How Retronator went from $1,000 to $62,635 on Kickstarter
Pixel art!
This one is all about pixel art and how to convert a unique idea from tiny little pixels into an actual academy that can get people to learn and fine tune their skills while playing a game.
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Pixel Art Academy by Retronator
At first, I was confused if Pixel Art Academy was a game or a website on how to make games. But after watching the trailer, it was pretty clear. It’s a game! And a way to learn how to make pixel art! How cool is that?
The trailer for Pixel Art Academy’s Kickstarter campaign is actually also a high-speed quick start on how to do pixel art, then it goes on to show how the game works. It’s a really nifty mix between a game and reality, where you draw stuff that you can upload into the game and also encourages you to post on Twitter and other social media sites. And you do it all in the browser.
So it’s not totally crazy that this campaign started with an ask for $1,000 and ended up with more than $60,000. So how did this happen? I had a nice time talking to Matej Jan, a.k.a. Retro and founder of Retronator, who’s living his dream, working full time on making pixel art and games..
All these lessons are presented in glorious pixel art.
Can you tell us about how the game works?
Pixel Art Academy is an adventure game where you become an art student and learn how to draw. I also like to call it a real-life skill RPG. As your character is leveling up in the game, you’re also learning all the materials yourself and doing the actual drawing tasks. The majority is played like an 80s text adventure though, or a 90s point-and-click adventure once I get all the art done for the game.
So how many people are involved in making this happen?
I’m working on the game alone for the most part. I do all the design, code, art, and marketing right now, but I did have some collaborators involved along the way. With my current budget I can’t afford it anymore, but it’s technically an open-source project and everyone is welcome to contribute at any time. During the Kickstarter campaign though, it was just me pitching a crazy idea about a game where you could learn something useful in it.
How long in advance did you start preparing for the Kickstarter, and what did you do?
The idea to run a Kickstarter came to me in April 2015 as a backup plan to fund my Master’s degree in Education. I wanted to expand on a pixel art tutorial I made on YouTube and after a month of brewing it in my head I realized I should make a game about learning pixel art. It went pretty fast from there.
I fleshed out the basic game design and art style in May and June. A landing page announcing the project and collecting people’s emails launched at start of July. I then recorded all the footage for the campaign, drew screenshot mockups, edited the video, and designed the campaign page, all while posting teasers to my social media. All together it took 3 to 4 months with the campaign launching at the start of August.
The timetable that tracks your progress in the game.
So how did you achieve getting more than $12,000 in the first few days?
I made the Kickstarter page go live pretty late in the evening so I spent the first day just posting the link to it on all my social media. The next day I went through the list of all the people I followed on Twitter and literally messaged everyone that followed me back and had anything to do with pixel art or gaming. I’m talking genuine messages to friends and acquaintances I made in previous years being in the pixel art scene, not copy/paste spam.
That’s my approach to social media in general, I see it just as technology to make friends and reach others with similar interests. It makes sense then, that when you launch something as big as a Kickstarter project, you’ll have about 100 internet friends that will personally share it further. That’s on top of all the people that follow you sort of uni-directionally. I run the biggest news blog about pixel art and after years of serving this niche, the blog's audience grew decently big. Given that my Kickstarter was perfectly matched with the readers' interest, I’d say this was a good example of value-added marketing done right—marketing that is a side-product of doing things for the community you’re involved in.
Cool, what’s the pixel art news blog called?
It’s www.retronator.com (EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s amazing, and your mouse cursor even turns into an Amiga 500 cursor. It’s incredible, with a style unlike anything you’ve ever seen in an online blog. Check it out!)
During the middle and end of the campaign, you had a huge spike where you got another $12,000 in just two days. Did you have any particular strategy?
After the initial interest from the pixel art scene, the idea of a game where you learn real-life skills started resonating with a wider audience. The CEO of Kickstarter chose it as his personal pick of the week in one of Kickstarter’s newsletters, followed by a feature in another newsletter specifically about learning or video game projects.
