SpaceSimCentral

:biggrin: Came last Monday but I only got down the sorting office a couple of days ago. my first boxed game from Kickstarter. :gamer:

Interesting post mortem from Andrew Luby (rogue Earth) about Kickstarter, making games ect. All rewards have finally been shipped. I've been hearing back from many of you and I'm glad you are enjoying the rewards. I wanted to deliver the highest quality rewards I could and I am very pleased with how most of them turned out. If you responded to the survey a bit late, you'll be receiving your rewards a bit later and may receive some shipments directly from our manufacturers. This concludes the Eterium kickstarter. If you have any comments or questions feel free to post in the comments or contact me.Post MortemAfter any major project, I like to think about what went right, what went wrong, and how things could have been better. Eterium was a massive undertaking by a team that was too small to take it on in the time frame we planned. We slipped our initial release date of October 2013 by half a year. However I feel the game we delivered was much better for it. I am very proud of Eterium and how the game turned out. The game has been in the hands of players now for three and half months and so far there have been very few reports of bugs. The game has received nearly unanimously high praise by those who have played it. The number one complaint against the game is the anime art style. And if that's all people can find to complain about then I consider it a success.The Kickstarter DecisionWe made the decision to go with Kickstarter to help aid in the completion of this game because we realized that I (being the programmer) would need to concentrate my efforts full time to finish the game. We were expecting the kickstarter to take off. We had delusions of double, triple, or even more funding. The game we had designed was really intended to be made on a much larger budget. The amount of money we asked for was, honestly, below the requirement to make this game. Like many other games on kickstarter, we expected to come in well above our goal or not at all. Sliding just past our goal hours before the end was both a moment of exhilaration and a big "Uh oh" at the same time. While I doubt the game would have ever seen the light of day without the kickstarter funding it put us on a road to create a game with inadequate funding. As a result Eterium has put a significant amount of strain on me and my family, both emotionally and financially.What Went RightWe delivered the game! I have had several of our backers say to me that this was the first kickstarter they've backed that has delivered. It was very important for us to get Eterium out before other games like Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous delivered. While our games cannot be compared and are different games that could successfully coexist, it would be suicide for Eterium to release along with one of those giants.The game we released was very polished and had very few bugs. The team worked well together and we were even able to deliver some of our stretch goals, such as the mission simulator. There were several other features that were added into the game during development and after release.What Went WrongThe amount of money we asked for on Kickstarter was inadequate to develop a game of this scope. The low amount of funding did not allow us much room to hire additional help and testers. After taxes, rewards and shipping the $25,800 broke down to significantly less. Leaving me to work on and test a majority of the game alone.Character Art: The character artist we hired to do the artwork delivered regular updates for the first few weeks, but after that disappeared. When we finally got ahold of him again, he delivered new sketches of all the characters that looked nothing like the original designs. Soon after, he had a hard drive failure and was unable to deliver. We had paid him 1/3rd up front, so while we lost some money, the biggest hit on us was time. We were facing our October deadline without any character at all. Since, at this point, we knew we would slip our October deadline, I started working to improve the quality of the game and adding the simulator stretch goal. We were able to hire Chenwen Hwang, our new character artist, in November. She created all of the characters for the game in just one month. I think she did an increadible job, especially taking into consideration the time spent.Marketing: As we approached release, we hired a PR company to assist us with handling PR and Marketing. This company went out of business just one month after we hired them, leaving us high and dry (and out the money) just weeks before release. Rather than hire another PR company, I decided to take care of all the PR myself. This was probably best in the long run, because many people have praised my personal interactions with the community. Another challenge of marketing was getting the word out about the game. It was difficult enough for us to get the word out about the kickstarter. While the game is well-liked by most who play it and has solid reviews on Steam, we were never able to get in on any major gaming websites. A large chunk of this is my fault, I am a programmer and I prefer to concentrate on making the game rather than getting the word out. A dedicated PR person would have definitely helped here. Before releasing the game, I did a lot of a reading about marketing indie games. I created a press release and sent out dozens of press copies. But nothing ever gained any traction. I suppose the game was just too small and insignificant compared to the bigger space games coming on the horizon.Final ThoughtsWhile I am very proud of the game Eterium turned out to be, I am very disappointed in the poor sales. It was always my hope that Eterium would be a stepping stone to the production of future indie titles. And while I do not plan to give up creating indie games, the sales from Eterium are far below my hopes and well below what would be required to fund a new game. The total revenue for the game so far does not even come close to paying back my personal investment in the game.Eterium should have remained a personal project. The amount of money we asked for on kickstarter was too low to fund development of the game and the resulting sales of the game have been lacking at best. As a personal project, I could have continued the game at my own pace rather than concentrating my full time efforts on it. However, if the game remained a personal project, I probably would have burnt out on it long before its release. It was nice to be able to put in the effort needed to get the game out quickly, rather than toil away at it for several more years.As for the future of myself and Rogue Earth LLC: we are currently prototyping several new game ideas in Unreal Engine 4. I have quite a bit of professional experience using UE3, so I was able to get up to speed on UE4 in no time. While I do not plan to create another Eterium/Wing Commander style game for a while (there is just too much competition), I am looking to do another science fiction / spaceship game. Due to the lack of funding, this game will be created in my free time as a side project. I'll share a link when I have something to show. At this time, I do not have any plans to do a kickstarter for it.

That's interesting. I feel slightly bad about Eterium; I was a backer and played it a little, and contributed one measly bug report, but I never really "got into it" the way I expected to. I'm not quite sure why. Having read the above, I think it's sad that the developer's overall conclusion seems to be a negative one, and that development of the game put an emotional strain on him and his family. I still really admire him for going through with it. auryx