Brandon the Game Dev

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.

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The Highways & Byways Kickstarter campaign is just ten days away. This project looms large in my life and though I’m normally rational, detached, and analytical, I’m struggling to remain objective. This is really common for Kickstarter creators and I imagine this anxiety is still felt by big-time creators. It’s okay, if unpleasant, to be anxious. You just have to recognize it so it doesn’t own you.

Kickstarter, in particular, can bring out a form of online stage fright. It’s important to recognize this for what it is – when you start a campaign, you’re putting yourself out there for people to respond to. I believe a lot of creators – especially new ones – haven’t built up the emotional intelligence to fully understand how hard this can be. Most of the folks who go to Kickstarter are passionate, creative people who are really close to their projects. These same people can find themselves sleepless at two in the morning, snapping at loved ones, or generally too tired to think AND not connect this back to the emotions that come with a Kickstarter campaign (fear of failure, fear of rejection, and so on).

It gets better with time, though. This pre-launch has been a lot smoother than the one I had with War Co. That’s why I’d like to share six ways to cope with Kickstarter anxiety that I’ve learned over the last 2 1/2 years.

1. Know you are not alone.

Most creators get nervous. If you’re not nervous about your upcoming Kickstarter campaign, you’re one of a privileged few. (Want to run mine?)

For the rest of us mortals, anxiety is a deeply ingrained part of the human experience. It’s the impulse that kept our ancestors safe by telling them to run when predators approached. That same impulse is inside us even today, and it’s too dumb to tell the difference between being chased by a lion and mean comments on the internet. For all its flaws, embrace anxiety – it served a very useful purpose in its prime and it’s still useful even today.

2. Embrace the imperfect launch.

Even experienced creators make errors. Making mistakes is part of the creative process. You will never be able to perfect your product, before or after you launch your campaign. For that reason, you need to accept that you if you are going to put something out there, something about it will be wrong.

That’s no excuse to do sloppy work. You need to make a great game. You need to play-test it a lot – alone, with friends, with family, with blind play-testers, and with game designers. You need to build an audience on the foundation of meaningful relationships. You need to reach out to reviewers. You need to know exactly how you’re going to print and ship the game.

Too many creators will do everything right, following all these steps above, only to get caught in the trap of “it’s not ready yet.” Don’t fall into that trap. To progress in this industry, you need to do great work but not sit on your ideas any longer than necessary.

3. Don’t let fear of failure keep you from starting.

If you fail on Kickstarter, the consequences are minimal. It’s embarrassing, but it doesn’t hurt your or your backers financially. By all means, shoot for a million dollars, but don’t sweat it if you fail to fund. You can relaunch. You can come back from failure. Sometimes Kickstarter failure can bring you positive attention in the form of new fans, especially if you’re a newcomer. In fact, this scenario is fairly common: a lot of people “fail up” on Kickstarter, learning lessons from the failed campaign and making it happen on the relaunch.

4. Plan for success.

It’s important to have a Plan B for failure, but obsessing over contingency plans is a dangerous game. One of the best ways to alleviate anxiety is to look at the good things that could happen instead of just the bad things. For example, I’ve got a spreadsheet that shows how Highways & Byways will play out financially at every funding level from its goal to $100,000 in $1,000 increments, then up to a million in larger increments. I don’t expect to make a million, or even $100,000, but being ready to scale if it happens makes me feel better and might do the same for you.

5. Channel your anxiety into productivity. 

Anxiety more or less hijacks your body and makes you ready to take action – the proverbial fight or flight. That boost of adrenaline can be channeled into productivity. Perhaps you’re anxious for a good reason. Maybe you don’t have enough email addresses or Facebook fans to confidently launch. Maybe you need to write press releases or make a list of local game stores to contact. No matter what you need to do, you can benefit from well-placed nervous energy.

6. Figure out what you’re afraid of and see if it’s something you can fix.

Remember how I said anxiety can be useful a few minutes ago? Sometimes we intuitively know that something is amiss, but we’re not able to put it into words yet. I’ll use a couple of Highways & Byways related examples to explain.

Around late October, I had begun to get a surge of anxiety over the Highways & Byways campaign. It came out of nowhere and confounded me because everything was going so well. The game was basically done, designers at Protospiel Atlanta generally liked it, and I had clear feedback for improvement. Yet I had this gnawing anxiety even still. Eventually, after talking with a friend of mine, I realized that I’d spent all my time pushing the blog and the Discord server and almost none of my time pushing Highways & Byways itself. I took a step back, re-calibrated my plan, and started marketing the game itself more. Had I not had this incredibly uncomfortable rush of anxiety, I wouldn’t have done this, and Highways & Byways would be a nonstarter Kickstarter.

