The $62,817 Kickstarter Adventure!
Time for an adventure!
One of the misconceptions of Kickstarter nowadays, is that you can easily raise money, by just posting your idea. It rarely works that way anymore and in this post you’ll learn more about how Scarecrow Studio managed to raise more than $60,000 for their unique point-and-click adventure game “3 Minutes to Midnight”.
Get all the wisdom in a single guide
When the series is complete, we will send you the FREE guide with 19 crucial crowdfunding tips on how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign. Subscribe below to get the guide and 1-2 updates per month with useful game dev marketing tips.
3 Minutes to Midnight by Scarecrow Studio
It’s commonly known that a Kickstarter trailer is very important for a successful Kickstarter. And the excellent one made for 3 Minutes to Midnight was more like the trailer for a movie, showing the cool art style and interesting story and characters. One important role of the trailer is to make the viewer curious, and they surely got that right with lots of details and mysterious events!
To make sure the players know what the actual game will look like, they also made a 13 minute long gameplay trailer, which I think is great. Don’t forget to check it out (link in the footer), it’s really beautiful and funny with great voice acting and even a cliffhanger to keep you guessing. The style and dialogue choices really reminds me of classic adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island. What’s unique about the game, except the colorful and hand drawn art style, is that you can solve problems in many different ways that have different consequences, really looking forward to see more of that.
After seeing all this, it was an easy choice for me to back the game, and I was hanging out on their Discord in the last minutes to see the 998:th and final backer come in, just a few minutes before midnight. Now, how did the game manage to raise more than $60,000? I spoke with Pavlina Kačerová, marketing and community manager, to know more about their campaign.
Spending time on funny dialogues is one of the best parts of point-and-click adventures.
Can you tell us about how the game works?
3 Minutes to Midnight is a point-and-click adventure game… but not just a pretty straightforward one with a beginning and an end. In this one, every action you take have consequences, and each puzzle have truly and wildly different solutions. The game is set in the late 1940s, following the story of Betty Anderson and Eliza Barret as they unravel a mystery in their sleepy little New Mexico town.
When 3 Minutes to Midnight was but a fever dream almost three years ago, we had a clear vision of what we wanted—and went for it! This is our first game, and our lack of experience made some steps in this arduous process take longer. No matter what, though, we've never lost our forward momentum. We have one clear objective—to create one of the best point-and-click adventure games ever made. It’s no easy task, but our passion and effort are reflected in every little detail. Nothing, no matter how minor, has been neglected.
It sounds like a big project! How many people are on the team?
There are eleven people currently working on 3 Minutes to Midnight. The brains behind the development, as well as the game designer and creative mind of this project is Jan Serra. Of course, this whole thing could never happen without his amazing team of professionals:
David Puerta, the lead environment artist
Daniel Peña, the lead character artist
Julen Diéguez, the lead programmer
Jorge Bompart, the lead animator
Marc Salvador and Oscar Nogueras, scriptwriters
Marina Hortal and Claudi Lázaro, assistant programmers
Carles Xicola, assistant animator.
Then there’s me, Pavlína Kačerová, who’s in charge of marketing and localization.
How many of them worked on the campaign?
The Kickstarter campaign was created by Jan and me, with the help of our amazing scriptwriters, Marc and Oscar, to whom goes a huge thanks for the humor and language spiciness the campaign features. The campaign, of course, couldn’t exist without the artwork, for which a huge thanks goes to Daniel, David, and Jorge.
When the campaign was running, Jan and I then spent around 80% of our worktime a day dedicated to it. Fortunately, the rest of the team could keep going, working on the game without any disturbance.
How long in advance did you start preparing for the Kickstarter, and what did you do?
It took us about two months to put the campaign together, write all the text for the campaign page, design the pledge levels, create all the campaign artwork, etc. However, before even starting to build our campaign, we spent many months just researching best practices, reading through all the “how to” articles, and talking to other creators of successful campaigns.
What did you learn from talking to other creators?
Probably the most important tip we got was to show your potential backers your enthusiasm, which requires keeping the Kickstarter campaign “alive.” That means posting regular updates, be active in the comment section, or, for example, do live streams, which is something we did three times during the campaign and it was a lot of fun!
The backgrounds are very colorful and detailed, and using zoom in and out, it gives a dimension not possible in the games of the early 1990’s
You got $38,000 in the first week, that’s crazy! How did you do that?
In my opinion, what helped us the most was the fact we already had a community of people following our project. I’m talking our lovely Discord server family, people who subscribed to our newsletter, and our followers on social media. Not saying our community is particularly huge, but those were people who were willing to support us on day one, and we are just so grateful for that.
What did you do to promote your Kickstarter campaign after the launch and during the middle of it when it's usually slow?
Honestly, nothing in particular. We were constantly running our Facebook ads and kept our social media presence as active as possible. I guess it was just a lucky day. It can also be due to the fact that we had quite a few high pledge levels (up to 4.900€.) So, it happened that someone felt generous enough to pledge so high, which is something you can never really expect when that will be.id you make any special promotion in the last few days?
The ending was a bit slower compared to a lot of other campaigns that usually have a spike in the end. Was there anything else you could have done?
We didn’t do any special promotion in the last few days. We kept reminding people on social media that our campaign is about to end, and that was pretty much it. I think there’s really nothing much we could do. By that time, we were just happy we successfully reached our goal, and that was what mattered the most to us.
Did you use any paid marketing or any outside help?
We were running some paid advertisement, but it was just quite a small number of backers coming from there. Other than that, it was all on us, no agency was involved. The majority of our backers were actually coming from Kickstarter itself.
What do you think is the most important part of your campaign that made it successful?
I think our community, either supporting us directly and spreading the word for us, made it happen for the most part.
If you could turn back time and redo the campaign, would you do something different?
Probably not run the campaign at all, HAHA. It’s too much stress and it takes too much time. We couldn’t dedicate 100% of our time to the development for 3 months (2 months prior plus the month of the campaign), which was very frustrating. On the other hand, we are so grateful that thanks to Kickstarter, new people had the chance to discover our game, thus there are now more even more people looking forward to 3 Minutes to Midnight to come out. And for us, that’s a powerful motivator.
What advice would you give to other small indie game studios that want to do a Kickstarter?
1) It’s a common misconception that Kickstarter will promote your project for you. They won’t. You have to do the hard work. The only thing they can do for you is that they will help you push it when your project is already doing great so then it can do even better, but Kickstarter won’t help you from zero.
2) Build your community beforehand. For us, it’s been two years. It’s not easy, but it’s worth it to take your time. Launch your project when you feel the support and people are really expecting it.
7 valuable tips learned from 3 Minutes to Midnight’s campaign:
Have a trailer with secrets that players want to know more about
Show your gameplay so the players can see what they expect
Research other campaigns a lot before launching
Make sure to spend 2-3 months to perfect the campaign
Make sure you have a community, ready to support you on day one
Be aware that the Kickstarter will distract you from actually working on the game
Be prepared for lots of hard work
The game is coming out spring 2020, so it’s not much left. I’m really looking forward to jumping into my couch and playing it on my Switch, and I hope you’ll check out the game once it hits Steam. If you want to know more::
Check the Scarecrow Studio website
Check out Scarecrow Studio Twitter
View the trailer and read more on the Kickstarter page
Watch the 13 minute gameplay on Youtube
We have a few more interviews coming up, so stay tuned and follow @bluegoogames on Twitter. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get updates.
