How we managed a successful Kickstarter campaign
Bonsoir,
It’s been a week since our Kickstarter campaign ended, so I want to take time to write some kind of post mortem about it, it’s going to be a long one. TLDR: We managed to raise more than 150k€ in 30 days, which represent 300% of our initial goal, got more than 12k steam wishlist and 8k demo downloads, and I want to explain how we did that.
I’ve received a lot of questions from people interested in doing a Kickstarter campaign (as well as many spam from fake “PR company”), and saw a lot of fantasy and misinformation about it. Short disclaimer, but everything I’ll be saying in this article is about my own experience, each project is different and each developer has a different background which will define what is possible or not for them. With that in mind, let’s dive in!
I) Context: Who are we
For people who don’t know us and might read this article, I’m Christophe Galati, a french indie game developer, nice to meet you! I’ve been making games as an indie for over a decade already, I have showcased my games in indie game events all over the world like Tokyo Game Show, PAX West, BitSummit, Paris Game Week… I’m pretty much known for my first game, Save me Mr Tako, which is a platfformer RPG made as a tribute to the Game Boy, starring an octopus main character. I made this game mostly as a solo indie between 2014/2018. You can find more informations about the game here.
Having already launched a game meant two things: we were already known by press and some content creators (even though the industry changed a lot since our first release), and had already a presence on social medias. Those factors already put some light on our back, as people who heard about our first game were more kean to share about our new one, especially as it is a sequel.
Speaking of the sequel, our current project is called Tako no Himitsu. It is an ARPG centered arround traumas and secrets, made as a tribute to the Game Boy Advance (kind of like Golden Sun meets Terranigma), with a colorful cast of characters and magical octopuses. This project started back in 2019, when I was selected in an artist residency in Kyoto called Villa Kujoyama, I got the chance to spend 5 month in Japan and define all the basics of the project (story, game design, prototype…). You can read more about this amazing experience here.
(And of course find more about our current project on Steam).
The development was kind of paused and slowed down due to the lack of funds and having to re-release our first game as a Definitive Edition (more about that in a bit). One year ago (2023), I created my game company Deneos, managed to raise a bit of funds and started to work on the project with a team. We are now between 5–10 freelancers working together to make this game come to life. That’s basically who we are.
II) What led us to Kickstarter
In this part I’m going to be very transparant with you, doing a Kickstarter campaign was very scary, I really didn’t wanted to make one at all at first and was searching for a publisher to fund the whole project.
As I said, the development of Tako no Himitsu started 5 years ago. It might seem incredibly long and it kind of is, but if we take the context and the fact that it is a JRPG in consideration, I’m pretty sure you’ll get why. As I’m not a solo indie anymore, the dynamic of creating games completely changed. For Save me Mr Tako, I was able to work on my own in my free time for 3 years without paying myself, but now I actually try to have a better life balance (so not doing everything on my own and burning myself up). That’s what led to gathering a team arround the project, which meant we need money to pay everyone for their work. Due to that, the development was very slow as we didn’t earned anything from the first game until 2022, so we had to pause the project a few times to allow me to do some freelance job to earn a bit of money.
Thanksfully I live in France, where there are some public funds. In 2020 I got 10k from the CNC (aide à l’écriture), which helped us to work on the vertical slice of the project with Pixel Boy, AAA and Valentin Seiche (even though they were definilty not paid a full salary). We basicaly went from this (where I made the art):
To this (we now had proper character designs and an artsitic direction set up):
In 2022, we had a playable demo with a lot of features implemented, so I started to search for a publisher to secure the development budget. I thought that having already released a game would have made it easier, but I was very wrong. It definitly helped us to get noticed, we got a few calls and answers, but at the time, two things were against us:
- Our budget was considered too low (we asked for 300k)
- Our release timeframe was too far (we were aiming for 2025)
So basically, publishers told us to recruit a lot of people, to ask for a million and make the game in one year, which is definitly not something we could do, especially as I didn’t had experience leading a team. The game was already getting good feedback, I guess its dark and queer themes might have scared some publishers, but we were also lacking the Steam wishilists as the game was still unanannounced so there was no steam page yet.
We kept improving the vertical slice demo and searching for publishers, but then the post covid crisis striked, and publishers where not funding anything anymore. They were basically telling us to do a Kickstarter campaign to prove them the game will sell (aka taking all the risks ourselves to reassure them). It seems that it’s particulary hard for indie JRPG to get a publisher, and that Kickstarter helped a lot of them to come to existence (even Undertale did Kickstarter).
