Alexis Kennedy on Cultist Simulator: the Way through the Wood, Part 3

I eventually released the Cultist Simulator alpha to the public in January. I had a little spare time before the BioWare contract started, so I scratched it together in smoking haste over Christmas. I had some notional businessy reasons along the lines of wanting to get exposure earlier, but I was already starting to realise my main motive: I had a semi-rational terror of running out of time. I’d started my game development career much, much later than most, on the cusp of middle age. I was very conscious — I still am — that I missed out on twenty years of making games, and there’s a lot I wanted to get done before I karked it, assuming that I karked it at a decently silvery age. So I constantly felt the pressure to get things done yesterday.

I didn’t hit up my press contacts, such as they were — I just released an announcement on my blog, and put up the Cultist alpha as a free download on itch.io, the smallest and most experimentally focused of the game storefronts. To my surprise, I immediately got a positive write-up on a pretty major gaming website, Kotaku, by a journalist I didn’t know and had never spoken to. I was delighted, but I was immediately beset by paranoia that the journalists I did know and had spoken to would think that I had left them out of the loop. So I hastily emailed them all — on my phone, since I was stuck at an airport — to let them know, and assure them that I hadn’t forgotten them. I don’t remember that any of them posted any articles of their own. I imagine they wondered what the hell I was on about. I got on my plane and worried all the way until the other end.

The Kotaku article mostly focused on the ‘cult leader’ aspect, which made sense… but to begin with, Cultist Simulator wasn’t really about cultists. It’s a game that invites you to feel lonely. I nearly called it Occultist Simulator. But the shadow of HP Lovecraft hangs over the game like a melancholy storm-cloud, and ‘cultist’ conveys an instantly Lovecraftian flavour. (At least, it does in the UK. In the US, it means something else, too. But we’ll come to that.)

I mentioned earlier that Lovecraft was an influence. And if you’re reading this, you probably know who Howard Phillips Lovecraft is — but he’s so omnipresent that he’s sometimes invisible. So: HPL was an early twentieth century weird fiction author with a modest following in his lifetime and a massive following after his death. His admittedly ornate literary style has come in for a lot of criticism — unfairly, I think — as has his occasionally blatant racism — more fairly, I reckon. But the distinctively alien flavour of his ‘Mythos’ inspired an avalanche of other writers, and the specific gods and monsters of his stories — Cthulhu, Azathoth, nightgaunts, Deep Ones, shoggoths, Mi-Go — are instantly recognisable touchstones of geek culture. As are the ‘cultists’ who serve those gods and monsters: humans whose motivations have been transformed or corrupted by secret knowledge, who work in secret to achieve a probably self-destructive agenda.

Fallen London, and Sunless Sea, had often been described as Lovecraftian, and I’d burnt a lot of energy on objecting to that. There were two reasons for my objections. The first is that ‘Lovecraftian’ tends to be an easy and misleading label for any kind of near-contemporary fantasy that isn’t about vampires. The second is that Lovecraft was a nihilistic old sod. The Fallen London universe was always about human concerns writ large, sometimes even in the stars. Lovecraft was much bleaker. Human concerns, in his work, are never writ large. The best we can hope for is to stay out from under the feet of the much more powerful things roaming round the cosmos.

But I’ve been no more immune to Lovecraft’s influence than any other minor weird fiction writer has been, and with Cultist I thought, to hell with it, let’s lean in. So I paid open and enthusiastic homage to any number of Lovecraftian tropes — alien gods, a dream-universe with its own reality, forbidden books and of course secretive occult organisations — while steering well clear of any actual specific elements of the actual Lovecraftian Mythos.*

And I found that calling the game ‘Lovecraftian’ made it a lot easier to sum up in a sentence than Fallen London had been. The thing about doing distinctive, unclassifiable games is that it’s hard to pitch them in a sentence. When it came to running the Kickstarter, that was a big help.