That was the biggest post-launch day spike and the biggest referrer source overall. After that the campaign also ranked very well on Kickstarter’s search results, which eventually led to half of the backers finding the project on Kickstarter itself.
What about the ending which also got you a lot of new backers?
The final spike in most campaigns will come from the 48 hour email. Everyone that saved the project will get reminded that the campaign is ending and if you’ve made your goal or were very close to making it, the undecided people will likely hop on board. Combined with your last personal push—if you have any energy left after a month of self-promotion—it can nicely round up the funding above what you’d expect.
Did you use any paid marketing or any outside help?
In the end, most of the backers of Pixel Art Academy were reached organically, growing from word-of-mouth in the pixel art scene to the wider Kickstarter and gaming audience. I don’t remember spending much time writing to journalists—most of the articles got published simply to talk about a relatively unique, inspiring, and underrepresented game idea.
I didn’t use any paid marketing and since I was running all my outreach efforts for my blog already, I didn’t feel the need to hire anyone else to do it for me.
What do you think is the most important part of your campaign that made it successful?
There were many factors that made my campaign a bit unique, from a custom-designed page done with pixel art images instead of normal text, to a really low goal which made the funding percentage stand out as ridiculously high.
But the main thing that made it successful I think was really the core idea. Not even specifically to make a game about learning pixel art, but the idea in general that you could improve a real-life skill by playing a video game. It turned out many people would actually love to learn something while playing.
If you could turn back time and redo the campaign, would you do something different?
I’d definitely push the estimated release date further. I had it set to one year because that’s when I’d graduate and I’d have something playable as part of my Master’s final project. Even though I was quite explicit that this is a long-term project and it will have many gradual releases after the first one, I don’t think anyone—including myself—imagined how long it would take to realize everything presented in the kickstarter video. It’ll be more like 10 years, rather than 1 that someone might expect if they just glanced at the estimated date.
What advice would you give to other small indie game studios that want to do a Kickstarter?
Kickstarter is hard. It requires an outstanding idea, great presentation, and an existing fan base that will essentially kickstart the Kickstarter. I’ve seen many projects that had just one or two of these things fail. I wouldn’t recommend crowdfunding for derivative games. While I appreciate the hard work and learning value for the developers, if the design is not creative enough, it’ll be hard to get people very excited about it. To me, Kickstarter is still a platform to bring innovative, underdog ideas to life.
You did something very interesting with promising 50 backer updates. Did you follow through with that?
I backed almost 100 projects myself and what I’ve learned from following them is that I care more for the journey of the developers themselves, rather than the end product. To me backing a project is not so much a pre-order as it is making someone’s dreams come true. It’s really inspiring to see them achieve it, including all the struggles that go with that.
I wanted the same kind of personal relationship with my backers, so I promised 50 update posts in the first year, essentially one every week. While they did slowly drop off to about two per month, I did finish them 2 years into development, together with the release of the intro episode.
Since then I tried doing monthly reports, but eventually switched to posting whenever there is a gameplay update released on the server. As development entered its long-term phase, I don’t want to annoy people by keep bringing up a project if they can’t play nothing new. For this reason I switched my weekly devlog updates to Patreon, while Kickstarter backers only get pinged for big releases, summarized also in vlog episodes. That way even if they don’t have time to play themselves, they can see what’s the current state of the game.
7 valuable tips learned from Pixel Art Academy’s campaign:
Announce the project in beforehand and collect people’s emails
Spend a lot of time on the campaign page
Message all your friends and followers, in a genuine way
Have at least 100 people that you know very well and know will help you spread the word
Try to have a personal relationship with your backer
By having a unique campaign, you increase your chances of succeeding
Have a way for people to support the project after the Kickstarter
I’m sure you’re as excited as I am to play the game, and you can actually do that right now! Check the links below:
Play it on https://pixelart.academy/
Follow Retro on Twitter
Check out the Retronator blog (It’s sooo pixelated ;)
View the trailer and read more about the game on the Kickstarter page for Pixel Art Academy
We will be back soon with another interview that will help you on your way to Kickstarter. Follow @bluegoogames on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter to get updates.
