IGDATC This Indie Life: Lessons From the Front by Kris Szafranski

Kris Szafranski
This Indie Life:
Lessons From the Front
1Friday, May 16, 14
Hello, thanks for coming. I’m Kris Szafranski, owner of Thoughtshelter Games, a video game
start-up here in the twin cities. My company has been around for about a year but I’ve been
working on games for quite a bit longer than that.

TODAY
Story of A Druid’s Duel
What I’ve Learned
Practical Insight on Major Milestones
Game Design, Prototyping, Competitive Analysis,
Technology Analysis, Kickstarter/Marketing
2Friday, May 16, 14
Today I want to share with you what I’ve learned on my short but eventful journey as a full-
time indie game dev. I’m going to do so through the lens of my upcoming strategy title called
A Druid’s Duel. We’ll step through the making of the game, what I experienced, why I did
certain things and didn’t do others.
My hope is that you can gain some insight into your own endeavors by seeing how I handled
some of the major topics in bringing something to market.

BEFORE...
• NerderyVP of Software Development
• Leader, manager, entrepreneur
• Web developer, designer, writer
• Gamer
3Friday, May 16, 14
A little bit about me: For the last 15 years I’ve been involved in web and software
development. First as a graphic and multimedia designer, then developer, then manager and
executive at The Nerdery (www.nerdery.com).
But I’ve always loved games. Any kind: sports, video games, RPGs, board games, you name it.
As a creative, I’ve designed and written up rules and invented all sorts of games, but never as
a serious focus until a few year ago.

MAKINGTHE LEAP
• Some dreams require full time attention
• Have conﬁdence in persistence
• Do your Research, Planning (& Saving)
• Have a Goal
4Friday, May 16, 14
As we’ll see, making the leap to do this for a living didn’t happen overnight, and didn’t
happen without a lot of thought and planning put into it.
Eventually I recognized the only way I could chase my dream was to put all of energy and
resources into it. I had a few things going for me. One, I have conﬁdence in being persistent.
I love to learn new things and I love to grow as a professional. Those alone have taught me
that if I put my mind to it, I can do anything.
I also was able to plan and save for my shift to self-employment. I didn’t take that prospect
lightly, not after having helped to built something like The Nerdery.
The most important factor, however, is that I have a goal, and every day I can see if I’m
getting closer or farther from that goal. My goal is to build Thoughthelter Games into a
studio that consistently delivers solid games and is based right here in Minneapolis.

DESIGNING ‘DRUIDS’
5Friday, May 16, 14
So, how did I get here?
Well, it’s been a long journey, well over ten years in the making. I’m going to start with how A
Druid’s Duel came to be and what I went through over that timeframe working the idea into
something worth pursuing.

6Friday, May 16, 14
It’s very possible you have no idea what A Druid’s Duel actually is, so here’s a recent trailer,
with current artwork, gameplay, and music. Just to give you an idea. The game is not yet
complete, but this will give you a look at what I’m going to be talking about.
Imagine chess where the pieces and the game board are meant to be changing constantly...
Trailer at: druidsduel.com

7Friday, May 16, 14
There you have it. It has been summed up as “Worms meets chess,” a very astute observation.
The objective of the game is to own the land spaces on the board. This generates Mana,
which is used to do all the cool stuff. Such as adding new druids to the board. Each druid has
its own way to moving and attacking. You can also transform those druids into animals,
which give them additional ways to move and attack. Your opponent is doing the same thing,
as well as morphing the land to suit his needs. This constant changing of the board and units
forces you to adapt your strategy throughout the game.
Looks pretty good, huh? Well, let’s rewind a couple of years. Why would I pick this concept as
the ﬁrst product for my business?

