Hahaha. That’s a good idea. Just wait. The stuff these guys do is literally so funny and amazing. Their creativity to break the game is so freakin awesome.
@@advancenine There's a whole channel dedicated to breaking games and playing them in unusual ways. Check out let's game it out the things he does in games is really funny
I have been watching you since day 1 your channel started for Night Stones. I'm sad to see that I cant try out your demo on steam cause I'm a Linux user. Not sure how but other Windows demos (not all but some) on steam lets me download it and all I have to do use Proton for the Steam Play for the game. Usually if my hardware meets the requirements and don't have insane proprietary requirements that is only for windows they run quite well. About 90% of my game library is "Windows only" games and very much playable! I know most dev's now a days say there is "no market" or "not enough of gamers on Linux to make it worth while" but there is still loads of gamers on Linux (estimated of at least 2 million+) use Steam Play (Proton) to play games, as far as I know Steam Play registers as a "Windows user". I ask and beg you with as much respect as possible please please please support Linux native or at least have the game work as best you can in Steam Play compatibility layer with Proton 8.0. If you cant or don't want to or don't have the time I understand and will still wish you the best. Would love to stream your game one day though. 😄
Hi, I played your demo and would like to give you some Feedback. Do you hace an EMail or way to contact you? Thinking youtube is not the best place for that... Anyway loved your demo in general.
Interestingly, I would've totally backed this campaign on Kickstarter IF I HAD KNOWN ABOUT IT. I've wishlisted the game on Steam, I've been following your videos, but somehow, the message of a KS campaign never reached me. Worth looking at!
Yo! Thanks for letting me know. I’m a terrible self promoter and, honestly, I felt like I had pushed the Kickstarter too hard through video mentions, shorts, and community posts. So it’s super helpful to hear that people still didn’t know about it and I should have increased its visibility. I’ll improve in the future thanks to your helpful insight. THANK YOU!
@@advancenine From my pov, I knew the kickstarter was happening eventually but I hadn't registered exactly when. Even if it was mentioned, it's tough to commit that to memory so most people I think need the reminder: "Hey, this is happening right now!"
Alright... I've played the entire demo. The immersion in this universe is magical, audio and video are conversing very well. I'm so proud of what this project is becoming... I am following your devlogs since the first one and I'm very anxious to watch what it'll become.
I'm baffled about why you wouldn't have posted a video about the Kickstarter here - this channel has been my sole window into your development, and it seems like I'm far from the only one there. Glad to hear it was funded though! Best of luck with the rest of your development!
You failed to notify your RU-vid audience about the kickstarter. You might have succeeded in your kickstarter but fail to realize you didn't reach in every corner and failed to reach your true potential in the kickstarter. Next time, TELL EVERYONE!
I've been following along since the beginning and never heard about the Kickstarter. I think you sadly missed out on a lot of funding. I would have definitely supported it. With that said, I'm really loving how the game is looking and playing. It keeps getting better and better. I noticed when your stamina runs out while flying you plummet a huge distance to the ground. Have you thought about the glider turning into a parachute somehow?
Your collaboration on the zombie car driving game was what put you on my radar. You were the most "human" component of that video, and certainly the most relatable personality. Congrats on your Kickstarter campaign exceeding it's mark! Unfortunate that I missed your Alpha tester phase, but I'm subscribed, watching, and hopeful your dream pans out to put smiles on faces the world over!
Something that I notice is that I CONSTANTLY see communiry posts when watching RU-vid on my phone, but hardly see them when in my PC. I don't know why this is, but this may be a reason why there's many people saying they found the kickstarter via YT and people saying they had never heard of it. Gosh, online platforms are weird. Anyways, I was so excited to see it funded! Congrats!!
Nope...my new rule for 2024 - immediately leave videos with dumb cutscene videos. Generate professional content, stop interrupting the flow every 10 seconds to show us what every word means - we are not toddlers.
Yeah I had to acquire more players through advertising than I anticipated. But I was also surprised how profitable the ads were so it worked out. In retrospect, I wish I had spent more on advertising as the ad campaign scaled really well. Live and learn…
I absolutely loved the devlog series for nightstones just like thousands of others and your journey has been super inspirational for a solo game dev like me.! In fact I started posting about my game on YT just after watching you.! Wishing you all the best for the launch. Your success is well deserved. 💜
As a solo indie developer first and foremost congratulations on meeting your goals. As I am working on my first game and it is far larger than I anticipated your quest gives me hope that someday I could find similar success with my project. Game under my channel.