I started putting the Kickstarter together in August 2017, as soon as I finished at BioWare (and at Telltale Games, but that’s a whole other story). Why a Kickstarter? I had some money from the sale of my Failbetter shares, I had some money from my months of freelancing, and there was a very good chance, by August 2017 that I would get a publishing advance from Humble. But if you’ve been following along, you’ll know I was feeling pretty risk-averse. I wanted to get the word out about the project in as many ways as possible; and I knew of old that Kickstarter was a good way to do that.

But more importantly, once again, I wanted to be bloody sure people would actually think this project was worth spending money on, before I committed time to making it. Yes, I’d seen enthusiasm from my core community, but it was impossible to judge how that would translate into a wider audience. By this point, honestly, I was keen enough to do make the thing that I’d have done it even if I knew I’d make a loss. When I left Failbetter, I’d chosen creative freedom over money, and I hadn’t changed my mind yet. But video game development can be as big a money pit as you like. I could make one version of the game on my own for, say, six month’s living expenses. Or I could make a more ambitious version of the game if I hired freelancers for some thousands, or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of pounds. I didn’t want to go into debt for hundreds of thousands of pounds on a game that wasn’t going to make its money back.

So I decided on a modestly ambitious version. I put together a budget. I reckoned I could make the game in seven or eight months, with about thirty thousand pounds for music, UI consultancy, art, maybe a bit of freelance production help, that sort of thing. I decided to run a Kickstarter for a thirty thousand pound funding threshold. If I raised more than that, it could go towards my living expenses; if it failed, I could always fall back on the cheapest possible version of the game.

Now came the alarming bit. Could I convince the Internet to give me thirty thousand pounds for this game? The last Kickstarter I’d run had raised a hundred thousand, but back then I’d been the head of an (admittedly small) studio, with the assistance of both Liam and Paul for trailer work, web design, art. It had taken me nearly a year of procrastination to cut together a pitch video for Humble, and I certainly couldn’t make any kind of trailer. I still had some fans, but I didn’t really know how many or how enthusiastic. I was at that point still on very good terms with Failbetter. I could count on them to give me a signal boost, and their fans were my fans. But I didn’t know how much that was worth.

Well, the worst that could happen was that I spent a month making a fool of myself, and then learnt a bit more about what did and didn’t work in the pitch. So I threw together the most convincing Kickstarter page that my visually challenged brain could handle (and begged some spare time from Lottie to help me tidy it up). I paid a freelance artist, Sarah Gordon, to paint me some unorthodox Tarot cards representing some of the Hours — the Door in the Eye, the Thunderskin, the Witch-and-Sister, the Sun-in-Rags. I paid a freelance video editor quite a princely sum to cut together those, with my creaky alpha game footage, into a slow-paced, haunting, trailer with the grainy effect of a silent film.

So now the worst that could happen was that I spent a month making a fool of myself, and also I was in the hole for several thousand pounds if I didn’t get funded. Kickstarter funding, remember, is all-or-nothing. If I asked for thirty thousand pounds and backers pledged twenty-nine thousand pounds, I would get zero pounds. But if I asked for only, say, ten thousand pounds, and then I ran out of money making the game, that was the worst of all possible worlds. It’s always tempting to pitch low so you can get funded, but you’re just trading off one risk for a nastier, longer-term risk.

And of course, if backers pledged thirty thousand pounds, I’d actually get something like twenty-seven thousand pounds, after Kickstarter fees, credit card fees, and dropped pledges. And that twenty-seven thousand would also need to cover the cost of all the physical rewards.

Received Kickstarter wisdom is that you need to offer physical rewards as well as digital rewards to excite backers. But I decided to steer away from the physical stuff. It was still just me working on this, and just the time taken to put a lot of rewards in the post, never mind the expense of providing them, would chew up my time. So I promised almost nothing physical: just my design notes on a USB stick, and for the three-hundred-pound tier, ‘a Thing suitable for display in a cabinet.’**

Everything else was digital… or personal. I remembered how, for Sunless Sea, I’d made ‘getting a tattoo’ a stretch goal — that is, a promise I’d keep if the project was sufficiently overfunded. This time round, I made it a pledge level. Anyone prepared to spend five thousand pounds could get this reward:

“Choose any piece of game art to be tattooed on my actual skin.”