WHYTHIS GAME?
• Chess-like land grab
• Turn-based strategy
• Full-time effort would
overcome my failures
• Competitive research
showed potential for niche
8Friday, May 16, 14
It has two elements I am very familiar with: it’s a chess-like land grab and a turn-based
strategy game.
Even as I’ve tried many times to turn these elements into game designs, I believed with my
full effort, I could ﬁnd the game within. Plus, as you’ll see, I did ample research that showed
the market potential for a game like this.

LOST SOULS
Richard White, Spiderweb Software
9Friday, May 16, 14
It all started in the year 2000 with a very little known Mac shareware game called Lost Souls.
This is all the Internet remembers of the game, a screenshot from level one. Even the creator
has disappeared, being the subject of a string of forum posts in 2007 searching for his
whereabouts.
Even from this one shot, you get the impression of a chess-like game on divergent battle
ﬁelds.

SPAWNED A
DECADE OF IDEAS
• Isometric land-grab
• Battling wizards
• Dynamic maps
• Unique upgrade schemes
• Dark, moody aesthetic
• Units persisted across
maps
10Friday, May 16, 14
Something about this game fascinated me, and all I wanted to do was to build on its basic
premise. I spent years sketching and writing up rules and game design docs. Each version got
more and more expansive until I had built up this whole franchise of games in my head.

YEARS OF FALSE STARTS
• Tons of emphasis on casting and upgrading mechanics
• Tried OpenGL, Flash, Javascript
• Input and Isometric are hard
• Druid idea entered drawings in 2010
• Already searching for a unique theme and setting
Keep in mind that I am not a programmer. Not by training. I’m self-taught and mostly web
technologies at that. That doubt in myself led me to give up a number of times throughout
the last decade.
By 2010 couldn’t recall all the rules of Lost Souls and I’d probably built it up in my mind that
it was better than it actually was. Still, something about its core kept me enthralled. But I
never wanted to copy it. Looking through my notes and sketches, the idea of casting the
pieces as druids entered in early 2010.

2010: FLASH-BASED MAP
BUILDER
The game was always map-based, and this was my attempt to create an editor in Flash/
ActionScript 3. I could always get to loading and drawing maps using the various
technologies, but stalled on input and game state, thinking I was missing some crucial skill.

2011–12: PAPER &
IOS PROTOTYPES
• Game design with Jonny Brannum
• Simpliﬁed project: Implement Lost Souls rules
• Whiteboard offered cheap and effective play testing
• Focused on core mechanics
• Tedious book-keeping
This is the time I tried to get formal about the idea. I whittled the project down to just a
recreation of Lost Souls, hoping that would give me a foundation on which could be built all
the other things I wanted to do. As I still saw the programming side as the one skill I did not
have, I brought in my good friend Jonny Brannum (@wlejon), a talented programmer and
game enthusiast.

As isometric had seemed too daunting to me technically, I redrew the map art in a top-down
fashion.
But ﬁrst we went with paper prototypes. The game would still play the same, as isometric is
just a tilted view of this, so I ﬁgured the design changes we came up with would hold over
visually.

We ended up using the white board for a lot of the prototyping, however. It was very fast, very
cheap, and could be done almost anywhere. Just draw a grid and get playing.
As Jonny began moving the game into iOS native code, I continued to work on pieces and unit
art, as well as GUI and the isometric game board concept.
In the bottom right you can see an interface concept for upgrading the units, one of the core
changes I wanted to make to Lost Souls.

REVEALED DESIGN FLAWS
• Limited movements made it slow and created
stalemates
• Fronts just moved back and forth
• No way to ﬂank or otherwise use the board
• Tile Mana value too high
• Powers vaguely deﬁned
When we got close to what I could remember of Lost Souls, continued playtests revealed
some huge problems with the game. Putting the units on an upgrade path instead of being
able to place any type you wished seemed a likely culprit, but the movements were also just
too slow. The games got stale as there wasn’t a good way to out-maneuver your opponent.

