Kickstarter: How to make a game (class) - Using Unity!

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Hey Game Developers,

Here is the link for the Unity Class on Kickstarter: LINK

Here is the Kickstarter video if you just want to get a sample! See below:

The Coder is Michael Stragey: He helped create Boogerman and has worked on games like Contra DS.
The teacher is named Armando Soto and has worked on games like Mighty Switch Force.
Riverman Media endorses us too! They had Metacritics top 10 mobile game for 2012! See below:

Let me know your thoughts on it when you get a chance. If you dig it, support it!

Thanks,

Armando

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Your video didn’t go in to much detail about your skills. How is your site different from the rest?

How do you take your clients from start to finish? What’s the process? What’s the user interface look like?

I fear that you won’t have a successful kick starter because you aren’t advertising a product. I’m not 100% sure what I’m buying.

Best of luck,

SubZeroGaming

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Hey SubZeroGaming!

Thanks so much for your honest review!

Here is the nuts and bolts version. You are going to get walked through these concepts in the class. In some cases you will get the docs we are making so you can use them as a template. All using Google docs :slight_smile:

The Set Up

  • What you should use to track your project
  • How to create the docs
  • from free solutions to paid :slight_smile:
  • You need tools to make a game, we want to make sure you start off right first!
  • The producer mindset (this is about 20 pages long)
  • What is good gameplay
  • How to do art direction
  • Sound design, as important as everything else! ( should not be an after thought)
  • Go for the funnest, smallest version of you game first: Then build form their (what’s the safety net!)
  • How to know what your game needs: Should have, nice to have, won’t have ( it’s important to know what your game is NOT)
  • etc

Ideation (How to form your idea using)

  • Using Game One Sheet (doc)
  • Executive Overview (1 Page Doc)
  • Treatment (3 pages)
  • Pitch Deck (5 pages)

Proof of Tech (Think of this as a sketch of your game - helping you call out all needs of your vertical slice)

  • How to lay out a Good doc for this ( since this is different than any of the things above)
  • What you should make (should be a product in itself)

Vertical Slice ( think like one piece of pie of a whole pie) (one portion of game from the larger game)

  • What should go into a VS doc
  • What your intention needs to be
  • Who you will need
  • How to lay out a good AI Spec (for objects, npc, enemies, etc)
  • What should the end result look like
  • Retrospective ( gotta do it!)

The Alpha Submission

  • Making sure your GDD is sound
  • How to make a good roll out plan to best help development along
  • basic’s of scheduling
  • Also: how to track your project
  • Thinking about marketing assets ( it’s important)
  • Why having a middle submission is good (usually) called a pre alpha (what should it be - always think a shippable product)
  • Retrospective ( gotta do it!)

The Beta

  • Using what you learned from last submission
  • Planning out your beta
  • Why QA is good
  • Remember the marketing assets
  • Keeping your team focused on victory
  • Getting 100% done

GMC

  • Making sure it works on all intended platforms
  • Tweak (when you should and shouldn’t - but also why it’s needed)
  • Finalizing your marketing
  • Getting your assets ready for submission ( with the App store and Play Store)
  • Do you need a customer service email for your game? ( yes :slight_smile: )

Going Live

  • The importance of a wrap party
  • How to handle feedback like a champ
  • Remember to have fun

All this plus, the Q&A with the students, to help us fill in gaps that we will miss because we are used to making games. The students are probably the most important aspect of this class. Without the students we have no questions, nothing to answer! So hopefully, this will cover a lot of the things the other class’s don’t cover.

Also, we are using Unity! ( Depending on your backer status - you can get the project, programmed by a monster that is proven to submit to Apple)

So that’s the nut shell version of what we are going to cover. This is not a class to learn how to code or do animation. This is a class for people with a vision. People that might have all the ingredients but not know how to put them together.

What do you think? Should this go up on the Kickstarter? I think it should, but it would be great to get your opinion.

