We did several interviews, updated our blog a few times per week, and managed to get some decent press coverage. I was really hustling for about 5 solid weeks, emailing everyone in the gaming press industry I could find. This would allow us about one more month to develop Crypt Run, which is approximately how long the Kickstarter project itself took to create! So if we met our goal, we would break even.This method of budgeting for what's affordable instead of what's ideal for the game certainly isn't the optimal approach for all projects. $5k seemed like a solid, reasonable goal that we could accomplish with our current network. Rather than estimating the budget to finish a complete game design, we decided to target a goal that we felt was within our reach, and design the rest of the game based on this yet-to-be-determined budget.

Our approach was to develop Crypt Run until we were almost out of money, then look to Kickstarter to see if we could gather a crowd who wanted us to continue development. This environment requires that a studio fund initial development upfront.

Conventional budgeting approaches are not always applicable in the crowdfunding arena, where backers expect a game to be far along in development before they'll consider funding it. Reasonable goalĬoming up with the budget for a game is difficult, even without complicating things with crowdfunding. There's no excuse these days: know your stuff! 2. I'd say that this more than anything else contributed to the campaign's success (except perhaps having a strong web-based demo). The last few weeks before we launched our own campaign, I dug through dozens of bookmarks and spent hours per day reading up and educating myself. A great place to start is the Kickstarter School, but these best practices change so often and are so contextual that custom research is best.

I spent roughly a year with my ear to the ground, reading the occasional crowdfunding article and getting a feel for the current Kickstarter community. There's an overwhelming amount of information out there on crowdfunding best practices. Let's talk about what worked, what didn't, and what we'll do differently next time. We made the goal (and many mistakes) during this exhausting campaign. The goal was $5,000 USD during a 30-day funding period. On July 12th of this year, Lost Decade Games launched a crowdfunding campaign for Crypt Run, our medieval fantasy hack ‘n slash game.

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