TRIED SOLUTIONS
• Alter starting conditions
• Unit placement rules
• Varied Mana costs
• Changed Archer shot range
• Unit upgrades were too
dynamic
• Added one-time use spells
Seeing this as a critical ﬂaw, we tried a lot of things to speed up and alter how the game
played. We devised rules for starting the game on an empty board, we varied the costs of the
units and how much Mana each tile supplied. We changed the Archer’s shot range and tried
variations on how upgrades worked.

2012: SCRAPPED!
• Game growing in scope
• Team interest diminished
• Didn’t want to make a clone
• Druid concept was vague
• Life goes on
After over a year of nights and weekends, Jonny and I got tired of it. I grew frustrated in not
being able to ﬁnd the magic I felt was there. We both also wanted to ﬁnish something and
saw no end in sight for this game.
In the end, while I added the druid concept and upgrades, they were a very thin veneer, and
added very little to game that inspired me.

2013: COALESCENCE
• Continued to think about the design
• Fleshed out druid concept
• Re-drew druid units and tile art
Throughout the rest of 2012 and into 2013, I didn’t give up completely on the game
concepts. There was something there, but the failure to ﬁnd it told me I would have to work
even harder.
Remaking Lost Souls was a dead-end, but I kept drawing and writing out ideas to bring the
Druids to the forefront and make the game my own. Somewhere in here was something worth
making.

2013: DRUIDS REINVENTED
I knew the visual style was a decent direction, but it needed to be better. I redrew the units
and concentrated on ﬁnding something unique and appealing. This brought them some
character and further away from the Lost Souls chess-like units. It also helped me think more
concretely about the design problems as tied to a fantasy world ﬁlled with these funny little
druid characters.

GAME DESIGN GOALS
• SimpliﬁedTurn-based Strategy
• Mutable Game Board/
Elements
• No Hit Points
• Minimal Randomness
• Unit Upgrades
• Fast: < 20 Minutes per game
• Core Objective is Land
Acquisition
Falling back to my competitive research, the game I wanted to make was there somewhere. I
needed clearer design objectives with which to work. This would allow me to advance the
appeal of Lost Souls into something workable for today’s gamer.
I knew these goals made the product unique, I just needed to merge it with my druid theme.

• Fully embraced Druid theme
• Animals solved everything
IT ALL COMESTOGETHER
The Druid theme had been identified, but until now, it was meaningless; Just a skin.
I came to understand the movement, pace, and upgrade problems were all the same thing, and that by embracing
the notion that Druids are nature-based mages, they can easily overcome such a thing.
If a Druid could fly, for instance, it could flank or move beyond the front lines. It could also make use of
disconnected land masses, which would inevitably occur in a game where the board was supposed to change. And
wolves are fast, maybe they could simply run past the front lines. And a Bear...
Animals complimented their Druid form and offered the trade-offs that make great strategy.

• Removed user spells: all
game actions performed by
units on the board
• Waywalker unit added as
the critical caster
• Broke from Lost Souls
IT ALL COMESTOGETHER
The board was always supposed to change. I had envisioned powerup totems you collect that gave the player one-
time use spells to do so. The other major change was to get ride of the notion of a god-like player having pseudo
control of the board. I moved all the board-changing spells to a new ranged unit, who was expensive and
powerful, but critical to gameplay.
I had ﬁnally broken from the Lost Souls mold, making it my own, but still maintained the core concepts: a chess-
like land grab.

GAME DESIGN LESSONS
• Playtesting will change the
design – so let it!
• Get outside opinions
• Be ﬂexible, seek evolution
• Be aware your inspiration
can hold you back
• Find your theme and setting
• Make itYOURS
I’d spent a decade chasing the ghost of Lost Souls, and in the end, all I needed to do was play
it again. Had I been able to play it, maybe I could have surpassed it quickly. As it turned out, I
had to determine what exactly I wanted from it and discard the rest, and this came from a lot
of prototyping and problem solving.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS,
TECHNOLOGY & MARKETS
The game design didn’t happen overnight. But neither did I spend all my efforts during that
time on the design. When it became apparent I was able to design a game that *could*
succeed, I knew I needed to learn a lot of things to ensure it actually *would* succeed.
Starting a business is hard work and there is a lot to consider beyond how your game works.

