Kickers Corner – DieselStörmers – Update

 

 

You’ll remember DieselStörmers from Kickers Corner back at the beginning of May, described as “a Action run’n’gun, Metal Slug meets Left 4 Dead meets Diablo sort of game”. Well, we’re very pleased to tell you that it tipped over its 100% needed backers mark over on Kickstarter and got funded.

We caught up with Adrian over at Black Forest Games, to congratulate the team and ask him a few questions, seeing how they managed it, did they hit any low moments and what are the next steps.

Vil)   Not only did you hit your 100%, you managed to break it. Firstly, congratulations, and secondly, what do you think was the winning element which drew the backers in, making them want to invest in the game?

Adr)  Actually, ‘breaking it’ is a bit overdrawn, but Thanks! As with most Kickstarter projects nowadays, the second and third weeks were difficult. We also got a backer boost driven by a blogpost about the long story behind Dieselstormers ‘A long bloody walk in metal boots’. And in the final week a lot of backers increased their pledge to get an artbook or a console version of the game. That helped a lot.

Vil)   Was there any moment in the Kickstarter  where you thought that you weren’t going to hit the mark for Dieselstormers? If you did, what did you begin to do in the background to stoke the coals interest?

Adr)  The end of the third week was very difficult. As we already had everything that was possible in our plan we just started to ping all of our personal connections again. And, actually, that worked. Sometimes people need more than one message in their e-mail and message-crowded daily life.

Vil)   When you set out to release Dieselstormers to the Kickstarter crowd, did you have a clear plan of what you intended to do and at what stage?  Did this come from previous successes/failures?

Adr) We had some kind of plan, but nothing overly detailed. From our two previous Kickstarters, we learned that having an overly detailed plan is not good. Better stay flexible so you can react to your backers’ feedback. That gives the whole campaign more soul.

Vil)   Is it now all hands on deck getting Dieselstormers released by Black Forest Games or is there another project on the horizon whilst another team (@BFG) continues with Dieselstormers?

Adr)  Currently, almost everyone is on Dieselstormers. There is another project ‘on the horizon’. We do have some basics, but  not much. By the way, it’s a project the Kickstarter community would go crazy about, I bet 😉

Vil)    Do you think Kickstarter and other public-funding sites like it are the future for independent game producers across the globe?

Adr)  The issue with crowdfunding today is that you are not really able to fund relevant parts of your development costs. For most game developers that feed a team, either it’s testing the market, doing pre-sales or just marketing. But there is a lot of potential and things will change. For some titles, crowdfunding will work, like for Star Citizen.

 

We should be catching up with Black Forest Games in a month or two to see where they are up to with DieselStörmers. Hopefully we’ll have some nice pretty new things to look at.