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I always thought an Ancient Rome with some modern twists like in Mel Brooks' History of the World Part I would be a hilarious and captivating game setting!

I'm hoping to work on that more when tax season's over! Between some pretty intense things I've had to deal with lately in my personal life like my upcoming move (mortgage papers = good hand exercise), I haven't been online as much. Once I get past these hurdles, I'm hoping to have 50 forum tabs open again.

I personally sent those stickers. Our stuff goes out fast because I live 5 blocks from the post office and am on a first-name basis with about 85% of the employees so they always take good care of everything I send and receive. I'm happy to hear they arrived safely!

Sadly international shipping has definitely gone up for bigger items since we ran the campaign. I remember when it didn't always cost much to send to Canada with a commercial permit, it's definitely more now. But we're prepared for it, and the sticker mailings fortunately don't chew up our budget too much!

I gotta give it a listen! But come now, how could we not mention it in the update? Cover's very Space Quest-y!

Screenie looks real sick! Reminds me of the cover of a Blind Guardian album!

To artificially inflate the balance sheet to look more attractive to investors...except that an IP that was earning money over a decade ago will not be worth nearly the same as it could be if it was earning money now, in the form of selling the old games, making new ones, merchandising it, and so forth.

Hence the thought process makes no sense!

Speaking from a business POV, if they're not using the IPs they should just sell them off to indie devs who will actually use them, and/or engage the original creators. After, indies are the ones who seriously do all the risk-taking in game development today. AAA will never take risk on a frontline title because they tie up such ludicrous amounts into development that they simply can't risk a game banking less than eight figures. We know as hardcore fans that Day of the Tentacle would make money-- not Star Wars money, but money. Much more money than most indies have to work with. But it'd be the "taking our $1,000/hour lawyers to lunch" budget for frontline devs yet still considered too much of a risk.

Why are they going to let the copyrights sitting there gathering dust? The IP valuation really isn't that high if it made a lot of money 15-20+ years ago but is just not now. I don't understand the IP hoarding mindset if they're not going to USE them!

And...if a Day of the Tentacle remake was 80% done, just finish it already and let the fans get it! If the work's been done and not that much remains to have a completed, marketable game...just release it already. Then merchandise it-- wouldn't tentacle figures and plushies rule? Outsource the merchandising to another company (like Himalaya...) and take a cut if they don't want to take risks with the money they're hoarding, merch WILL sell. Sell the existing games on GOG and Steam, demand for them is there. The latter will take NO risk or work at all on Disney's part.

Funny how the people who go to these top-tier business schools for MBAs to supposedly learn how to make lots of money heading these companies really miss some dead obvious ways to do so.

We had problems with flakes looooong before Kickstarter was even a household name.

And don't forget, we are one of very few software corporations-- probably even the only one-- who has a Chief Amphibian Officer. (see my profile picture!) We get to spend far less on QA because she eats all the bugs. *drum crash*

But actually, I had planned on doing a writeup accompanying the Mages postmortem discussing the financial aspects of Kickstarter, and giving the opinion and experience of someone who is both a financial professional and a game developer side-by-side with facts about different funding types, and why Kickstarter was the right path for us and other gaming projects but definitely isn't for others.

Like I remember reading some of the comments on Kotaku when they covered us at the beginning of the campaign. And I was laughing at them as an accountant more than as a game developer because I could tell that clearly these were folks who never tried to start a business, let alone run one. Especially all the cries of "Why don't these devs on Kickstarter just get bank loans?" (Spoiler: Because IP-based businesses are NOT bank-friendly unless you're cushioned by many, many assets, ie, you can take out a home equity loan or borrow against a 401k that's got at least six figures in it. Let's face it, most hardcore indies have neither of those! Also, banks don't like businesses like game development where they don't get the revenue until the end of development which can and does get dragged out, and making loan payments is difficult if not impossible if there's little to no cash coming in for a protracted timeframe.)

It's also that our business and personal experiences are ones of making do with little and being resourceful. It also helps that Himalaya's management doesn't live and spend like AIG execs. (Except Yael, the Chief Amphibian Officer. She bathes in Icelandic spring water and has designer terrarium wallpaper!) As you can see by both the pixelized loveliness we've been posting (and sending to the Evoker tier!) and the physical rewards we've been producing, we can do quite a bit with 1/8 of a million bucks. We'd love the chance to really go the extra mile with half a mil. Maybe we'll even get that chance soon enough.

But flakeage has been a serious problem for us. When a team member flakes/doesn't do what they've been paid to do, we not only lose the time and money but it hurts us a lot more than it hurts a AAA dev because they can always afford to pay someone or pay an existing member more money to pick up the slack. With indies, it can rip major holes in the timeline. Ironically it happens more with paid projects than unpaid probably because the responsibility and treating a passion like it's work (which it is for all intents and purposes) screws with the psyche and upends the creative process.