MEANWHILE,
BACK ATTHE RANCH...
Game Design?
Game Programming?
Game Engines?
Marketplace?
Competition?
Distribution?
What about...
I spent 2012 and 2013 learning. That’s on top of working a lot of hours at the day job.
I was contemplating changing careers and venturing into the unknown. I knew games, was
becoming more and more conﬁdent I could make one, but didn’t know anything about
making products, or selling them.
This all has to come together to be successful.

THIS IS A BUSINESS
Competing in the marketplace has
always been a major objective.
My underlying goal is to build a business. My goal with Thoughtshelter Games is to build a
local independent game design studio. That means I need to make money. This won’t be easy
and I certainly don’t know everything. But stating this goal made it real, and with a goal, I
could better consider what I’d need to make it happen. I could hold each decision up to this
goal and it would help guide me.

GAME DESIGN
The Art of Game Design
by Jesse Schell
Introspective, deep, yet extremely practical and applicable.
I had no formal method of learning game design and no time for school. So I turned to
books.
IMHO, the single greatest text on both the theory and practicality of designing games.

GAME PROGRAMMING
• Introducing HTML5 Game Development by Jesse Freeman
• Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone
• HTML5 Games by Jacob Seidelin
• Prototyped simple game ideas
• Various HTML5/JS engines (Impact, Melon)
These all gave me the conﬁdence to know that I could make a game. All were hands-on and
ended with built games or prototypes. HTML5 Games in particular helped me move my own
project ahead.

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
I picked the top turn-based tactics games on iOS as a place to start the formal competitive
analysis. They were popular and had elements I wanted to improve or evaluate.
I played them a ton and got very detailed on the hows and whys they worked (or didn’t). This
was also training in game design: critiquing other designs.

TECHNOLOGY ANALYSIS
• First concern was marketability, not game design needs.
• Distribution/Storefront ease
• Support DLC
• Multi-platform (PC and mobile)
I knew my game wasn’t going to stress the hardware, but I also knew it would play great on a
tablet. So I focused on how I would sell the game, not what tech would make it ﬂy.
As a business, if you can’t sell it, you’re not going anywhere. Your technology choice is a
long-term decision. Take your time and know your goals. You can research forever - Don’t.

WEB (HTML/JAVASCRIPT)
• Plethora of game engines
• Wide support
• Great communities
• Already had advanced
knowledge
• Endless documentation and
examples
PROS CONS
• Multi-platforms, multi-browsers
• Javascript evolving very rapidly
• Questionable on mobile without
middleware/build product
• Audio concerns
• Weak isometric support of engines
• Weak adoption of storefronts
Using web technologies was very appealing to me. Given my background, it was a natural ﬁt and seemed to offer
the quickest path.
Biggest development concern was the prospect of testing in all the browser/platform combinations.
Business concern: How do you sell a web-native game?

• Famous for community
• Enormous adoption by Indie
community
• Cross-platform, including iOS
• Free to try, decent pricing model
• Suitable for any time of game (in
theory)
• Distribution is open
PROS CONS
• Need to learn Unityscript or
• Need to learn C#
• How well does it work for 2D?
• Weak 2D resources other than
platformers
UNITY GAME ENGINE
Everyone is using it – it must be good. It is untested as a 2D platform, at least for me.
Platformers were everywhere, but could I wrangle it for an isometric turn-based game?

LESSONS
• Do your homework, you have competitors.
• Be open to changing based on your research.
• There’s more to technology than development.
You need to have some idea where your game will ﬁt in with the marketplace. Not that you
need to predict the future, but your game needs to offer something the others don’t.
Ultimately I decided to prototype in one technology, knowing I would likely change for the
release codebase. This allowed me to move on and just get to work. I had gained conﬁdence
in canvas and javascript enough to know I could use it. The longer-term decision on the
release platform leaned heavily toward Unity.