Best,

Armando

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I doubt that you will have a successful kickstarter, first off basically (this is only from what I am gathering) this is just another tutorial. What are you going to offer that is not covered in BurgZerg’s Hack&Slash tutorial?

Also you are pricing your product at $25? That seems a little low if you are offering an actual “class”, also with that you will need at least 400 backers pledging $25, or 1000 backers pledging $10.

Also your kickstarter seems to have some conflicting information in it:

and then farther down:

Personally I would consider “putting the components together” as a micro-step. Basically you are telling people “we are going to show your everything! but not teach you everything.”

Overall, what are you offering that isn’t already available through free online tutorial and templates?

Not trying to be a **** here, just trying to get you to think “outside of the box” so to speak.

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Hi Armando,

It certainly seems like you have prepared yourself well. I do like the idea; however, i’m not sure funding is what you need. If you want to start an online educational website such as the walker boys studio, you should do it without the funding. Get a wordpress template and a partner. Post your curriculum, offer free tutorials, and for those who want it, offer an online class where it’s up front and personal. The walker boys studio completed their online school site with 0 funding. You can do the same.

none the less,

I still wish you the best of luck. I support what you are trying todo.

SubZeroGaming

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Hey Johnathan,

Thanks for lending your time on this. You didn’t have too and I appreciate it! We are still working on our online school. With the goal being video tutorials and live help with the things you didn’t understand or things we didn’t cover. It’s a learning process for sure.

I see you have Unity Tutorials too. Maybe we can post them on our site (link to them - no pressure either way about it).

If you have any other questions feel free to reach out!

Very happy about your support!

Stay Creative,

Armando Soto

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Hey Sildaekar!

Thanks for taking your time out to review the videos! We posted a “what’s offered” essentially a lot of the stuff I was talking with SubZeroGaming about in the post above. I have been making games for a while now and have been leading teams for a long time. I am the guy in charge of the game being either on time, under budget or high quality :slight_smile: (usually having to pick two of the three).

And that’s what I want to share with people. How to start and how to finish. In terms of macro steps or micro steps I guess that definition can sound vague for sure. But let me give a glimpse at the spirit of my message. I want to think about it like this: If I was teaching you how to write a GDD. I would walk you through one, show you the sections it “could have” (each game is a different beast) breakdown those sections into what’s needed in them. But I will not hand hold and write it for you. We won’t do things like " Sentence one should be about this, sentence two should be about that!"

From my current and previous experience being clear counts and the less words to explain something correctly the better. I think Albert Einstein said," Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." So the fleshing out of the GDD is up to you. Also the length is up to you. We are just here to provide the framework on how we would handle it. Other studios and dev teams handle things different ways, this is just how we would do it.

Also, this class is not for everyone. From what it sounds like you have everything you need to succeed! It sounds like you are savvy at finding things all over the net to learn from, others might not be so savvy. I want to bring affordable education to everyone and have it under one roof. Having seen how much effort it cost my parents to help my dream come true has changed my life. I want to help others too. The main class is $50 bucks (right now anyway) and I think it can help a lot of people reach their goals and not break the bank.

Let me know if you have any other questions. I do value your time on this!

Be well,

Armando Soto

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Hi Armando,

No problem and of course you may use my videos.

Best of luck,

p.s: Keep us updated with the project.

SubZeroGaming

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Oh, ok. First off let me say that I do apologize if my comment sounded a little harsh (been having an all-around bad week). This sounds interesting, and $50 does sound reasonable, would you care to elaborate on what one would get from the $50 class? Is that going to be everything or will that be “just the basics” with the rest split up into other classes?

Will you cover design theory and story-writting as well? Or is this a simple “here it is” tutorial? What about marketing, public relations, DLCs, in-game billing, etc etc… (ideas for future classes). One thing I believe that you should stress (a lesson hard learned for me) is that making a game for commercial release (the reason many are making games) is a lot more then just “making the game”.

