Alexis Kennedy on Cultist Simulator: the Way through the Wood, Part 5

Kickstarters usually run for a month. Anyone interested can pledge at any time after the Kickstarter opens, right up until the moment the Kickstarter closes. And they do. But here’s the thing. For nearly all Kickstarters, by far the most pledges come in the first 48 and the last 48 hours.

The reasons for this are pretty straightforward. A Kickstarter, whatever size it is, makes the biggest splash the day that it opens. It’s then that the core fans — whether that means thousands of people on a mailing list, or a dozen friends and family cajoled into backing — will get involved. If the creator’s announced the Kickstarter in advance — as they should! — then when the gates open, they’ll get their first flood of visitors.

After that, the flood of interest will slow to a trickle. The campaign might stay on the front page of Kickstarter, if it’s a staff pick, but people who browse the front page regularly will already have made their decision. It’s a hard slog bringing new visitors to the campaign, day by day.

But then in the final hours, it generally picks up — almost magically, it seems at the time. Partly it’s because LAST 48 HOURS / LAST 24 HOURS / LAST 12 HOURS gets people’s attention in a way that STILL RUNNING doesn’t, and it’s easier and more effective to promote. Partly it’s because backers who want to see the campaign do better will decide to chip in or up their pledges.

And partly it’s just because there’s a REMIND ME button just below the SUBSCRIBE button on a Kickstarter page. Anyone who clicks that gets an email 48 hours before the campaign ends. This means a lot of passing visitors — people who didn’t like your project quite enough to back it then — will finally chip in when they see time is running out.

This has a pretty significant psychological consequence for anyone running a campaign. The middle period can feel like being on a becalmed sailing ship. The funding total that shot up at the beginning is now creeping up. And that’s if you put enough effort into promoting your Kickstarter. If you let it slide for a few days, it’ll ‘creep up incredibly slowly’ or ‘stall’ instead. Or even, occasionally, drop. Backers do sometimes cancel or reduce pledges. It’s almost certainly nothing to do with the campaign. They might have lost their job, or realised they need to buy an emergency birthday present with their spare cash. But it’s easy to take it personally, and it’s hella demoralising.

So we’re talking about a massive surge of optimism at the beginning, followed by weeks of wracking uncertainty and semi-helplessness, followed by — if the campaign succeeds — a last-minute gush of relieved delight. This is why people come out of Kickstarter campaigns looking like they’ve been in a tumble-drier for a month.

This is what the funding looked like, day-by-day, for the Cultist Simulator campaign.

You’ll notice that the final surge is a lot less impressive than the initial one. I think the rule of thumb is that the end surge brings in probably about half as much as the initial surge, but in Cultist’s case it was more like a quarter. I think this was just because I didn’t do a great job of promoting the campaign while it was running. I was funded largely by my existing fan base — people who’d been following my work for years — and I know how to talk to them, but I’m not especially good at wider promotional stuff. And there was only one of me. I did do an AMA (‘ask me anything’, an online Q&A on Reddit) towards the end, and I made as much of a noise as possible as I could on social media, but I was exhausted and, honestly, very aware that I was boring people by banging on about it all the time.

So we didn’t make it to the hoped-for 100K, and we didn’t make that final Tarot deck stretch goal*. I was much more disappointed than I expected. That’s how quickly expectations can change. A month before, I’d been worrying about whether I’d make 30K. Now, ‘only’ making about three times my original goal felt almost, sometimes, like a failure. That funding total is very, very easy to obsess about.

But only ‘almost, sometimes’ like a failure! Mostly, I was bloody delighted. I did one last heartfelt thankyou video, took a few days off… and then started making the game.

Some time in the last few thousand words, it may have occurred to you to wonder: where was my publisher, Humble, in all this? They’d offered me an advance in exchange for 30% of the game revenue. How did they feel about me raising more money through Kickstarter? Was the deal still on?

Actually, that was all pretty straightforward. We’d agreed the Kickstarter money didn’t count as game revenue, and so Humble wouldn’t get a cut. They certainly didn’t object to the project getting the extra publicity and budget, without any additional cost or effort needed from their end. And I still wanted the publishing advance, and the extra reach that Humble’s promotional efforts could give me later. They were fine with me being transparent about that if any Kickstarter backers asked, but in the end no-one seemed particularly interested.

