How I raised $24,000 on Kickstarter (for a text adventure) | Hacker News Reader

How I raised $24,000 on Kickstarter (for a text adventure)

money.cnn.com

38 pointsido25 comments

Trivia: total donations came to $31,337, exactly.

New interview of the author: http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/intervi...

Great link, although 24K doesn't seem like much for a lifetimes work! I look forward to playing some of the games. The teaser reminded me of Infocom's Hitchhikers Guide for some reason...

He eventually raised 31k, and this is just for the development of Hadean Lands - which he will also be selling on the app store once completed.

So the sum is more like bootstrapping the monetization of a lifetimes work by financing the first project!

Yes, I can see it going somewhere now with the growth of mobile devices. I love the old text adventures. Retrotastic.

If you haven't yet, check out inform7.com. It's a free system for developing text adventures, with a sweet GUI IDE (cross platform Win/Mac/Gnome) and a language that's similar to English yet has interesting support for relationships between game items. (ie, you can define a relationship of 'loathing' between characters that influences reactions.)

It can compile to the same format as the old Infocom games, or to glulx, a new format by Andrew Plotkin (the guy this thread is about) that allows for bigger games.

Thanks, I'm looking!

This makes me happy. I loved Zork, and I don't see why text adventures need to be outdated. I would love to boot one up on my Kindle.

On that note, I can't see why anything fun should be declared 'dead'. There is something a MUD can offer that WOW cannot.

Wow. This is the same zarf of "Zarf's List of Interactive Games on the Web" circa early '90s.

http://www.eblong.com/zarf/zarfs-list.html

Nice to see this guy is still doing big things. I'm sure some of you must recognize him by that page as well.

(reference: His kickstarter profile @ http://www.kickstarter.com/profile/zarf shows website eblong.com which hosts the legacy "Zarf's List")

The money quote:

> First, spend 15 years working hard on projects with no reward but community goodwill.

Instant success takes 10 years of work.

It sounds as if he had already built up a reputation within a certain community, and is now just capitalising on that. Without that reputational factor, he probably wouldn't have been able to raise much funds.

Yep.

"Without running every day, he probably wouldn't have been able to run that marathon."

We love instant success stories, but the reality is, you have to prepare and be ready to seize your moment when it comes.

This is exactly the answer to the question I posed today:

What is the key to success? Show up and do it.

http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/what-is-the-key-to-succes...

Those tips are sort of less helpful to some people when it's already hard to get past step one: getting your project accepted at kickstarter.

It wasn't that hard for me. I had a creative project. I had a plan and a reason for seeking funding upfront. I had something to give to those that funded me.

That seems to be the only real requirements.

Of course, I only got $25 pledge towards my $4,000 goal. So it must not of been that good of an idea.

Would love to know what your idea was. Care to elaborate?

Glad that you got a chance.

I pitched, they gave reasons why they rejected me, I gave projects they supported that rebutted their reasons, they shrugged.

So it must not of been that good of an idea.

How did you market it?

There's a bunch of technical details in the Kickstarter updates, if you're into that kind of thing :-) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zarf/hadean-lands-inter... they're labeled "The Techy Post, Part n of 4"

WTF? Man, the Internet does not cease to amaze me at times... Eh, good luck!

You could try reading the guy's bio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Plotkin

Or even the article -

But I guess everybody who succeeds on Kickstarter has to answer this question.

How did I do it, really? First, spend 15 years working hard on projects with no reward but community goodwill.

That is the correct answer on a LOT of "How do you do it"s, actually. Sometimes there are alternatives, but you cannot beat a longtime community involvement if you want your voice to be heard...

The total now is $31,337, no joke.

Seeing this I have some faith that my latest lark might get some attention (not money attention, but people attention). I am going to work on a hand held text adventure play thing. Going to post the schematics on the web, I could use an aruduino but that would overshoot my small (very very small) budget. Lets see where this goes.

Please check out the Ben Nanonote -- this is just the sort of thing that it might be good for. I know that some kind of inform interpreter has been ported for it, but a nice little adventure client could be very spiffy!

Project page: http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote

Sales site: http://sharism.cc/ (You can also use ThinkGeek, I believe.)

I have one of these things with the latest firmware (OpenWRT linux with some modifications). It is an incredibly cool device. You actually have a keyboard that has all the stuff you need for programming (or general unixy/emaily things), a pretty nice colour display and a reasonable amount of horsepower. I like to think of it as an SGI Indy that I can put in a pocket...

Thanks for the pointer, but no this is not what I am thinking. This project is supposed to be a intermediate level electronics project. This is most probably going to have a black and white screen and an avr controller of some sort. I chose IF to implement on this because I love solving little text adventures.

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