| I'm going to be cruel here. I'm pretty sure you've got no hope of getting funded. You're three guys barely out of school who are talking about your huge, sprawling vision, and all you have to back it up is a handful of samey-looking coder art. You've got a buggy abandoned year-old demo. You don't feel like people who can even begin to finish a small game, much less this big dream. If you guys want to be a game dev team, then narrow your scope. Build a name for yourselves doing smaller games, learn something about promoting yourself. Build an audience. Or work on this in your spare time, and produce a compelling, polished first chapter of the story that gets people saying "wow! I want to know how it ends!" when they play it. When you have fans who are willing to give you a few bucks for a good, finished game of limited scope, THEN you can consider a Kickstarter. Because a lot of what makes a Kickstarter work is ACTIVATING YOUR EXISTING AUDIENCE. Sure, you get people hearing about you and your work through KS, and you get your fans promoting your work because they want the KS to succeed - but if you don't have any existing fans who trust you to deliver on your promises, all you're going to get is sympathy pledges from rich relatives. Also? Find someone for your team who is actually training to be an artist instead of letting the comp sci major who kinda likes to draw handle all the art duties. Or have that coder who kinda likes to draw go take some serious art classes. The existing art is high school notebook doodle level, those big crude head shots of your different races really screams "amateur" to me. (As do their names. Greens, Reds, Pinks? That's screaming that your world building is superficial. Your elevator pitch is "explore a vast and beautiful galaxy with rich stories at its heart"; what you're showing is neither beautiful nor a compelling narrative base.) I applaud you dreaming big. But you are not ready for this yet. This campaign is the first failure of many you will encounter on your way to realizing this dream of making a Cool Sci-Fi Zelda; if you stay on this path you will fail many more times. Ideally you will learn something from every failure, and the next one will be an excitingly new kind of failure; eventually you'll run out of easy ways to fail and start finding some modest success. Good luck. |
Summarizing it seems to be, story is poorly defined, the retro-8-bit art doesn't work, and the lack of previous efforts does not give one confidence that these things will be fixed.
I agree that failures will help define the value of success in the future. (Experiencing overcoming that is the 'reward' for putting in the effort)
Short answer on the feedback, for the author, you are failing because you are not ready yet. This has been a good checkpoint, and you have some good ideas in this list of comments to explore.