Still, we've persevered and made it this far with a big thanks to our fans!

Eek, that's not good! Fortunately we're squared away with a couple packing goods suppliers, why, if that post robot from Deponia were here, he'd be squeeing til he broke if he saw how much bubble wrap we got!

There are some things that just don't need it (like t-shirts and the maps for instance), but we're being careful with our higher tiers since they got a lot of resin figures coming to them.

Even though many of us view rewards/swag as gifts for pledging to a product's development-- and not the sale of a finished good-- unfortunately that's not how customs sees it because while the *game* itself is done, you're still receiving a different type of finished good. Unless formal legislation otherwise says it's okay to mark these items as gifts like if some kind of landmark case makes it happen, we can't risk losing our permission to do business (or else it's going to be very hard to get the game released, if not impossible!)

I think the best method is to value the items apportioned to how much the pledge was-- which would definitely be lesser than what they'd be on our store page. Invoices are a must to avoid customs riffling through the packages, so I'd have a preset invoice made for each tier to differentiate how much money went to the physical swag and how much went to digital goods/money given to us out of the goodness of your hearts. We'll do our best to keep agents' snooping hands out of packages and for some countries, legally below the low-value clearance depending on the tier.

Er, by marking items as gifts at low value they DID do something wrong-- it's illegal!

If a largish package turns up at the customs office with a suspiciously low value attached ($5 as I read in the thread)...customs is SO going to tear it apart.

http://voices.yahoo.com/the-dangers-falsifying-international-customs-forms-6958706.html

I know this from several years of selling on ebay, both as a private and business seller, in addition to being on a first-name basis with most of my local post office's workers (and our Fedex reps also let us in on some nasty surprises that could be in store duty-wise.) Basically, if you send out a huge batch of overseas shipments just once, as would be the case for many Kickstarters that don't plan to continually merchandise, it puts the sender on a watchlist. (Opposed to if you have a personal account and get one or two auctions with an overseas winner.) Neeeeever try to screw a governmental authority out of money they're due; it's going to bite you hard. Because not only is the buyer going to have to pay duty anyway after going through some significant hassle (and possibly a fine, depending on the agent you get), but guess who gets a big fat fine for abetting duty evasion? The seller does. It doesn't happen immediately like a parking ticket. But when it does happen, it's not pretty. And in most cases...the feds can and WILL shut your business down until the fines are paid. Since businesses typically have 30 days to appeal a customs fraud allegation and it's a daunting process to fight, unless you got the resources of Wal-Mart you're likely to get shut down due to being unable to pay those fines.

Some countries are also just worse at this than others. I'm honestly surprised to hear about Germany though, I've sent several items there over the years both as gifts and merchandise and never had issues.

Paying duty isn't fun, but it's the law and merchants have no control over it. No one here wants to go to jail and/or pay mortgage-sized fines! (And we did tell our backers from the outset that we wouldn't be marking items as gifts.)

As for the items turning up in bad shape...did they turn up damaged because of customs riffling, or because they weren't packed well?

That's a pretty swell idea! We could probably implement that in some way...I love a theatrical flair!

Thank you for the really kind words, Nipples! That seriously made my day.

Wasn't the original figure $200K for swag, and they didn't even offer game boxes? Er...we have a LOT more swag and our swag-related damages didn't even come close to breaching a six-figure amount in its entirety. Even after freight/lading! (Standing before many, many resin figures that traveled about 8,500 miles has shown me this. And there's more coming!)

I didn't look at the AMA (though from reading the KS comments I saw many concerns about this new funding system) but just from my first glance at how the rewards on the campaign page were initially set up, the tier just to get a basic digital copy of the game was definitely overpriced. You need only look at every successful game campaign-- be it the Sierra giants that grossed a mid-six figure range or indie productions that made $50K or less-- to know that that tier is where a majority of your backers will put their money, even though it won't provide the majority of your total funding.

Case in point, the majority of our backers pledged to the $16 tier as expected-- though the tier provided about 20% of our total funding (this isn't counting PayPal pledges, just KS only.) It also doesn't account for the large swath of backers who started there, then upped their pledges as the campaign wore on.