On Valentine’s Day of this year, I found myself deeply uncomfortable again. After a couple of days, I realized that I wasn’t pulling in enough people – even with some active Highways & Byways outreach online, I was still focusing way too much on the blog and Discord server. That’s when I decided to run five consecutive weekly giveaway contests on Facebook, reach out to over 20 streamers, purchase Facebook ads, and compile a list of over 170 local gaming stores in the US to email. Will this work? Only time will tell, but the takeaway was clear as day: build an audience for Highways & Byways and not just the Brandon the Game Dev brand.

These may be very personal and specific examples, but I feel like you can apply them to your life as well. You don’t even have to be a Kickstarter creator. Sometimes that horrible sinking feeling is actually a voice trying to save you from making mistakes.

Does Kickstarter scare you? If so, how do you cope? Do you have any stories of how you’ve overcome your fear and launched? Share below in the comments, I’d love to read your insights 🙂

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• 10 days to the campaign!
• Last week, I gave away a copy of Forbidden Island. This week, it’s a copy of Codenames. If you want it, you’ve got a little over 24 hours after this post goes up to get it on the Highways & Byways Facebook page.
• You can view the Kickstarter campaign page here.

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.

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Highways & Byways launches on Kickstarter March 26. As of the time that I’m writing this, that’s a little under a month away. Things are starting to get hectic around the Pangea Games office / my home office. Just this week, I’ve cranked out six blog posts to build up my backlog, created the Kickstarter campaign video, finalized my manufacturer choice, reached out to my manufacturer and fulfillment partners, finished a giveaway contest and started another, then started researching stretch goals.

I’m a big proponent of working smart before you work hard. I’ve written about how critical time management is to your success in game development. I’ve also talked about how you can’t reliably speed up game development when you work alone or in a small team. But you know what? Sometimes you have to put in an 80-hour workweek to make it happen.

That’s what I’ve done for the last couple of weeks to prepare for Highways & Byways. I started game development fairly recently and have one game published. That means I’m working 40 45 hours per week as Systems Analyst. Then I put in another 35-40 on Highways & Byways because some of this stuff cannot be cut short. Video filming and editing are unavoidably time-consuming. Writing blog posts – at least my long-form Start to Finish posts – take a few hours each. Setting up the Kickstarter page, checking my cost tables, doing streams…all of this takes T-I-M-E!

With all this in mind, I’ve prepared a checklist for myself that I’d like to share with you. It’s a list of everything you need to take care in the time span between “a month before” and “a week before.”

1 Month to 1 Week

Kickstarter Checklist

Prepare for long hours. This is unavoidable when you get really close to a campaign, so embrace it.

Draft the Kickstarter campaign page. You need to have a version you can show to others at least three weeks before the campaign.

Make the video. You need to film, edit, and post your video at least three weeks before the campaign.

Clear your schedule. Take off work on the day you launch the campaign. If you run a blog or website, create a backlog of content to last you through the campaign. If you have another business or other commitments, see how much of that you can defer to a later time or ask someone else to take care of.

Submit your Kickstarter campaign for approval. Sometimes Kickstarter drags their feet on the approval process, though it’s usually 7 days tops. Even still, you want to have your Kickstarter ready to go with the green Launch Now button 2 weeks out.

Set up Google Analytics on your campaign page. This will help you see where your pledges are coming from for your future knowledge.

Double check your cost projections and budget. You need to be ready for funding anywhere between your goal and a million dollars. Can you reliably profit at the goal level? Can you scale nicely if you do waaaay better than you expect? The answer to both those questions needs to be yes.

Research stretch goals. Don’t just throw stretch goals up on the page. Research the per-unit cost of every single one and choose your stretch goal levels carefully.

Double down on lead generation. If you don’t have an audience by now, you need to delay your launch date. If you do, though, it never hurts to up your advertising budget or double down on outreach.

Write and send press releases. See Jamey Stegmaier’s Kickstarter Lesson #43: Press Releases on this subject. Do this 7-14 days before.

Send sneak previews to retailers. Do this about 7 days before. Again, the eternal king of sage campaign advice, Jamey Stegmaier, has a post for this.

Find collaborators for your Kickstarter campaign. Find a few friends, family, and associates you trust to help you reply to comments when they come in fast on the launch day.

Prepare Facebook ads. I like preparing my ads well in advance of the campaign, just so I can test their effectiveness on my landing page instead of the campaign when it’s live.