MAY 17, 2013
I foundedThoughtshelter Games and
then really got to work.
So, solid design in hand, with an idea of the marketplace and competition, along with
knowledge of the technological landscape and where I would start, I set forth on the next
phase of the adventure.
I made the leap.

PROTOTYPING &
PLAYTESTING
By this point it was only me. All design, programming, art, and testing fell to me. I happily
accepted the challenge.

DIGITAL PROTOTYPE
(MAY–AUGUST 2013)
• Design mostly set, time to implement
• HTML/CSS/Javascript with Canvas, limited to Chrome on Mac
• Home-rolled engine
• Built from HTML5 Games by Jacob Seidelin
• Ready in 3 weeks, including SFX and Music
The animals and Waywalker design changes were only ideas at this point. They hadn’t been
playtested, even on paper, so I learned to design and prototype concurrently.
These new ideas would need to be worked out on the ﬂy as I developed the rest of the game
prototype.

DIGITAL PROTOTYPE
(MAY–AUGUST 2013)
• Translating Input to game elements
• Drawing logic (isometric challenges)
TWO HISTORICAL HURDLES
Given a decent engine-like structure, I got to work, quickly hitting the hurdles I feared the
most. Armed with new conﬁdence, I attacked them head-on.

Here are my notes on determining isometric inputs. In the end there wasn’t a silver bullet,
which I always thought I was somehow missing. It just comes down to hard work.
HTML5 Canvas is old-school, only pixels, not directly tied to anything in your data. So the
only way to bridge input to data is to bridge the input to your data. This just meant doing the
math and geometry required, and then it just worked.

DIGITAL PROTOTYPE
(MAY–AUGUST 2013)
• Rapid game logic progress
• Sound is critical to playtesting
• Used opengameart.org sound effects
• Contracted professional composer
Solving those problems, which I had built up for a decade into impossible tasks, was an
epiphany, and my growing conﬁdence just soared.
I very quickly implemented the logic that made A Druid’s Duel it’s own game, using the art I’d
drawn myself.
Sound is critical to a video game, and it should be put in asap. Believing sound fuels critique
of experience and theme, I strived to include it in the prototype.

PROTOTYPING LESSONS
• Choose one target platform
• Focus on game mechanics, not polish
• Expect throw-away code or to refactor
• Iterate quickly on concepts
• Okay to build only partial games
• Goal is to test game design decisions
Read the bullets :)
Repeat: The goal is to test game design decisions.

2013: PROTOTYPE DEMO
This is a screen grab of the actual canvas/javascript build used in the ﬁrst public playtests.
Not pretty, but you can see all of the elements present are still in the game screen today.

PLAYTESTING ROUND 1
• Enlisted testers fromThe
Nerdery, friends, and
acquaintances.
• Wanted 20+ local players
• Ran sessions myself
• 30 mins How to Play
• 60 mins playing vs. each
other
• Created questionnaire
Having just left The Nerdery, I had plenty of friends there who wanted to help playtest, and
given that it was ready in a month gave everyone conﬁdence to spend time on it.
I immediately put a date on the calendar to work toward. This helped drive me to be
pragmatic and make decisions.

GENCON 2014 SESSIONS
• First Exposure Playtest Hall
• One of two video games
presented
• Different Demographic, still
on target
• Players chose their game
• Consistent feedback
• Conﬁrmation of direction
• Allowed A/B testing of
Waywalker
GenCon was the ﬁrst true “stranger” test. I presented the game and was fortunate to get four
groups of four players, with varying player types. I had made adjustments following the
Nerdery testing groups and had a chance to do some A/B testing on the Waywalker, a new
but critical addition to the game.