Great video! Thanks for sharing your insights on the KS campaign, as a fellow dev doing through one right now, it's great insight! And hope you have fun with that yatch you definitely bought 😂
Alpha Playtester Here: I confess that I intentionally initially did not say anything about my ultrawide monitor specifically so I could see if the game still functioned under those parameters. :P
Hahaha. You freakin menace! You reported the first bug and I was honestly like “this isn’t bad”. Then people started jumping on NPCs. Hahahaha. Thanks for being so rad and helpful!
Like everyone else in the comments section, i'm puzzled why you didn't make a video about the campaign. I've been following the development closely here like most of your follower base that are here but had ZERO info that you even had a Kickstarter going on and after reading the comments section on this video, i see maybe couple comments that you've made a community post about the campaign but those don't even show up for majority of subs on YT especially PC users and hence are mostly meaningless and if i and others had notifications/community messages on for every content creator on YT i/we follow we would be swimming in spam. But nevertheless i'm extremely glad you did hit your campaign goal and will keep following closely the project, just a teeny bit sad because we could've done MUCH better there had we had info about the Kickstarter :(
I'm a bit late to the party, but contrary to what other Creators showcase, launching a Kickstarter Campaign is not an easy task Building a community of people willing to support your project is the defining detail behind a successful launch And I'm peaking from a failed campaign, conversations I've had with other Creators and the ongoing development of my comic series I encourage you to give a shot next time around but solely woring with your audience and making them part of the process Nonetheless congrats! Raising $25K it's not an easy task and you still learned something from the experience 🎉
I think a video announcing the kickstarter may have helped boost awareness that it was happening; checking the thumbnails/titles of your videos there's no sign of it. Gentle mentions in videos/community posts are great for building up interest for existing fans ahead of time, but a 'Hey, here's my game, and here's the kickstarter for it, link in description' video would likely garner far more eyes, both old and new. I'm glad it succeeded regardless, though, congrats on both that success and the shape of the game so far, it's coming along wonderfully!
A game similar like yours , or lets say if it had 1-2 systems more (a little more complex I mean), isnt it possible to ask for Kickstarter to fund the whole game? I mean to tell them "I need my expenses for a whole year to make this game , I need 100.000 $" . Isnt it possible? ...or its possible but not probable?
the parts towards the end where you go through the game without a narration/script is pretty cool! I think you could sprinkle stuff like that in future videos.
I don't understand why people kickstarted your game. The graphics are largely poor with mostly dead space and flat textures on top of being low poly. Your story seems like nothing to look at (if you're hiding it than I revert back to the original statement since no one knows what it is). Combat is basically non existent. You're not a puzzle game. Your not a platformer. It's like you slapped on the most basic of mechanics and called it a game. An improvement would be to make the gliding segments zoom out the camera so you can see more of the landscape. Like zelda, if you had something to show it would be a great way to let the player really take in the environment. Also it would help with navigation. Not too much a zoom out of course.
i want to cross the gate to talk with twilight hollow 😭😭😭 what a great Devlog and great Demo, somehow the first thing i did when the game started i jumped into the campfire and stuck there for like 10 sec but eventually manage to escape, not a big deal but something could be wrong with the collision, or just my bad luck 😅Love your work
Yo! Thanks for playing the demo. Why the heck are you jumping on fire though!? lol. Honestly that bug used to exist very heavily but I thought I had completely fixed it. Looks like there is more work to be done on my collision detection and i really appreciate you letting me know.
Some of the exploits found by the alpha testers may need fixed in these locations, but seem like they might be fun mechanics to explore further in the game. Im thinking especially of the standing on the climbing guy, and some of the hop-and-jump parkour climbing. Maybe not for main content, but little easter eggs hidden away in remote corners?
Did you factor the costs in to the funding because 25k is not much at all. I would however always suggest getting 'players' to test the game (like you seem to be in a way) they will by far give the best feedback, better than any paid QA team.
alpha testers are the best and worse at the same time! it's a shame when we're so proud of our baby, and start showing people what you have for minutes later they show us 50+ things you're not supposed to in the game! 😆gladly they also help us iimprove right? love this project man! amazing stuff!😁
I love your reaction to the alpha testers lmao. I had to do alpha testing for a software company even though I'm a product designer. You definitely have to adapt a certain mindset to do it. I don't think it'd be too hard to get in that mindset if you already have the knowledge of how things are built though. Something worth thinking about for future projects, since you could potentially lower the amount of alpha testing needed by catching things earlier.
