Rizzo Island: Kickstarter or Patreon?

[Rizzoislandgame]

Hey there! So basically, the Patreon hasn't gained any steam at all, so I thought about doing a Kickstarter instead. Would you be more willing to fund a Kickstarter project than support us on Patreon?

We really need the funds, and it's getting hard to find people who won't work for little money, so I need this.

I've already started a poll on the Patreon page for Patrons to see if they're okay with it, but I wanted to get your guy's opinion too!

[mankrip]

Some words of advice, since you're talking about money:

The chances of having a successful Kickstarter campaign are smaller than having a successful Patreon campaign. While Patreon campaigns can slowly grow over a long time and the authors will always receive the money from the pledges, Kickstarter campaigns are short and requires tons of people to pledge at once, otherwise the author gets nothing. Kickstarter campaigns are only successful when the authors already have a huge fanbase - some estimates calculated that the vast majority of the pledges received by successful Kickstarter campaigns comes from only 1% of the authors' followers.

I've put my whole life on the line to make this game once. And lost almost 10 years of my life due to the consequences of that failure. The most relevant thing I've learned from that, from a gamedev perspective, is to never try to create a complete game using unfinished and unpolished tech. Big AAA studios can afford the money, infrastructure and risks of doing that; indies can't.
And this is not just from personal experience. In all these years I've seen it happen over and over to other people too. See how In The Line of Fire failed. See how hard Elysian Shadows failed, despite getting the Kickstarter money. Money isn't everything.

The most successful commercial DC projects either used tech that was simple to create, or tech that was already fully developed.
For the design of your game, the Beats of Rage engine would be good enough. It's a 2D engine, but the characters in it moves on a side-scrolling 3D plane and it already has fighting mechanics with items, jumps, weapons, throws, special moves, platforms, etc. It has good framerate, supports beautiful 2D scenarios, and 2D sprites are much simpler to create than 3D models. There are tons of mods for it and helpful resources that you can learn from.

Money is a curse, and people may jump at your neck to chew the meat out of your bones if you waste their money in a failure. When asking for money, don't offer them anything better than what you have already made before. They're paying for a product, they're not investing in your education or buying shares in a company.

[Nico0020]

Well said Mankrip.

My personal opinion, stick with a Patreon. It may be hard to find followers for it, but in the end its a better decision for yourself, your fans and your game.

[Rizzoislandgame]

I guess I’ll stick with Patreon then! Thanks for the input! BTW mankrip, your port of the engine currently works fine for our needs! I’ve decided to use Unity to port it to PC and we have some people working on that port as we speak. The game runs smoother now than the original demo did, and production is already in full swing! No stopping now! I actually know someone who is trying to make a new 3D Dreamcast engine (who’s not lerabot) and he seems to be making good progress on it! If he’s able to finish it up, and it turns out okay, I’ll probably use that engine from then on! That way it would be easier to port it to other systems.

But I understand your concerns and everything. You’ve been with the scene from the beginning and watched it grow and shrink many times. I guess I just didn’t learn from the In the Line of Fire debacle after all.

I’ll continue to use Patreon as a steady stream of funding. The one thing I’m glad about, is that even if I don’t finish it in time for our not yet announced release date, I at least inspired multiple people to start developing for it again! Multiple people have told me this and that I made them break out there old Dreamcast’s from the closet and play my demo!

Thanks mankrip for the advice, and I’ll give it a lot of thought. Just know that even though the engine is unfinished and outdated, it’s good enough for me to use as a game engine for right now! My game would never have gotten off the ground otherwise! So thank you so much!