• Know what you’re looking for
• Ask for speciﬁcs
• Playtest early but make sure there are few bugs
• More polish means expectations are higher
PLAYTESTING LESSONS
This is pertaining to public playtesting. As the designer, you should be playing your concepts
repeatedly with a few trusted partners. Even so, plan to do public playtesting early.
Bugs: Bugs are distracting, and since you’re playing on a stable, small platform, making it
rock solid should be doable.
Speciﬁcs: You’re looking for the whys. This doesn’t work...why?
Polish: Up to you, but changing things gets harder the more polish you add. Focus on the
core game. Also, some people are hesitant to contribute if it looks done.

PLAYTESTING LESSONS
• Stay Positive
• Write it all down
• Record if you can
• Keep old versions

PROVEN WITH SCIENCE!
In the end, I only really wanted to get an idea of one thing: Was it fun?
This is unmeasurable and highly subjective, but games are played because they are fun, so
you have to ask. I certainly tried to qualify other feedback, evaluate balance and strategy in
the game’s design, but this let me know I had found something.

Cool. Now build it in Unity.
A few months of work culminated in great feedback and a decent ﬁrst showing in public. But I
couldn’t launch with that prototype, and a ton of work remained. I also had chosen to move
the game to Unity. Meaning I’d have to port or re-build a lot of the game.

2013: UNITY REBUILD
The initial Unity build-out went pretty quickly. I had to start over, since porting the hard stuff
wasn’t feasible, but the game logic was pretty easy to port, some was just copy and paste.
I had to re-solve the same tough problems (input->data, isometric) but I also got to
celebrate the triumphs when I got it working in a new environment. Plus, I’d done it before,
so I knew I could do it.
I opted to use a sprite framework called Orthello, which gave me a camera set-up and sprite
prefabs, including animations, tweening, and a nice delegate structure for timing and input
events.

UNITY IMPRESSIONS
• Learn the terminology
• Get comfortable with the Editor
• Architecture? LOL!
• Unityscript ≠ Javascript. Just use C#.
• Prepare to hate the GUI system
• Documentation and community
are rock solid
Terminology: That’s why I worked through that book earlier, to learn the Unity terms so
documentation made more sense.
Architecture: Learn how Unity expects the Editor and code to work together. That will free
your mind.
C# is amazing and powerful. The Mono port is in parity with all MSDN dox, so there is no
fear.
GUI System: Always being “redone.” Find something else. I used Orthello.
Dox are very solid and the community is very helpful.

THE
KICKSTARTER DILEMMA
The next few months saw steady progress in Unity. I re-worked the GUI several times,
brought on a character artist and continued to work with Troy Strand (yellowchordaudio.com)
on music.
I got an alpha version of the online multiplayer functionality working using simple web
services and a PHP web server. I also stubbed in logic for the single player game.
But I was always thinking about marketing and what I would do when I was ﬁnally done. How
could I prepare now for the eventual sale of the game?

JANUARY - APRIL 2014
• Originally considered fall of 2013
• Questioned the value
• “Lost time” argument
• Can’t quantify exposure
• Can’t qualify customers
• Seemed more important to others
than myself
Kickstarter was always on the horizon; always something I intended to do. But I kept pushing
it back. The more research I did, the more trouble I had seeing the value.
Lost time here refers to the idea that if I did a Kickstarter and failed to get funded, much of
the work on the campaign was not moving the game development forward at all. Basically,
wasted time to market.

REQUIRES...
• Considerable effort
(1-3 months)
• Marketing and PR plan
• Tremendous social
networking
• Need to show advanced
progress
• Difﬁcult to predict success
• No guarantee of return
These are the main requirements of a Kickstarter for a video game. Other types of projects
can bend some of them, in particular video games need to show advanced progress so people
know what they’re going to get.
Even with these it is difficult to predict success and as KS is all-or-nothing, there is no
guarantee your invested time and money will generate a return, even if your work is really
solid.

