Take Two!

Paul and I are currently working on plans for our second Kickstarter later this year. We're working under a few constraints:

• We have very limited time for playtesting whatever comes next due to FlickFleet construction,
• We have very little cash due to FlickFleet shipping,
• We don't want to run it until we've shipped all the 2018 Kickstarter rewards.

By the end of August (hopefully!) there should be about 300 people in the world who have a copy of FlickFleet. Which is a lot considering every single one of those will have been loving hand-crafted by Paul and me. But it's not many as a proportion of the 7.4 billion people who live on the planet (or even the gamers among them).

FlickFleet has been getting excellent feedback and Paul and I would love to see more people get the chance to enjoy it. Now there's a number of reasons why we only got 325 backers for our first Kickstarter (not least of which was that our advertising spend was less than £100). Lots of people will avoid Kickstarters from first time creators because they are wary of getting stung by people who don't know what their doing and have no track record. It's one of the reasons that we spent so much of our first Kickstarter page and video talking about our credentials and experience.

If we come back to Kickstarter in September then we can do things a bit differently. We will hopefully have a completed Kickstarter under our belts with fulfilment having been completed early, rather than late. We have a community of FlickFleet owners 300 strong, many of whom (assuming the same level of excitement among backers who have yet to receive their rewards as we've had from those backers who've already got their copies) really love the game. Some of those are already clamouring for extra FlickFleet content, others will hopefully help us by reaching out to their friends, games clubs, families and random strangers in the supermarket to espouse the game.

This time there's a few things we’re hoping to do differently, with this in mind:

• Focus the video and the page more on the game than on us,
• Be more upbeat (and less knackered!) in the video,
• Use stretch goals more effectively,
• Set a lower target because we don't need a(nother!) laser cutter,
• Reduce the amount of crafting required for the standard edition.

I've started this process by scripting a new video on the train this week, focussed on playing the game. Which gave me an idea for a scenario - so once I've tested it I'll be adding that to the Scenarios page too!