4:48 What if you add a Stone golemn that acts as a guard, perhaps to a bridge or cave entrance(s), that dont just block your path but kills you when you dont satisfy some requirements.
Nooooooooooooo! Don't "fix" all these cool bugs! Work them into the gameplay. There's not a heck of a lot of original or novel features in this game, and these things could make all the difference.
I’ve been following from the start but recently I’ve seen you posting on the game dev subreddit, I’m interested to hear how that has influenced your decisions going forward and your opinion on the feedback you received
Love your reactions to alpha testers breaking your game in multiple ways xD Gotta love these people, showing us cracks in our system that we didnt even imagine were there!
holy shit you spent 8000 in facebook and google advertisements....dude... what the hell that is insane... probably got you like 100 backers at $80per backer... I'm sure worse than that
You are so right. $80 per backer would be unsustainable. I monitor ad performance via ROAS to ensure the ads meet my goals and I was able to acquire new customers for much less than you expect. That’s a nice thing about digital marketing - you can actually measure performance in real time. Which is awesome for my analytical engineering mind :)
I am looking at your steam store and seeing your video thumbnail "How I Failed" doesn't instill confidence for your game. If I was you I would change it for something like "How gamers made my game better". If I was You I would do that but that's just me.
Awesome progress, love seeing you reacting to testing finding bugs, always funny how testers find all kinds of stuff that the developer never thought of trying 😆
With Kickstarter campaigns, this is how it always goes. Your first 24 hours pull in the largest sum of money and within a few days the campaign funding drops to a few pledges per day. The last couple of days usually see a boost. This is the typical campaign funding curve. I think you probably overpaid on the ads as $8000 to only end up with $35k is not super great. I'm not sure when or where you ran the ads but the best strategy is to run ads a couple of weeks *prior* to rhe launch, directing people to the pre-launch page. Then run ads for the first 48 hours of launch. After that you basically shouldn't bother running ads until the very last few days of launch. Running ads mid-campaign is a waste of money. You're not going to get many pledges for what you're spending. Since the first 24 hours are the most critical, building your pre-launch as large as possible is key. If you launched with a small number of pre-launch followers, your first day funding will be weaker. It's worth it to even delay the KS launch by a month in order to really just build your pre-launch following up. All of those people get notified on the day of launch and are most likely to pledge right away.
Hey! Thanks for asking! All my previous games are on mobile and have been removed on stores as I haven’t been updating them with security patches over time. They weren’t profitable so it didn’t make sense to keep supporting them. Hopefully night stones is a different story and I can get enough players to continue making more games. But either way it’s a fun ride and I’m enjoying it!
Dude that's awesome! Congrats! I have a hard time making RU-vid videos and social media posts about my game. It feels like not making progress to the game is really bad even though it would me more useful to grow a bigger audience
Omg I totally agree. As an engineer, marketing feels so wasteful to spend time on. But I’ve learned the hard way it’s literally just as important… if not more so.
@@advanceninefor mobile games it’s where 60% of the budget goes and 70% of the cut stays. Self publishing is an adventure and your type of game and your style of developing is a good fit.
Honestly I know it’s a big number but I wish I had spent more. The ads were profitable and I missed an opportunity to expand my audience further. But these are all lessons to make me better :)
Oof sad to find out I missed out on the kickstarter! I know others have said it but def not enough promotion on yt. I see now the last video mentioned it in the middle, but tbh I did skip that last video. The devlogs have been the mainline content, so if anything I would have done the announcement inside one of these instead of a side video. Devlog 8 mentions it will be coming, and devlog 9 says it's over, so I bet a bunch of people are confused. I know some community posts were made, but I (and seemingly a bunch of others) don't see these in my feed often. best way to reach your core audience is probably through your core content. Doesn't hurt to do the rest (and I'm glad it was still enough!), but definitely wouldn't skip a plug in the devlogs for future projects. Also would love to see more of the alpha footage and your thoughts watching it. As a game dev or engineer it's so much fun (and/or painful lol, I've def experienced both) to watch people interact with what you've built. Love that kind of content.
![How Much Money My Game Raised On Kickstarter [Devlog 9]](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
