by Nathan Stout (of AccordingToWhim.com)
Hey ho everyone! Nathan here. Today I’d like to talk a little about what I (personally) hope to achieve with our Kickstarter project: Rise Of The RockStar. Honesty is the best policy so I will tell you want I want out of this…
When we first started talking about making a game many moons ago my first thought was cool, another game for the According To Whim brand. We already had a game we homebrewed called Whim Wars. It was a fun project and simple (the game itself is pretty simple). I used a printer, a paper cutter, some drawings I made, Microsoft word, some dice, a golf pencil, and finally a 65 count CCG card box (oh, and don’t forget the glue stick) and viola!
We quickly found out (and pretty much knew) Rise of the Rock Star (then called ‘the fame game’ or ‘rise to fame: rock star’) was going to be more complex. I knew it was going to take much more time, effort and most of all… money to get it made. I thought about kit bashing it like I did with Whim Wars but after a little research figured it would be way too expensive. If we were going to do it… might as well do it right.
After a month we decided to raise the money on Kickstarter. It seemed like the place to go to get great ideas made into reality. At this point my hope was to get the game paid for. The basic game, nothing else. In the back of my mind I always suspected that somehow we would get funded but in the end I would be paying money out of my pocket to cover unexpected expenses.
As the development of the game progressed Rise of the Rock Star grew. It went from a core game to a core game with 4 expansions. There were so many avenues of customizability in the game that I (and mainly Chris) knew we would need more ‘game’ to maximize the playability and fun. At this point (which had been a few weeks down the road with some KS research done) I was feeling a little better since we could push the expansions as stretch goals. If we can get the funding… great, we could get the expansions made.
In the back of my mind I fancied daydreams of making it really big and having more than enough to produce the game, pay all expenses in making it, and even having some left over. What to do with that money? Chris and I would have to agree what to do with it. I am pretty sure we would decided to dump it into the development of our next KS game.
My ultimate dream (what I’d like to achieve) would be to have enough money left over after getting all of Rise of the Rock Star produced and getting a real demo made of our next game. I’d love to have a few copies of it ready to roll out to game reviewers way before we started the KS project. It would also be nice to have a pool of money to draw on to pay for all the miscellaneous KS related expenses that happen before funding (paying for the ads, fliers, business cards, banners, demos, etc…)
End the end what I hope we achieve is to be able to get the core game produced. If we can just achieve that, then I will feel accomplished in my task. All the rest would be icing on the cake!