I didn’t think for a moment that anyone would go for it. Five thousand pounds — even with the rewards from all the other levels thrown in — was a silly sum. But I hoped its almost-possible air might get people talking.

Lottie, on the other hand, wasn’t entirely happy about the idea. Weather Factory was still just me at this point. We’d discussed the theoretical possibility of her joining me, but she wanted to stay at Failbetter for a good while yet, and now that we were living together, the idea of running a studio together, too, and probably spending twenty-four hours a day together… that seemed like a lot of eggs in quite a small basket. So it was my decision. But when your girlfriend tells you quite reasonably that she’s not at ease with the idea any internet stranger might be able to get a dead god tattooed on you, you listen.. So I added:

“My girlfriend gets to veto anything too alarming.”

But the most significant reward was probably the Stolen Name tier. For seventy quid, you could get this:

“Your name, or a pseudonym, goes in the game, as an author of forbidden works / damned soul / grasping tide spirit / oracular bottled ape foetus etc. I reserve the right to veto unsuitable names, because I still remember that time a backer tried to get a landmark called Dankmeme Swamp in Sunless Sea. But I’ll find something that works for us both, or give your money back.”

‘Your name in the game’ is a very usual Kickstarter reward. I was a little worried about it here, though. I’d put a lot of work into creating a fairly coherent alternate history, and suddenly having to include too many audience-requested names in that history would be challenging — like trying to keep a meal edible when you unexpectedly have to include dozens of random spices. So I’d made it seventy pounds, which was quite high for a ‘name in the game’ level. I thought that would allow some enthusiasts to pledge, but keep the numbers to maybe twenty or thirty names. With this in mind, I added:

“If I get a lot of backers, I am really going to regret making this a seventy quid tier, but I’ll put an whole extra library of Scarlet Monks in or something.”

As it happened, I eventually got two hundred and twenty-five backers at that level or higher. The Kickstarter experience is often a frothy cocktail of elation and nausea, and the panic of having to squeeze more than two hundred names into my tiny embryonic mythology was like an extra gulp of that cocktail. But I’m getting ahead of myself; we’re still on the eve of the Kickstarter.

I’d meant this to be a casual, low-key Kickstarter, and — partly because it was just me — it had certainly been much lighter on prep than any of the three Kickstarters we’d run at at Failbetter. But it’s very difficult to be casual about a Kickstarter when you get that close to launch.

In the last few hours before you push the LAUNCH button on a Kickstarter, you inevitably read and reread every word of your pitch long after they have ceased to make individual sense. Is that description too vague? Is that sentence too glib? You tried to include so much in the opening paragraph that it was completely indigestible, and now you’ve rewritten it from scratch, and does it even mean anything at all now to anyone who isn’t you? You’ve listened to the feedback from the people you’ve shown the preview too, and some of it you’ve followed avidly because it’s an incredibly useful insight into real reactions, and some of it you’ve quietly thrown out because none of these people have ever run Kickstarters. But what if you’ve thrown out the good advice and kept the bad?

In actual fact most of this probably never makes any difference at all. Potential backers scan a Kickstarter pitch in a minute or two, and decide very quickly if they love it, or if they don’t. Most don’t finish or don’t even watch the pitch video. If someone reads it beginning to end and notices the three typos you’ve missed, they’re probably already on board. But pressing that button feels like launching a rocket. Probably nothing will explode. But you don’t really know how high it will go, and the last five minutes before you press the button might be your last chance to change that.

September 1st, 2017, 10am. I pressed the button.

*There weren’t any legal constraints here. The situation around the copyright on Lovecraft’s work is complicated, and the venerable game developer Chaosium has trademarked some of the phrases from it, but it’s basically public domain stuff at this point. I just really enjoy making up new mythologies and I didn’t want to waste the opportunity.

**I had several options in mind, and we eventually went with something else. Twenty-three people trusted me enough — or liked the project enough — to pledge money to this extremely vague description. They got a pug-sized statuette of a skeletal feathered crow. Lottie found the statuettes online, and we were both so delighted that I actually altered the appearance of the Hour called the Beach-Crow so we could use them to represent it.

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