Hi guys,

I would like some advice on starting a kickstarter campaign. Our indie team is a casual collaboration of currently 4 people, the programmer and myself as game designer and artist being the owners of the IP, and 2 sound engineers who are in another state. The project we are currently working on is at the alpha stage and we are currently having people play test our vertical slice of the game, which has been getting some generally positive feedback.

We would now like to get some funding to hire more graphic designers/sprite artists to help with the project and a kickstarter campaign seems like a good way to do that. we are aiming for, at minimum, $10,000 - $20,000, but more is obviously better.

How should we go about starting our kickstarter campaign; what do we need to prepare for it, and what other things should we be aware of?

Do you have a business plan? Where is the money going? You need $10,000 to $20,000? Which is it? Why the huge disparity?

You are legally obligated to deliver your kickstarter promises, so don't ask for a cent less than you have worked out you need to finish your game.

Have you judged the viability of your idea? A lot of successful projects seem to have done legwork to drive interest around their game before the kickstarter kicks off rather than scrabling to draw interest once the kickstarter drive goes live.

I haven't used Kickstarter yet myself, but have been studying it a little to prepare for my own eventual Kickstarter.

A common theme seems to be (well-planned) funded projects underestimating the costs of producing and shipping physical merchandise with alot of unexpected costs - try to have your rewards as digital as possible, where manufacturing and distribution is almost $0.

You need alot of social marketing before the Kickstarter, because merely being on Kickstarter won't give you much and your efforts within the Kickstarter have a large delay where you are losing money from a lack of notice before journalists (hopefully) start to respond to some of your emails. You can't wait until the day the Kickstarter launches to send out emails to websites.