Those years were very hard to me as I was living with minimum wages in France. Fortunately, the Definitive Edition of Save me Mr Tako brought me some money which fueled back my hopes. That’s why in 2023, I took things in hands, created my game company properly thanks to the Tako money, decided that we won’t give up on this game and do everything we can, including the Kickstarter campaign.
Before that, even though I was showing pictures of the game on Twitter already, I was hiding the octopus mecanic and the fact that the game was the sequel to my previous one. We decided to take part of the AG French Direct and partnered with a PR company called Future Friends Games to boost the announcement. We published a cool reveal trailer (the first I made myself), the Steam Page and the coming soon Kickstarter page, to start earning wishlist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV2Tp8CEOqU
III) Preparing the campaign
Our announcement went pretty well, raising more than 2000 Steam wishlists (for reference, when launching Save me Mr Tako Definitive Edition, I had 3000). So we were now in the Kickstarter preparation phase. You might not know it, but Kickstarter also have a wishlist system, which help you get visibility, so we had to work on increasing those numbers (I was told having 1000 of them could really help).
I worked with my PR Partner Future Friends for the announcement, which took one retainer month (approximately 3000€), and I was pretty satisfied with their help. They told me that they’ll help again to prepare the campaign and when we’ll run it (which will cost two more retainer months). After that I was basically handling communication on my own (in addition to searching for funds and making the actual game). They left me advices, to especially try tiktok as it can really do wonder in indie marketing, so for a while I spend time making tiktok videos, which is very time consuming and not very my thing (and you can’t put a link on your profile unless you have more than 1000 followers, which don’t help converting the traffic). So in the end I decided to stick with what I do best, basically doing screenshot saturday with gif each weeks, and posting devlogs on Patreon every couple of months.
At these moments, Twitter also started to change, so for a while my tweets were not getting as much visibility as before (I was getting less than 50 likes even though I had more than 2000 followers). It was due to having the links to the Kickstarter coming soon page in them, so here is a small tip for you, put all the link and mentions in the tweet bellow, it can help a bit. After that, I started to have between 100–600 likes to each of my tweets, and increasing the wishlist count a bit days after days for more than a year.
One of our goals with the Kickstarter Campaign was to publish it with a demo, as for me it’s really what show people that the game exists and bring them into its world. With our vertical slice demo, one of the feedback was that the story was kind of hard to get into, so for our first public demo, I decided to make the real begining I had planned for the story, so it will be easier to draw people in. As time went on, I managed to secure a bit of funding with the company from french public funds (CNC pre production, BPI, personal loans…) which we directly injected into the demo. The team grew a lot more than what I anticipated at first, which allowed us to have good progress, especially in the art direction, and gave us a lot of materials for the trailers (there is a lot already made that you can’t see in the demo), but which also took a lot of time of managment.
In the meantime, we decided to have a japanese guest composer, as it is something that help Kickstarter projects a lot (and a personal pleasure as well). I first wanted to work with Motoi Sakuraba, as Golden Sun is the game main reference. Unfortunately I had trouble reaching to him so I started to work with Masanori Hikichi, the composer of Terranigma (our second main reference). In the end, Sakuraba answered so we decided to keep both of them and to have them already making a track for the demo. I believe having them in the project helped tremandously to catch people’s attention.
https://marc-antoinearchier.bandcamp.com/album/tako-no-himitsu-ost-wip
We initially planned to launch the campaign in the summer 2023, but we delayed it at least 3 times in order to work more on the demo and have more things prepared. I also wanted to line the campaign with a public event in order to get more attention from press and if possible a steam featuring for the demo. In the end, in May 2024, we learned that we were selected to BitSummit, which would take place in July. It was a dream come true, I had the chance to show my first game there 7 years ago, and it’s an event that takes places in Kyoto, the town were the project actually started, so we decided to go for it!
Basically, we had one month to finish and publish the demo, prepare the campaign (stretchgoals, rewards, text and images), make a trailer, and go back to Japan. It was a lot, but I’m glad we pulled it off thanks to the support of our team and Future Friends. I made the trailer again which was very stressful due to the short amount of time. Valentin Seiche did the Key Art, Marc-Antoine Archier the music, Brieuc and Garrett helped with programming while I was busy, and the whole art team did a lot in such a short amount of time, everything is a big group effort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPNuTy0fmh0
Ultimately things had to be cut to the demo last minute as they were not properly polished. At first I wanted to have 3 chapters to allow to show a lot of diversity, but in the end we sticked with two to have the time to make them properly. As we’ll showcased the game in Japan, we worked with 8–4ltd (who localized our previous game) to localize the demo in japanese, which also meant we had to lock the actualy content in order to have time to localize it. I wish we would have had more languages, but it costs a lot and take a lot of time of testing. We actually spend quite some times playtesting everything to be sure the demo would be as bug free and polish as possible. Then, we submitted the demo on Steam (which is also stressfull as Steam takes a few day in order to approve it), but in the end everything was ready to launch right in time (very stressfull).
