Also why even fight anyone when you can sit back and let the others weaken each other? The unusual FFA mode I've been trying addresses all these problems and is so far working well. You might say it's inspired by the new FFA mode in Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition, but actually that's not quite right. Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition's FFA mode was actually inspired by Codex's, it's just that you got to see the results in reverse chronological order.

If you haven't tried the new FFA mode in Puzzle Strike, I highly recommend it, by the way. There's no player-elimination and there's naturally shifting alliances as the game progresses, because whenever anyone is in a position to win, the rest of the players want to temporarily help each other to prevent that. It usually leads to exciting, close games. And if you have tried it, it would be nice if you rated Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition and/or Puzzle Strike Shadows on boardgamegeek. (Scroll down to "user information, then "rating" to rate a game.)

Not much more info on Codex right now. It's a troublesome situation that explaining the unusual workings of it gives other companies years to do the same kind of thing before I can even release it. I will say that it's inspired by RTS games such as WarCraft 3 and StarCraft, that you have a lot of flexibility available to you during gameplay that you don't have in CCGs, and that there's no randomness in the resource system.

I will now go back to making logos, boxes, rulebooks, more boxes, and more boxes.

All Puzzle Strike Kickstarter Orders Shipped!

As of today, Puzzle Strike (3rd Edition and Shadows) has shipped to every single kickstarter backer. We managed to meet our goal of the September ship date, which is somewhat of a rare thing for games on kickstarter, ha. If any of you have recieved your order, but not the randomizer cards, don't worry. For some orders, the cards didn't fit in the shipping box, so they were mailed out to you separately. If you have any questions about your particular order or shipping situation, you can contact Game Salute (see the info in the image above).

Thanks to everyone for the support, I'm glad we managed to get extra components (boards and screens) into Puzzle Strike, and I hope you enjoy the free randomizer cards, and online coupon for www.fantasystrike.com too.

If you missed out on the kickstarter, Puzzle Strike 3rd Edition, Shadows, as well as various extras like the 100+ page strategy guide are available here, and will ship on October 28th if you order far enough ahead of time.

Thanks again!