SOUND FAMILIAR?
It’s the same as launching a
completed product.
It seemed so much like launching a product that it was hard to justify the effort given I had
even less control over the likelihood of success. At the end of either process, at least with a
regular launch, I’d be done and wouldn’t owe anybody anything.

WHY I DID IT
• Test-run of marketing and PR foundation
• Forced timelines on things I needed to do anyway
• Needed external validation
• Burning desire to “succeed”
• Income wouldn’t hurt :)
Ultimately I came to see it as a test-run of launch, and as such, could be used as a test
harness for my business. First and foremost was the idea that I can gain a lot of exposure
now, during development. It became a trial in marketing my company and product.
These were to be my success factors.

PREPARATION
• Research
• Remade websites
• Set up Presskit()
• Video Production
• Made the demo product
• Launched Steam Greenlight page
• Contracted professional artists
• Contracted PR professional
I researched the design and messaging of about ten KS video game campaigns. I wrote, shot,
and edited the KS video three times. I made trailers, I started building social media
presences.
I reworked the design of druidsduel.com and continued to work on the demo build. I prepped
the Steam Greenlight page.
I also brought on an animator and re-contacted the sprite artist to continue work, assuming
success. I signed on a general PR contractor with some history in the video game industry. It
was a solid three months of hard work.
I chose a goal of $7,000 as an attainable amount. I wanted $10k but thought as a complete
unknown this was a stretch. $5k seemed too low. $7k is way less than the actual
development budget of the game, but it was more about exposure than covering all my costs.

LAUNCH DAY
• Emotionally draining
• 6 hour launch and blast
follow-ups
• Monitored social media
• Used Buffer
(bufferapp.com) to cross-
post to social media
• Hit Day One goals (>10%)
• Launch DayTacos!
Launch was fairly painless, all told. I was warned not to stare at the funding money tick
upward (or not), so tried to keep busy otherwise.

CELEBRATE SUCCESSES!
Nom!
Nom!
Nom!
Nom!
Nom!
Nom!
Remember: Always celebrate your successes, no matter how small. There’s so much out there
that can bring you down, you need to keep some perspective.

ALLTHE IN-BETWEEN
• Emotionally draining ups and downs
• Constantly questioned the value and generated crippling FUD
• Swells of pride and elation as I got noticed
• Constant social media posting
• Enormous pressure to make progress so people would cover it
• All this resulted in no media coverage
The middle weeks are pretty much a blur of emotional ﬁts of depression and elation. This
rubber-banding was exhausting and concerning. I felt like a pimp on Twitter and FB. But I
was doing solid work on the game, and still believed it could be great. The support felt
genuine and I my mood was more often positive than negative.
Knowing at this point that PAX East was also on the horizon, I was doubling my efforts to
make great leaps of progress on the visuals and presentation of the game.

FINAL WEEK
• Emotionally draining
• “Do anything” mentality
• Touched by amazing support
• Priming the pump
• Ultimately made the goal two days early
• Nothing prepared!
I asked family to donate more money, to raise the bar a bit, thinking that people are more
inclined to back a project they see as on its way. Closing the gap to the goal helped
springboard the ﬁnal week push I expected to get.
This felt truly icky, but ultimately it came down to the dollars, which had somehow gone from
last on my list of success factors to ﬁrst. Having seen the outcome of the other tests, making
the funding goal seemed paramount, or it would be truly a waste of effort. Family gave
enough to help give it a boost. I wasn’t prepared to give up the vast majority of funding by
missing it by a little bit. I’m likely not the only project runner to make the decision to give it a
lift in order to make it.
The last week push occurred just as predicted and I hit the goal with two days left. Since I
wanted to pay back the money to my family, I tried to over-fund as much as possible, but I
was spent, and didn’t pull in much more than my goal.

