Monsterpunk Week III Status Report

Day 22. It's one minute past noon. Time is a blur. Days and weeks have lost meaning. I almost forgot today was Sunday and I was supposed to write an update here. I've been awake for six hours yet it feels like a Saturday afternoon and the weekend somehow slipped between my fingers.

It's been a weird and busy week. I figured people would stop giving me money when I said there wouldn't be any more stretch goals.

They aren't stopping.

I already wrote an update about the demon race representative, otherwise I'd take the opportunity to do that in celebration of the 666% funding benchmark.

By last week Kickstarter's promotion-boosting algorithm had already surpassed the direct referrals in quantity and total value of pledges, but by this week it's almost doubled it in value and around quadruplued it in quantity. We could leave this thing on autopilot and it would keep going up.

Looking at the graph, weekdays have a constant and stable stream of new backers while weekends seem to hit a slump. Last week's I attributed this to Easter, but it is happening this weekend as well so I guess it's a pattern. The 14th, 22nd and 23rd are the big anomalies with huge influxes of backers making the graph jump up noticeably and stop being a nearly straight line.

With that said my sample size is of two weekends (the first doesn't count because it was during the rush of the initial 48 hours), so maybe I'm just seeing patterns that really aren't there.

So frustratingly close to the lucky 777, yet so far away. Most followers don't convert even at the end but if they do it's going to be ridiculous. I joked above that I expected people to stop giving me money after we met that last stretch goal but they aren't. I really didn't think we'd pick up another thousand and half in the third week, so among all the other things I'm doing I'm also trying to figure out what I can offer as a token extra reward for backers, sort of as a surprise stretch goal retroactively added in after it has already been met.

So far the best I've got is to write some additional classes and release them as PDFs later, giving them for free to all backers, but only after the core book and expansion are finished so they don't threaten to disrupt our schedule. I'll write a campaign update about that later when I've got it figured out.

Until next week, may you be continuously pleasantly surprised.

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Kickstarter Week II Status Report

Second verse, same as the first.

At this point I figure I could tell people that our next stretch goal will be to buy me a skull fortress on a volcanic island for a million dollars and if it happened by next weekend I'd just go "Yeah, that checks out."

It's a shame I have too much integrity to do that. We're not doing more stretch goals, because this is all the work I can safely take on and I'm not looking forward to becoming another Peter Molyneux.

We've still got two weeks to go and we're still going strong though. More funding means more and better art assets. Monster art, landscapes, combat maps, all that good stuff. I figure I could say "Give me 10k and I'll get 3 landscapes plus a bestiary with 50 monsters and a map pack with 20 maps." But I can't 100% promise that with our current schedule, it's a lot of work not just for me but also for the people I'm paying to make these assets. If they get sick for or, you know, life happens at them for a week or two we won't meet the deadlines, so I'd rather just do however much we can with the money we get and leave it at that.

That number isn't a complete fabrication, by the way, it's the figure I ended up with after doing a lot of math. We might actually make it at this rate. It seems farfetched, but so seemed every stretch goal before. Crazier things have happened. If we do then, well, now you know how much I want to expand that bestiary and map pack, I guess.

Who knows, maybe next week I'll ask for that skull fortress.

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Kickstarter Week I Status Report

Mkay it's been a week so let's check in how we're doing and --

--huhwha?

To say this has blown away all my expectations is an understatement. I genuinely doubted we'd reach the expansion book stretch goal, let alone that we'd reach it in four days. In a little over a week we've not just made more money than BCG did in its whole month but also we got more than double the backers. It's not unrealistic to expect we'll meet the 5k stretch goal before the final 48 hours. Hell, it might happen before the last week.

The numbers even went up again between taking the screenshot and finishing writing this update. Twice.

So how come MP is doing so well even though I've basically done less marketing for it than BCG, which pretty much had none at all?

You see that "external referrers" side of the pie chart? That's word of mouth. That's the people from my Discord that have either pledged themselves or showed the game to other people. For the first 2-3 days of the campaign the direct referrals were the grand majority of the funding and ever since then Kickstarter's algorithm has been promoting the game based on its success to make it catch up.

So the answer to the previous question would be "Turns out cultivating a chill community that upholds basic human decency for a few years without asking for anything in return makes people want to support you." Weird thing, huh.

And I didn't even have to show people any silhouettes of new classes hidden behind a number of retweets or put pictures of boobs front and center to do it!

The majority of pledges occur during the first few days and the last 48 hours. If the people that put this game on 'remind me later' all decide to pitch in for the basic PDF to reap its rewards we'll not just meet the last stretch goal, we'll soar past it for an absurd 777% funding. That's not even a joke. We have $3,669 as of me writing these words and $4,100 would give us $7,769.

That's terrifying.

I am not used to success. I had taken for granted that I would forever continue to barely get the funding needed for these dumb games of pretend that I keep making and to continue subsisting with only the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs covered.

With success come expectations, notoriety and also stakes. I now not only have to keep a lot more people happy and will get a lot more negative attention my way for no reason, but also I have something to lose. That is a hell of a motivator.

I would continue writing this blog post but I think that I've already said all that needed to be said. Plus I've already written 9 of the expansion book's 12 projected new classes and I would like to finish the other 3 today.

Until next week.

Gimmick Out.

The Monsterpunk Kickstarter is LIVE!

And also it's already funded!? NANI!?

Yes, really, go see for yourself. I've spent like four hours writing personalized thank you messages and also hastily writing the first update and let me tell you it's a great problem to have.

Crazy world.

hello im not dead and im actually making progress yeah i cant believe it either

So I need to kickstart the remainder of Monsterpunk to get it 100% finished, right? Right. For the past few weeks I've been setting that up and I thought I'd get it done by last week, but it has been stuck in bureaucratic hell for a long-ass time and only today (April 1st) it's been fully cleared.

It's technically good news but it feels like I've had a joke sprung on me after being trolled for weeks.

Anyway, I figure I'll launch this Sunday 7, because I do things during Sundays even if it's basically delaying a thing that is weeks overdue by 6 additional days because.... Uhhh... Tradition??? I guess??????????

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ggwp/801073551?ref=780828&token=37bf0a13

Here's a preview of what it's going to look like. This is not live yet. I may not take myself super seriously but even I'm not stupid enough to try and launch a serious project on April 1st. Feel free to tell me I'm a capitalist pig, an idiot who refuses to make money, or to exercise your creativity finding a way to combine the two. Also other constructive feedback would also be cool and good but I hear that's an even rarer commodity than common sense so I understand if y'all don't got any to give away.

Gimmick Out.