I hope this list helps you prepare for your own Kickstarter campaign. If I left anything off, let me know and I’ll add it 😀

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• 17 days to the campaign!
• Last week, I gave away a copy of Ticket to Ride. This giveaway contest performed unbelievably well on Facebook. This week, it’s a copy of Forbidden Island. If you want it, you’ve got a little over 24 hours after this post goes up to get it on the Highways & Byways Facebook page.
• You can view the Kickstarter campaign page here.

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.

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Self-publishing a board game for the first time is an incredibly disorienting and complicated experience. Many of you know I created this blog to mentor first-time game developers after my unorthodox start in the board game industry. My own experiences formed my beliefs about how critical it is to teach others how to achieve their goals.

I am going to launch my second board game on Kickstarter in about three weeks. My first game was War Co., successfully launched in September 2016 to the tune of $12,510. I am not a massive success. I am not Jamey Stegmaier or James Mathe. If you’re a first-timer, I’m just a couple of years ahead of you. I have many years to go before my company, Pangea Games, is a powerhouse!

Nonetheless, I believe that the moment you achieve some measure of success, you can start to teach others. That success can be a single Kickstarter campaign, a completed game, taking steps toward publishing (like commissioning art), or simply having a good play-test. Mentoring others is so important and you shouldn’t underestimate your own knowledge just because you haven’t made a million dollars yet. In fact, I’ve gone ahead and listed five reasons while I believe mentoring your fellow game developers is such a big deal.

1. The first year knocks out the vast majority of would-be game developers.

The hardest part of learning any new skill is the beginning. I don’t mean the very beginning, such as in the first few weeks and months when everything you’re learning is sexy, exciting, and new. I’m talking about that critical period of time after the novelty wears off and before you see your first big success. I call this the Great Filter.

The Great Filter knocks out game developers when they find out how tough play-testing is. It knocks them out when they find out there are a dozen games like theirs on Kickstarter at this moment. The Great Filter is at work when creators realize that building an audience comes down to talking to an unfathomable amount of people and being rejected an even more unfathomable amount of times.

Having somebody to talk to keeps game developers from being knocked out by the Great Filter. If we want a mature, happy, healthy, thriving tabletop games industry, we have to help one another. That’s the only way we can maintain the staggering growth we’ve seen in the last few years.

2. It’s a great way to network. 

If you want to make people like you, consider their interests. Ask yourself “what will make their life better?” and then try to give them that. Being generous has a funny way of building up good karma.

Sharing knowledge is the most scalable way to fulfill others’ needs. You can dramatically improve someone’s life for the better simply by giving them the know-how they need to move forward in some aspect of their life.

3. It’s a great way for everybody involved to learn.

The act of teaching forces you to slow down and understand your own thought processes. By explaining why you do something to someone else, you codify your own beliefs. This is a powerful effect and you can see it at work in schools where students who tutor end up doing better than before they started tutoring.

This is definitely true for game development. I’ve done tons of research for this blog and for people asking questions on Discord, which has built up my understanding of manufacturing, finding artists, marketing, and much more!

4. It teaches you to be critical of your own work when you need to be.

It’s easier to look at other people’s work with a critical eye that you wouldn’t be able to cast upon your own work. By practicing giving others feedback, you give yourself the ability to objectively evaluate games and business plans on their own merits.

This skill is one you have to hone over time and it’s not something you can easily polish to perfection on your own work. When you’re emotionally wrapped up in something, it’s hard to see it for what it is. That’s why helping others perfect their ideas helps you build the skillset and objective mindset needed to perfect your own. This same effect is why blind play-testing of board games is so important.

5. Having a community keeps you in for the long haul.

Everybody can use a helping hand, especially beginners. This goes for game development, your career, parenting, and even getting physically fit. You can’t shortcut game development unless you have lots of people or loads of cash.

There will be times when you are exhausted. There will be times you won’t want to go on any further. If you help out others, though, you’ll either build up or become part of a community. Either way, having a community of like-minded individuals will help you stay mentally sharp for the long road ahead.

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• Three weeks to the campaign!
• Last week, I gave away an Amazon gift card. This week, it’s a copy of Ticket to Ride. If you want it, you’ve got a little over 24 hours after this post goes up to get it on the Highways & Byways Facebook page.
• I’ll most likely be printing with Shuffled Ink, with Panda Games as a backup plan.
• I spent a lot of this weekend filming the Kickstarter video.
• I’m starting to investigate the cost of stretch goals.