By the end, the game looked completely refreshed from the demo version at the outset. It had
all new tile art for two complete seasons, all the units were animated, and the there was a
bunch of visual polish on UI elements. It was where I wish it had been at the campaign start.

INTHE END
• Funded at 111%
• Built social media presence
• Badge of honor: still in a
minority
• Fewer funders than
estimated
• Weak rewards
• Backer bonus idea ﬂopped
• Missed PAX East timing
So, in the end, what happened? How’d it go? What worked?
When I began creating the KS campaign using their tools, I had set the time frame to 30 days.
By the time I actually hit “Launch,” I’d been accepted to show at PAX East. I failed to adjust
the 30 days out to 35 in order to cover PAX weekend. Had I done that I am conﬁdent I would
have blown away my goal of $7,000.

HOW’D I DO?
• Test-run of marketing and PR foundation?
• Timelines help get things done?
• Supply external validation?
• Satisfy desire to “succeed?”
• Money?
YES
YES
NO
YES
YES...
How’d I do with those original success criteria?
Overall, I think it was mostly a success. External validation wouldn’t come for another few
days when I went to PAX East, but I was able to garner some attention and players seemed to
truly appreciate the game.
Money is a wash. It was mostly spent by the time it was ﬁnalized. Which I expected. $7,000 is
hardly a video game budget, but it certainly helped. It was nice to get paid after so long.

KICKSTARTER CONCLUSION
• Don’t know what to expect
• Would do it again for certain
projects
• Seems too haphazard for
business-critical products
• Would have launched with the
progress I had at the end
• Evaluate your options very
carefully
• Expect to work your ass off
• Build up social presence ﬁrst
• Happy to offer advice or insight
Indie video games have almost single-handedly grown the crowd-funding industry and it
may seem like almost a required step on the path to success. I would argue that video game
Kickstarters are in their own world and have their own set of rules and stricter, harsher
requirements.
Difficult to have valid expectations as each project is different. You won’t know until you start
working on it.
I would happily discuss the KS in-depth with anyone who wants to know more. It was quite an
experience.
Link to actual KS page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/481479629/a-druids-duel-
whimsical-turn-based-strategy
Link to Kicktraq summary: www.kicktraq.com/projects/481479629/a-druids-duel-
whimsical-turn-based-strategy/

WHAT’S NEXT?

ONWARD, DRUID!
• Recover fromThe Crash
• Single Player Campaign
• Online Multiplayer
• Publishers
• Marketing Strategy
• Launch August 2014
I went from 3 solid months of the emotional peaks and valleys of Kickstarter, not even having
time to really enjoy its success. I dove straight into the ﬁre of PAX East, one of the most
prominent shows you can be at. There I was overwhelmed with praise and attention. It was
way beyond my wildest expectations. I was so shot afterwards: I felt like a fraud. I felt like a
success. I couldn’t relate to what I’d been through and done, let alone get back to work. All
that and I’m still a complete unknown and the game isn’t even done.
That’s what I call The Crash. I came home, I got sick, I got depressed and in the end, got
nothing done for a couple weeks. I read a few books, I prototyped other games. But I’d done
very little on A Druid’s Duel. My social media dried up and I struggled to even care. This is a
known pattern that I didn’t take seriously.
This talk has actually given me a ton of perspective, and has helped get me back on track.
Having to put together my story has reminded me just why I’m doing this. I do this to learn. I
do this to grow. I’m really good at both, and through those I continue to build my business
and help others do the same.

QUESTIONS?
// ACTUAL CODE COMMENT FROM MR. BRANNUM

TALKTO ME
• kris@thoughtshelter.com
• www.druidsduel.com
• Twitter: @druidsduel
• www.facebook.com/ThoughtshelterGames
Send me any questions or comments you have! Seriously, I’m very happy to discuss any of
this with you.
Thank you for reading :)
Kris

IGDATC This Indie Life: Lessons From the Front by Kris Szafranski

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