So how much money did I have, and how much did I need?

I’d wanted to raise enough to pay freelancers, and I needed to pay my own living expenses for eight or nine months, plus some marketing costs. Humble’s advance would cover living expenses and modest marketing costs.

I’d raised 82K from the Kickstarter although I knew only maybe 65K of that would end up going towards the project, after Kickstarter fees, credit card fees, backer pledges that failed (or got clawed back when it turned out someone had used their father’s credit card to back the project — it happens), and a hefty chunk to buy the physical rewards.

17K gone, out of that 82K? Ouch! Ouch indeed, but that’s not unusual. It could be a lot worse. I’d gone light on the physical rewards. I still wasn’t looking forward to sourcing and posting all those things on my own, especially since there was going to be about three times as much of that as I’d expected. I resigned myself to numerous evenings in front of disposable Netflix binge-fodder, copying design notes on to USBs and putting them in envelopes.

But back to the budget. I’d still ended up with more than double the 30K I’d hoped to raise. What was I going to spend the money on? Honestly, ‘contingency and maybe a tiny bit of polish’ was a good enough answer as far as I was concerned. Even in a small project, when things go wrong, it can get expensive very fast. I didn’t have any other source of income. If I fell ill for a month, or if one of my freelancers produced work I couldn’t use, that contingency would disappear very quickly. I knew it wasn’t an answer anyone would find particularly exciting, though.

But around this time, something potentially wonderful and also potentially disastrous happened.

My extremely beloved Lottie had just quit her job at Failbetter, my previous studio. This meant that a talented and tenacious producer with good commercial instincts and a flair for graphic design — someone I trusted completely and enjoyed working with — someone with exactly the skills I could most use in a business partner — was suddenly looking for a job.

But it’s not a small thing, going into business with your significant other. We lived together. If we worked together — and worked from home — we would be spending almost twenty-four hours a day in each others’ company. And we would have no source of income other than the money I’d already raised. If the project didn’t work out, we would both be in financial trouble. And I was more prominent than Lottie, further along in my career, and the one bringing the funding to the table. That’s a difficult dynamic to navigate for romantic partners who want to be equals. All of that added up to a lot of potential strain on our relationship.

We’d been talking about the possibility, on and off, ever since I’d struck out on my own — always as a comfortably distant hypothetical. We’d expected to deal with the question much further on, if at all. But the situation at Lottie’s current workplace had deteriorated more and faster than either of us had ever expected — enough so that she’d resigned without finding another job first. So there she was without a job, and there I was with enough extra funding for us to pay a salary for the time being. The timing was pretty compelling.

We went for it: Lottie joined Weather Factory as a second founder. And I’m bloody glad she did. We’ve had our share of difficult conversations since, but I think Cultist would have been a worse and a much less successful game without Lottie’s talents and influence. It certainly wouldn’t have launched on the alarmingly accelerated schedule we managed. More on that in a bit.

And it meant that those evenings watching binge-fodder and packaging Kickstarter rewards became a shared and almost fun activity. It also meant that the rewards got a lot better. At £35 and up, I’d promised backers my design notes on a USB: I could just have pasted them into Dropbox and sent a link via email, but I worried that wouldn’t feel very special. I’d found some nice-looking USBs and gift boxes, but I hadn’t had the time or heart or knack to do much research. So the USBs were not Cultist-themed, and also were pretty expensive.

But Lottie doesn’t like things being half-done. So she went on a tear looking for companies that could bulk-produce custom-3D-printed USB keys, and negotiated with Chinese suppliers until we had several hundred tiny gorgeous replicas of one of the Cultist Simulator books:

It was so immediately beloved that we ended up, much later, selling it as merchandise through our Etsy store. But that’s much later.

People often ask: what does a games producer do? It’s difficult to be specific, because the answer varies greatly, but at the micro-indie end it tends to be ‘everything that needs doing that might not get done otherwise’. So that includes, for instance, making sure the pledge rewards for a Kickstarter are high-quality. But for Weather Factory, that meant Lottie handled schedules, budgets, finance, freelancer relationships; and then, because we were only two people, she picked up marketing too; and then she ended up doing not only graphic design for our marketing and social media, but also bits of art when we ran out of freelancer budget**.