In addition to the demo, trailer, PR Texts for press and influencers (Future Friends managed to get us more than 80 content creators registered to test the demo for the launch), we had to prepare the Kickstarter stretch goals, social goals and rewards. The stretch goals would be revealed only after we secured 100% of fundings, but they need to be prepared. One important reward I wanted to have was the possibility for baker to order physical versions, as physical rewards are what brings in the more money. I discussed to a few potential partners about that, and due to the crisis some were a bit affraid by Kickstarter. In the end, I managed to secure a deal with Pix&Love, a french company that I love. Having them handling all physical rewards relieved me from a lot of stress, as I won’t have to send anything myself. So here is an other advice, find good partners early on, you dont have to do your campaign on your own.
Two weeks before launching the campaign, I also went to the GameCamp in France, a professional game event where I got advice from a few people (even though at the moment I was very nervous to go into this campaign, feeling that we won’t reach the goal). I was following the success of Alzara Radiant Echoes on Kickstarter and thinking that as I did not have their marketing budget, I won’t be able to succeed. Emma actually gave me a lot of advices and put me in touch with The Crowdfunding Agency, who handled paid ads for them. I met them in person during the event, and so at the last minutes we decided to invest 1k in ads for our campaign as well (which is not a lot, but can still help).
I’m lucky to know people who managed a few campaigns before like Thomas Bideaux, who is the one who recommanded me to work with Future Friends and gave me a lot of advice before and during the campaign. Don’t hesitate to reach to people who went through this process, without that, I would not have known I had to get in touch with the Kickstarter team before launching the campaign to get the project we love badge (which gives more visibility). They also advised me to reach to other indiedevs who are or did a successfull campaign to help signal boost ours, which I did.
A week before the campaign launch, we had 1100 Kickstarter wishlists on the coming soon page. We released a teaser of the game with parts of the trailer, featuring our track from Motoi Sakuraba, and reach 1800 wishlists just before the launch. This teaser is my most viral tweet ever, and helped a lot!
IV) Running the campaign
On July 10 2024, we launched our campaign on Kickstarter and the demo on Steam. From there, things went incredibly fast. We reached our base goal of 50k€ in just 3 days, and after that we started announcing and reaching stretchgoal after stretchgoal.
One thing that I was asked a lot is how much money we put ourselves in the campaign. We actually haven’t injected any money, because what is the point? We actually need the money to make the game, so we can’t play with it like that. But we did spend on the demo, in PR and Ads as mentionned before.
What was our strategy? First step getting the word out. Future Friend had their PR draft ready for the launch so all their network was notified, but I also spend time myself researching for every journalist, game developers and content creators I interacted with in the past 7 years for my first game. It took a lot of time to find and write to all of them, especially as the industry has been hard and a lot of people were laid off and medias not existing anymore. But now I have a nice excel with all my contacts. So basically I messaged them a week before the campaign launched, the day of the launch, when we reached our goal, and a bit before the end of the campaign to signal boost my tweets and the Kickstarter page as much as possible.
My second point was to rely on my community, the queer and drag community. I’m a queer person myself and have been following the evolution of the drag scene these past 10 years thanks to friends who do drag. It’s something I’m actually talking about in the game as we have a Drag Queen playable character. As we were working on his storyline, we decided to include cameos of real world drag artists in the game in order to portray the scene properly. We spent a lot of time reaching and getting the approval from many drag artists before the campaign, including queens, kings and queers. Some of them are friends, other I saw perform locally or on TV. In the end we managed to reveal one drag artist each day on Twitter/Instagram/TikTok, which made a lot of people from the community discover about our game (as well as queer content creators).
The third axis of our Strategy was the BitSummit, that we lined up to happen right in the middle of the campaign, when things usually slow down. Being able to return to Kyoto for such an important moment of the project life felt very special. Thanks to the event, we got a lot of international press coverage, as well as valuable feedback from players who helped us patching the demo. The event had a steam featuring, which made a lot of people discover the demo, thus the campaign (the demo had a Kickstarter link on the menu!).