I do recall conveying that bit of information-- that you need to be careful with that price point because the point of your Kickstarter is that you want to give special incentives to back the game now instead of buying it later. It's more than just being a part of the process-- what does your backer get out of the deal? $16-20 would be an ideal price for a game like Mage's Initiation since it's got an epic scope as it is, and made even more epic thanks to our backers! However, it wouldn't be fair to the backers to have a $16 point just to make the finished game the same price upon release-- they helped see it to release. Thus we kept this in mind and offered more goodies at the $16 and $20 tiers, like the soundtrack and getting your name in a library book plus some colorful shiny stickers. Beyond that would be getting our fantabulous swag and basic or Collector's Edition boxed copies for far less than what they'd retail for since the tiers were pretty much cumulative. (And, our way of saying thanks for helping us kick off our merchandising in addition to the game itself!)

I kinda knew Precinct wasn't going to make it when I saw that the digital-copy-of-game tier was priced far higher than most other gaming campaigns I'd seen.

Those are some seriously 1992-era graphics...awesome!

I played Nelly Cootalot-- I rather liked the whimsical art style, it had some good humor (like the cat burglar.) I'll back it!

Our next monthly update is coming very soon-- we ended up hitting a snag with the business side of things (a supplier reneged, grr...) but are back on course now.
Much to our delight, we ended up getting more funds than I expected after the smoke cleared even taking cancelled pledges into account, and have been able to direct most of that surplus straight into development to really make the game shine. We still have a few PayPal pledges trickling in maybe once a week or so...our PayPal grand total net of fees is now $3,837. To avoid confusion though, I'd leave the graphs to show how much was available at the time the campaign ended.

We also hope to get Demo 2.0 out soon enough to show off combat tweaks and get additional feedback. Even though the current demo isn't totally representative of how the final build will be, Demo 2.0 should hopefully offer a more accurate look with the tweaks we've already taken into account. We appreciate the thorough feedback we've received!

Spellirium looks really interesting. I just grabbed myself a pledge!

We keep a database of the email addresses tied to either your Kickstarter or PayPal pledge, and if the email on your forum account matches up, we will grant you access upon request. Sean should get back to you soon but if he doesn't, just drop GameDevChris a quick PM, we'll verify your address, and get you all set up. The private forum only becomes visible once you gain access.

I'd definitely like to do a mini-update sometime soon about the financial aspects, showing how much we ended up having to work with after the smoke cleared and how the Show Me The Money pie chart shifted as a result (since that's really my area of expertise.) It would not only be informative and transparent to you guys, but I also hope it helps educate prospective creators and the general public about what they can reasonably expect finance-wise.

But yes, we got over $1,000 net of new pledges from PayPal after the campaign ended-- thank you, slacker backers! I'm itching to get more of our swag into production, but there is some art/design work still to be done in that department and game assets get priority, but Bort's sculpture is still being worked on at our figure manufacturer, and I believe Varner's or perhaps Priestess Amun-Cul's is next.

I can't update the PayPal total on the Kickstarter page anymore because the "Edit Project" button vanished the second we got funded, but I've been keeping a spreadsheet on our PayPal pledges. They're still trickling in! According to my stats, we've gathered $3,651 net of fees altogether from PayPal; $1,060 net of fees specifically after the Kickstarter ended primarily from new pledges, but also a few folks who upped their pledges at the last minute with the Donate button.

Sweet!

Here we are. (attached)

Our target beta date is October-November. We initially planned it earlier but figured the fall was a safer bet because we're expanding the game substantially, and are taking player feedback into account from the demo (soon to be demos) to retool the combat. Not to mention we need to add new backgrounds and sprites for the new game areas and sidequests opened up.

The wait will be worth it.

Actually, disregard my last message-- there WILL be an updated demo or two coming out in the coming months meant to get feedback for the combat retooling, namely. Sorry, it's been a mad dash here and I forgot about that!

Probably not due to it chewing up the time we'd definitely need to put towards the finished game, but we'll be using the beta for additional feedback when the time comes. We've definitely taken the feedback received on this demo into account!

Thank you! It was many months of hard work, and it felt amazing to see the fans come through for us.

Now, we work on the game, gauge the feature creep that's now upon us as our backers have generously funded extra content and whatnot, and get the wheels in motion with our suppliers for the goodies we're having made. We still got another 10 days or so til the smoke clears from Amazon, though.

Ideally we'd like to do an update at least once a month, talking about progress made on the game, and possibly reserve some updates for significant milestones.

Additional quests, more game world...I'm hoping we get to implement those and then some!

At the time of writing, we're $3,415 away from swaths of spiders, Walking Undead, and Adopt-a-Goblin!

Here's to hoping we wallop our goal with a massive fireball shortly!

Our Kickstarter went live today! Amazing first day so far!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2112639455/mages-initiation-a-classic-sierra-style-adventure

We've been hard at work getting assets ready, sourcing rewards for drool-worthy swag, and many other things to make sure the campaign's going to be great! We plan to launch the first or second week of February.