Fantastic Contraption has been nominated for the prestigious IGF Nuovo award, and for Best VR Experience at the Vision VR/AR Awards (read more at our Road to IGF interview). The team is thrilled and we’ll be showing the game at both the IGF expo at the Game Developers Conference in March, and at the Vision summit next month in LA. Come visit us if you’re there!
It’s out! After nearly 3 years of work and a fair amount of stress and crunching, I released Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville on May 29th. Yaaaaay!
I wasn’t expecting a launch bump since it was Kickstarted and spent a year in Early Access… plus gaming press were too busy with E3 to review it. But release went well! There were Rebuild 3 banners on the front page of Steam, GOG, and IndieGameStand. It was exciting to see my own creation up there with other games I have so much respect for.
I launched at a 15% discount and had the same deal for the Steam summer sale 2 weeks later. I keep hearing from players who are glad I launched on GOG at the same time; looks like about 10% of my launch sales came from GOG which I think is high. The game’s Steam Spy data is currently accurate… though it’s way off for some of our other games.
Steam dropped their refund bomb four days after Rebuild 3 released, allowing players to easily refund purchases for any reason including not liking a game or finding it on sale for cheaper, just so long as they’ve played less than 2 hours. As someone who buys a lot of games I love it; they’ve basically brought back demos and made them mandatory for all games. Ideally players will spend their refunded money on a new game and stop when they find one they like. Everybody wins!
But I grew up in the shareware era and I know that sometimes 2 hours of a game is enough, especially for bite-sized indie titles. I don’t think that’s an issue for Rebuild 3 (which has a whopping average play time of 15 hours), but it might be for other games.
Rebuild’s had cumulative refunds of 2.3% since launch – nothing remotely close to the hit/miss ratio of actual demos. Most of them say it’s “Not what I expected” and that the game is too simple and looks like a mobile game. I guess that’s fair enough (she says while working on the mobile port).
I’m rolling out the first big bugfix update for Rebuild 3 to all stores. It fixes 50-odd small bugs, and introduces (in that I fixed the bug preventing it from running) a very rare questline which forumgoers are crowdsourcing to solve as a group.
I also just added Steam trading cards, so you can collect various faction leaders and trade them in for unique profile backgrounds and emoji.
Now back to that mobile version… I’ve had some hiccups but it should be coming out to iOS and Android sometime in August. You can get the Android beta version now if you buy the game direct from RebuildGame.com, or if you’d like to be in the iOS TestFlight beta you can email me to request a slot.
Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville was just successfully funded on Kickstarter, raising $41k from 2200 backers. Breakdown from Kicktraq:
Like most campaigns seem to go, it started strong, then totally lost momentum, then suddenly leapt forward at the end of the run. Looking at my referrals (full breakdown here), I’m guessing this is in large part because Kickstarter was featuring it at those times. A whopping 53% of my pledges came from people who were browsing Kickstarter when my campaign caught their eye.
It was a success, in that it surpassed my $25k goal, introduced new players to the game, and raised an average $19 per backer. To be honest I was hoping more existing Rebuild players would take an interest, but due to a marketing snafu it’s possible they didn’t even know it was going on. Either way, I knew it’d be a challenge to convince free Flash and $2.99 mobile players to back a PC downloadable game for $10 (no iOS version in the rewards either).
The campaign didn’t come close to actually funding the game in it’s entirety, which would have required more like $150k with my time at cut rate. But I was upfront in saying I didn’t need to fund the entire game, that this money would go towards extra art and extra content and stretch goals. Of which we made a couple, but I’m somewhat relieved that we didn’t make the voice acting stretch goal.
My advice for anyone else doing a video game Kickstarter campaign:
– Read Lobster’s guide to Kickstarter from start to finish.
– Don’t use IndieGogo. I really hate Kickstarter for being so revoltingly US-centric and I know it’s not easy to make or fake a US company (or UK, or Canadian which is what I am). But if the referral numbers are truth, then over half my pledge money came from Kickstarter regulars who bumped into my game on there, mostly while browsing in the video games section. I shouldn’t be surprised; I do it myself. IndieGogo and other crowdfunding sites sadly have much smaller communities.
– Make your video pure gameplay footage set to music. Recent uber-successful campaigns have done this, implying that people are more interested in the game than the story or people behind it. Filming yourself is way too much trouble, especially if you freeze up in front of a camera like me. But Colin was a very patient director and we eventually did get through my lines after 5 mornings of filming. We thought my story of being a (mostly) lone female dev living in the jungle in Panama might catch some attention, but backers seemed to be more excited by the gameplay.
– Don’t bother with physical goods at all. Other devs report they are too much trouble and talked me out of doing a board game as a reward (I know: awwwww). Despite an early poll that showed my fans had no interest in t-shirts or stickers, I did them anyway because dammit I like those things. It was only possible because I found a company (Teelaunch) that would produce and ship them for me.
