It’s Over!

After 30 days of content creation, promotion, answering hundreds of emails, interviewing, bugfixing and writing, our Kickstarter project has come to an end. It’s been a long and bumpy road, but ultimately, we were successful! I can not thank each and every one of you enough for your support, comments, criticism, and encouragement.

The grand total: $45,783. Just shy of the $50,000 Adventure Mode stretch goal, but hitting every other stretch goal along the way.

We also got about $400 from the Paypal account we set up. For people who missed our deadline, we will have the Paypal running until Friday of next week (August 30th), where you can get many of the same rewards for $5 extra (sorry about the expense. Doing business using Paypal can be quite risky to us as a company).

What Happens Next?

The Funds

Kickstarter will take a few days to process the credit card information of each backer. After that, Kickstarter and Amazon will take about 10% of the funding. That means, assuming everything goes to plan, we will ultimately get about $41,204.70. Right now, we have about $39k of confirmed payments (including the $10k payment from our Benefactor).

The first thing we will do with this money is pay off our contractors who helped us get the Kickstarter up and running. After that, we will begin purchasing and shipping rewards.

The Rewards

Every backer will receive a survey asking you a few questions about rewards. For tiers which require physical items to be shipped, we will be asking for your shipping address. For creative tiers, we will give you the ability to submit your creations. There will also be options for postcard types and T-shirt sizes.

Some of these rewards will be available very soon. Physical CDs of the game and OST will not be shipped until the Alpha period has arrived. CDs will contain Alpha builds of the game for the operating system of your choice.

Digital Distribution

Between now and October, we will be exploring our options on how best to distribute copies of the Pre-Alpha, Alpha, Beta and other digital rewards. We will likely be distributing through multiple platforms. All backers who are entitled to digital rewards will receive keys to all sources. You can then choose to use the keys to download builds of the game in the way you find easiest (or just give them to your friends 😉 ) So if our game is successful on Greenlight, you will receive a Steam key — but will also have access to other distribution sources (and on each supported OS).

Besides Steam, the top candidates for us right now are Desura, The Humble Store,GOG.com, and of course, our own website. We will be talking with representatives of each of these services to try to find the best plan for DwarfCorp.

Development

Most importantly, now that the Kickstarter is over, we can again focus on development. We’re very excited to get started again — this time with fresh new resources at our disposal and a budding community.

We’ll continue to update the Pre-Alpha-Prototype for a while, mostly to improve performance and fix bugs. The Prototype will then be frozen, and will serve as a kind of “demo” of the game. After that, only backers in the $20 and higher tiers will be able to update to the latest build of the game.

I encourage backers to register to our forums, where we will be seeking community feedback, and posting intermittent updates.

Additionally, we will also be looking for new partners and contract work. $45k is nothing to scoff at — but it’s not enough to hire full-time employees or do a huge amount of contracting. For that reason, we may be bringing on more developers as partners in our business to help us lighten the load. At the moment we have no details on the subject, but we will be posting updates about this as we assess the situation and figure out exactly what we need.

Postmortem 

In the near future, I will be writing a very detailed, personal, and honest account of the Kickstarter process. Mostly this will be for other game developers hoping to get funded through Kickstarter, but many of you may find it interesting and enlightening.

That’s all for now!