[24pfilms]

As a recent indie game developer Kickstarter does somewhat look like a viable model to fund your development. But like Hollywood, there is great stuff and there is crap with a lot of gray in the middle. In my situation I am making a very small iOS twitch game built on the Unity3d platform. As most know the advantages of Unity is it's ability for delivery to a variety of platforms and rapid iteration of development. Our project will have 2 month development.

Our team is comprised of myself (Ex-EA, ex-Squaresoft and serial startup guy) a pair of outsourced programmers, a optimization and art integration programmer (ex-UBI) and a 3d artist. I will handle many of the art and sound tasks as well as the final call on things.

The budget is under $30k. I know this is doable and possible because I have a clearly defined budget, and experience to quantify this budget.

This game is to provide hopefully two things: To quantify that a financial success can be built from this model. Positive Revenue versus Negative Revenue. Build a core following of player who like our work. To use the potential revenue to build a bigger project.

There will always be scammers and people who want to rig the system. I have thought closely about using KS for our second game which will require a budget of $100k, but at this time I don't have the followers and the public cred (in my mind to validate the success of a kickstarter campaign) although we do have great a prototype, art and a working business plan and design doc. Hopfully this first game/risk will allow us to grow into what we desire as a viable business model for all involved.

[JabavuAdams]

Two months sounds unrealistic to ship a polished game, even though Unity is a very productive platform.

I've done a GDC demo in Unity in one month with a team of about 7. It was a good concept demo, but not polished enough to release as a product.

I also shipped a Unity game in about 2 months, doing all the programming and art, with predictable results. The game-play needs polish, and let's not even talk about the visuals.

Games really do benefit from iteration. In some sense, this is the danger of trying to schedule a game project. It's a great way to build some life-less me too game. Often the most successful new games have had schedule disasters that forced almost complete re-writes.