So there are two qualities that make a really good indie producer. One is that they need to be absolutely trustworthy — meticulous — organised — reliable. ‘Reliable’ is not a traditionally sexy term, but when someone’s job is to do the stuff that needs doing but might not get done otherwise, you need to be sure they’ll actually do it. The other is that they need to be willing and capable to do almost anything that needs doing. To Lottie’s continuing chagrin, I’ve identified one of her more significant qualities as ‘constructive irritation’. I mean by this that when she finds something she can’t do well, it annoys her enough that she puts an unlikely amount of effort into getting good at it quickly. It isn’t always fun to be in the room with her when that’s happening, but it’s invariably useful. She’s a hell of a producer, is what I’m saying.

So Lottie came on board; Weather Factory was now two people. She handled all the things I mentioned above, and more, and I handed coding, game design, writing, and that rarefied thing, ‘strategy’. It was honestly still really about two jobs for each of us, but it’s been generally doable.

Did I say ‘year’? Actually, we had just over seven months. I’d promised the game would be delivered in May 2018. We had until then to turn a shonky alpha with placeholder content into a polished, release-ready, content-complete game.

Of course, it wasn’t even a full seven calendar months to work on the game. We were going to three big events to promote the game, each of which would eat up a week of time, practically speaking, with travel and setup. We would lose weeks at Christmas, because the world stops for the holidays anyway, because nothing, nothing interferes with Lottie’s family Christmases, and in the end because we both of us got flu and each spent a week prostrate and occasionally hallucinating.

And we really had to get the game finished at the beginning of May so we could release at the end of May, because ‘finished’ in videogame terms tends to mean ‘not quite finished’. You’d be amazed at the number of fiddly but essential technical or creative tasks that somehow only become visible once the game is ‘finished’. Like, have you written all the text for all the achievements on the Steam store? Uploaded them? Sized the images right? Have you done the same for the GOG store, which introduced achievements while you were still working on the game? Have you got the achievements working with the new version of their client? Sure, on Windows, but what about Mac? So you have to dust off the testing Mac that lives on the shelf by the cat-food cupboard except at major releases, and then you have to update OSX because you haven’t lately, and then there’s an issue with the new version of the GOG client which you can’t resolve until the following day because GOG support is in Warsaw, an hour ahead of UK time, and they’ve knocked off for the evening. And that’s the whole afternoon and the whole morning, or one whole day out of the twenty days finishing time you’ve allotted. And obviously you didn’t actually really quite lock the code on the 1st of May — you’ve already spent five days fixing bugs and adding that one last-minute community suggestion. And then your daughter’s off school sick, so you’re not getting much technical work done for the whole following day.

This stuff requires thought even for larger studios, and when your whole studio is two people, only one of whom can code and only one of whom can draw, it’s pretty intense. So it was an aggressive schedule, although a doable one.

Why on earth, then, did we pick such an aggressive schedule? The whole point of being your own boss is that you can work to your own deadlines, right?

I’ve mentioned already that we had a decent, but limited, amount of funding, and no revenue at all until we launched the game. But, more than that, Cultist was a very unusual and deliberately experimental game. The prototype had got some love, and I’d been making games long enough to have a sense for what would work and what wouldn’t. But the whole point of Weather Factory had been to work on risky projects. That sounds fun in principle, but it’s alarming when you’re calculating likely sales figures in terms of months of future rent. The best way to manage that risk was to get the game made as quickly as possible — so that if it wasn’t working out, we could gather feedback and fix problems sooner, not later. And if it did bomb on launch, we would have enough time left to try to find a way to turn it around.

So, seven months. Off we went.

*although if you’re following Weather Factory now, you’ll know that, years later, we decided to make one anyway.

**or when I needed something at the last minute because I’d had a purportedly brilliant idea that needed to go in the game.

Learn more about my journey: https://www.alexiskennedy.co.uk/ or connect with me on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and YouTube