Distribution Kickstarter budgeting and general game publishing advice

[KyussSun]

Hi everyone. Long story short: I'm a high school CTE instructor who teaches a "Gaming, Animation, and Web Design" class at a local Vermont high school. I've been at it for about six years, and until recently we've mostly made small, pre-alpha demos of games. This year, we decided to try and release an actual, finished game. We're calling the game Hero: Sandwich Evolved. It's a 2D, side-scrolling, retro 8-bit shooter/platformer that can best be described as a cross between Halo: Combat Evolved, Mega Man, and Burgertime. We're at a pre-alpha stage right now but hope to have a playable first level in two weeks. We've made a small LLC called Frozen Cow Studios with the intention of hiring not just my high school students, but also former students and local artists/programmers over the summer. We're hoping to release Hero: Sandwich Evolved in the Fall of 2017.

In two weeks we're filming a Kickstarter promo video, and I'm trying to set the budget so that we can afford everything we'll need to get the game published. This is what I've allocated so far:

• 1,000 = two copies of Game Maker Studio 2 with Android and Windows export modules (right now we're using the educational licenses, but once we're legit we'll have to purchase commercial licenses of the software)
  
  
• 1,000 = remaining balance for the Kickstarter promo video.
  
  
• 1,200 = chiptune composer. We actually are working with someone very affordable who we really like, but I'd like to have a cushion here just in case.
  
  
• 3,000 = lead artist fee. This includes work done to this point, such as character design, spriting, and logo design (we had a few student lead artists that got too busy with college work to continue). He's been working pro bono to this point and has already done a lot of work so this price is pretty much non-negotiable.
  
  
• 4,000 = programmers. We have a student and a former student, working 4 hours a day for 8 weeks at 12.50/hr.
  
  
• 100 = Steam fee
  
  
• 25 - Android Marketplace fee
  

That brings us to 10,325. We'd like to tack on 10% for the Kickstarter fees, so rounding up that'd bring us to 11,500.I 'd also like to add another 10% for any emergency funds that we may need to tap into (last-minute programmer, bug squasher, etc) so that would bring us to roughly 12,650.

This is the first game that any of us has made. My background is in fine arts and educational technology; this is a totally new foray for just about everyone involved with the project. What things am I missing? What funds and/or other obstacles will be in our way as we launch our Kickstarter and get closer to releasing the title?

Thanks to any who can offer advice.

 

[zbox]

A small one - but if you're set on playing within the lines (as you should ) depending on your jurdistiction, you should check if you'll have to pay tax on the income from the KS and account for that

 

[Hyomoto]

The biggest draw on funds will be unexpected delays. Unless your project is rock solid from the start you will encounter problems. From a coding perspective it may come to it that your engine doesn't handle something the way you want it to and you have to go back and retool something, sometimes this is simple depending on how the project is built and what you intend to change, or it could be like what I did the other day and eat up about 40 hours of time. Maybe your game works great but you find something you want to add, or maybe something you've spent a lot of time isn't working and you decide it has to be removed. Eight weeks sounds good if you can get everyone working eight hours a day and provide consistent output with a cohesive vision but some days are better than others. In fact, you need look no further than all the failed Kickstarter projects in the 4 - 40k dollar range. It seems those projects have a success rate of about 10%, maybe less.

It's pretty easy to see why. These are small, inexperienced teams. These are often their first, and sometimes only, 'big' projects. They budget like you do and say, hey it should cost this much and we need this much time. The biggest piece of advice I would offer you is take that time table and double it. I'll give you an example. I work in a training division, the people we get have eighteen months to perform two levels of qualifications. This involves studying, practical experience and evaluation. We just got a new syllabus in, and the goal is to get it done in fourteen months. If I showed you my numbers you'd probably agree I've put together a pretty generous time table, and four months of slop time should be plenty, right? Well, when you really crunch the numbers those four months only add up to about 170 syllabus hours. Which if you consider are being used during a time this person is experiencing either A) remedial instruction, or B) having personal issues, those hours really boil down to about 1 month. During those times we aren't getting useful forward progress out of them. From our perspective being behind at all is pretty much the bell tolls.

The other example I can give, since I've watched a few Kickstarters and backed a few failed ones, is if a team member leaves they generally take most of their progress with them. Simply put, they were the ones looking at these files each day. They have the requisite knowledge of how they work and the programs they used to make them. Even if they leave their work behind, training someone else to make use of them may not even be viable. You may literally go back to square one. The artist has a particular style and finding someone who can match it is tough. Music is made with a variety of tools, so not only is matching their style an issue, so is even having the software needed to edit them. And lastly, programmers. If I handed you my Final Fantasy engine right now, I bet you could figure it out eventually but it would take time and effort. I on the other hand can work with it effectively because I built it and I know it's limitations and procedures. Unless your coders are ALSO making highly detailed documentation on how the project runs, losing one could mean at worst having to rewrite or figure out huge sections of code.

If I sound doom and gloom it's because like I pointed out earlier, projects in your range are typically not Kickstarter successes. On the other hand, having a team together means you can influence each other and keep motivation going. Single-person projects are the absolute easiest to quit, so hopefully you all know each other reasonably well and can rely on personal expectations of each other. That's enough rambling out of me, hopefully you pick something useful out of this block of text.

 

[Lysho]

Well, if you are planning to make this thing profitable and pay for itself, you're missing the most important feature there is: advertising costs. A great game with bad advertising is a bad game. You have to start thinking of your target audience and how you'll reach them. I recommend trying a couple of broad and then targeted facebook ads since all kinds of people use it, and you can see which demographics were interested in your ad video. But ideally you'll know your target audience from the start so that you incorporate design/art/gameplay principles that best resonate with that audience.