Speaking of a demo, a lot of our strategy relied on it, and it works way better than we expected. We ended up with more than 8000 demo downloads. Our goal was to patch the demo a week before the end of the campaign in order to get people playing it again, which we did with all the feedback received at BitSummit and online. We were able to rework some mecanics and add quality of life features (like the run button, possibility to aim…), as well as adding the new boss and cutscene we did not had the time to finish before launching the campaign. It helped get a bit of press attention again. At this moment Steam also released its big demo update (too bad it was after we launched it, but it still helped to get more eyes on it).
One things that wasn’t planned though, was to catch the attention of Miyoko Kobayashi, the other composer of Terranigma. She replied to some of my tweets after the launch of the campaign and we started to talk in DM, leading to her joining the project as well. It became a last minute stretchgoal that caught a lot of attention. I’m very proud this happened, because it’s the first time in 20 years that Masanori Hikichi and Miyoko Kobayashi are working together on a game soundtrack, it feel so special to reunite them on my project, especially as a huge fan of Quintet games.
Then it was just constant communication, publishing teasers (which were a mix of footage of the KS trailer and other cut footage) as video posts perform better, reddit, and posting a Kickstarter update everytime we reached a Stretchgoal. Speaking of Stretchgoals, we managed to reach all the stretchgoals we planned, which still feels surreal.
I also tried to make the most of my trip in Japan, getting to spend time at Villa Kujoyama again to work on the patch, getting inspired again by the town scenery, temples and local drag scene. I felt recharged and at peace running the campaign from there. I also got the chance to meet with Masanori Hikichi who came to visit me in Kyoto, and played some music to me (including the music from my game, which was magical). I shared a lot about that this in my Kickstarter updates and on social medias, which I guess also helped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fHjPGOXW24
Now that the campaign is over, here is some datas:
- 8,500 demo downloads
- 2,465 new backers (more than 150k€ raised)
- 12000 Steam wishlists
- 300 discord members
- big boost on all socials
- great reception of the demo
I was far from expecting such results. Even though I’m very tired of the past two months, I’m also very proud and happy that my game found its tribes, especially after working on it on our own for so long. I hope that the goal of reassuring publishers is met, and that things will go more smoothly moving forward.
Here are things I feel we did right:
- The demo
- Making the most out of the game event
- Securing good partnerships for the project
- Staying true to our “brand” in communication and embracing our queerness
- Good stretchgoals that motivated people and that will benefit the game
And some things we shoulve have done differently (if we had the money for it):
- Prepare the ads more (it was kind of a last minute addition and we could have done more with a better prior audiance research/mailing lists)
- more “famous influencers” prep (we haven’t paid any influencers featuring)
- having more updates of the demo ready along the campaign (we wanted to have an additional chapter droping after the campaign but just didn’t had time or funds to properly make it)
- Social goals (we haven’t reached many and it could have been done better)
- Some rewards pricing (for example, the side quest tiers was too expensive and the boss one not enough, as well as not setting up physical only tiers which was a mistake)
One big things to take away from it is that a successfull campaign is not something that happen randomly, it took us a year of planning and finding reliable partners in many department (PR, ads, localization, Physical stuff, development…). I don’t think I would have found them without having already worked in this industry for 10 years and developing my network. I want to thanks again all the people who supported us in this adventure. We spent 5 years working on the game and taking into account all the lessons we learned with our first game to make it as polished as possible before allowing people to play it. I guess you can do it faster, but don’t underestimate the impact a good demo can have, because I feel that’s thanks to it that people really managed to feel the heart of the project.
I want to end this article by talking a bit about what’s next for us. Even though we are very proud of the result of our campaign, it only unlocks the next step of a long road for us. Game Development is hard, especially JRPG, and even with this amount of money we have not secured the full game content budget, so in the coming years we’ll have to be wise with our choices, apply to more funds and find reliable partners or cut content in order to reach the finish line. I’m confident that we can make the game come true, especially now that we proved that our formula work and people are into it. I can’t wait to be back to work on it (even though in the next couple of month mostly paperwork awaits me!) and see the world come to life.
Here is a small surprise, even though we haven’t reached all the social goals, we still have implemented the new octopus skin! In the final game, you’ll be able to use a magic wand to turn your octopus into characters from our previous game Save me Mr Tako!
Thank you so much for reading this article. I hope it inspired you in some ways or that I was able to share a bit of my knowledge, so it becomes a usefull resources for other indie game developers who wants to do a Kickstarter campaign.
Don’t forget to wishlist the game on Steam, try the demo and leave it a review:
- Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2357380/Tako_no_Himitsu_Ocean_of_Secrets/
- Late pledges are available on the Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1373467035/tako-no-himitsu-ocean-of-secrets
- Follow us on Social Medias: https://linktr.ee/ChrisDeneos
🐙Thank you for your support! 🐙