– Put people into your game at all levels. Stick their names in the credits ($1), on randomly generated characters in the game ($25), draw stylized versions of their faces for random characters ($100), or make them full named npcs with stories and events in the game ($500). Offering these rewards was one of the reasons I wanted to do a Kickstarter campaign in the first place.
– Offer exclusive in-game content. I felt torn about my $20 reward tier which gave players unique starting stats for their main leader. On one hand, it smelled like DLC to me to write content for the game but withhold it from regular players. On the other hand, backers were genuinely excited about it and it cost me little to do.
– Plan something to talk about. I listed the npc gangs, announced the soundtrack, talked about the art and my travel/work lifestyle… but then it devolved into short notices about milestones peppered with gratuitous character sketches from Sara. I wish I’d prepared more in-depth articles about game features since backers did (surprisingly) seem to read and enjoy them.
– Add rewards in the middle of the campaign. My theory: once backers have read a few updates and are getting excited about the project, they’re looking for a reason to increase their pledge. I did additive “everything above, plus” reward tiers so when I added the soundtrack at the $35 level, all the higher tiers included it too.
– Invite backers to vote on something. I had some controversy when I added the Relationships & Kids stretch goal. I didn’t explain it very well, I think I made it sound like playing house in The Sims. Anyway it got backers talking which seemed like a good thing even though they were angry, so I told them they would instead vote between that and the Seasons stretch goal. Half the comments in my whole campaign probably related to this.
– If you don’t need the money, don’t worry about the money. Unlike many projects, I had other options for funding. I used the campaign as a promotional tool and to gauge interest so I wouldn’t kill myself making the game perfect if nobody wanted it. I chose a relatively low goal ($25k) and reached it in the initial rush. I did promotional stuff for 2 hours every morning plus one full day a week, but didn’t feel the incredible stress that most teams seem to. It may not have been a huge financial success, but I did raise awareness for Rebuild and started a sense of community that I hope to carry over into the alpha & beta test.
The Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville Kickstarter campaign made its first stretch goal with no time to lose! I’ll be adding 3 extra faction, including the 1337cREw gamer faction who were so busy having a weekend lan party (do people still have those?) that they didn’t even notice zombies filling the streets outside. Here’s Dara, their leader:
And here’s Madison, a bit of a rebellious youth who joins The Pharmacists. Not for the drugs, not for the protection, but because he likes their style:
Now there’s only 48-ish hours to go, but in a fit of crazed optimism I’ve added another $40k stretch goal: Relationships & Kids. Somewhere in all this killing-the-zombies, saving-humanity, rebuilding-civilization, people surely must be getting on with the daily friendships, feuds and flings that make life worth living.
The basics are: the more time two survivors spend together, the more they’ll like one another. If something bad happens to a person (for example, they’re ripped to shreds by ravenous undead), their friends will be sad. If one of them is happy, they’ll give a happiness boost to their buds. And if two people really, really like eachother, and happen to be opposite genders, perhaps like magic a baby will appear!
Kids will stay safe in the fort of course, we’re not going to send them out to crawl into those tight little spaces and scavenge everything their tiny fingers can grab until they’re at least 14. Maybe 13. It’s a tough world out there.
Okay, on a less depressing note – here’s a sneak peak at one of Sara’s zombies, who she calls Cutter. I think he must have gotten into a face-biting match at some point, but I can’t quite tell if he lost or won.
The Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville Kickstarter campaign has been live for about an hour, and already has $2000 in pledges! :D I’m so excited and proud just to be a part of the crowdfunding movement which is changing how indie games get made. Since Double Fine opened the floodgates, crowdfunding has become a viable way to fund game development without a publisher. It’s a wonderful way to gather fans together and communally support the creation of something bigger than us. My heart is glowing; let’s all join hands and sing now!
Rebuild fans have already been showing their support for this sequel since the Rebuild 3 ideas wiki opened last November. I’ve gotten so many valuable suggestions that are going to make this new game the best evah, and most of them are in the game already. I’ve about reached the halfway point and am still on track for a release in Spring 2014.
The campaign will run until October 31st to raise $25,000 to help with the cost of art, writing and music. I’m going to finish the game regardless, but the more money this campaign raises now, the more awesome I can afford to make it. And if we manage to overshoot the goal, I’ve got some stretch goals I’m just itching to announce.
This is your chance to get in early and preorder Rebuild 3 for Windows & Mac (via Steam or DRM-free direct download). The first 500 will get a discount price, then there are sweet extras like exclusive starting equipment, a digital artbook, a sticker for your laptop or your name and face on actual survivors in the game.
Whoo! Let’s do this thing!