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It’s an interesting idea, but here are a few observations:

There are already online courses that teach you A-Z of game development, such as Digital Tutors, where they teach you programming, texturing, animation, Unity game development, UI design, 2d artwork, etc. So, for that $50, what do you do that’s different? Nothing immediately jumped out at me that would set you apart from Digital Tutors or 3D Buzz.They both connect the entire game development pipeline, and do so for 2d and 3d games, using all of the most common game development tools.

Also, you use “your game” in generic terms, but all your examples are 2d games designed for a mobile device. This is critically misleading, in my opinion, as you are telling your customer that you will help them make “their game”, which may be a 3d game with little or no resemblance to yours. I would suggest making certain that all the readers know from the very beginning that it’s your 2d game that you are demonstrating, and not the game they envision.

Finally, I agree with the above posters. Having money always makes things a bit easier, but people can already pay a nominal fee for the services you offer from existing websites with tons of content. It’s far easier to charge for something when people can examine the merchandise so to speak. I think you’ll find a kickstarter campaign far more effective if you already have a website with effective classes, and instead try to expand the courses by hiring instructors or commissioning tutorials.

I hope that helps, and good luck!

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Hey S3dition!

Awesome feedback. I actually have checked out digital-tutors. It looks really great. I think places like this are an amazing resource to learn how to use tools. Like Unity, photoshop, etc. Looking in the game design section specifically, I didn’t see anything really covered except how to use tools like UDK, Unity and CryENGINE. All top notch stuff btw.

In terms of 2D or 3D. It is all game design for me. Heck, even 2D is faked now days with it needing to be put onto a poly and displayed for the world to see. Doing this allows you to leverage 3D lighting, funs stuff like that. I know 3D has many technical hurdles/lighting/etc - but I view game design very bottom up. I don’t usually start with a theme first, I start with gameplay mechanics as a foundation, then I builded a theme on top of it. A First person shorter, in my opinion is simply wack a mole with twisted rules (something pops up on the screen and you hit it! = wack a mole) Since it’s on a TV everything get’s flattened out in the end. I can’t wait for the Star Trek Holodeck! I digress…Take for instance the game we are making, Dynamite Bob. It could still be totally 3D or 2D and be the same game. But I do hear you, this can be confusing and I would for sure make it more clear if I ever tried to launch a Kickstarter again. All that being said, you are totally right. People should super 100% know that I am making my game from beginning to end, showing them my process and helping them with their game too.

I guess I imagined if I took a Steven King (not that I am even close to his status) class on writing and he took me through his writing process showing me how he writes his own book I would learn a ton on how to write my own book. Because I could see how he did it and try it on my own writings. Even though I would probably write something totally different that didn’t involve murder or a cabin in the woods.

Also, I might be wrong but I don’t see very much 1 on 1 mentorship happening on the digital-tutors site. Like I said, you trump me in terms of being an expert on sites like you have mentioned. I look at game development to be more abstract than just tools. Although, knowing how to use tools is 100% needed, it’s game theory, getting the right team of creatives, how to spit ball a design (best practices) that I also want to cover. Subjects like how to manage the team, I have found over the last 13 or so years that connecting with people and making sure you can complete and not compete with them will 100% make a better game. Team work makes the dream work! I have had the privilege of working on titles like: Contra 4, DuckTales Remastered, Jelly Car 2, Mighty Switch Force and Adventure Time - etc. I want to share all that I have with people that want to learn. I guess if this was connect the dotes I still see dotes missing from the educational pipeline of making games. Just my opinion but everything seems heavily tool oriented online now days. It’s more than just game theory/people/tools - it’s all of it combined.

If I was a better business man I should probably charge more. I was taught as a kid that “You get what you pay for.” Meaning if it’s inexpensive, it probably sucks. I get it. $50 = people no likey! This was an experiment if I could prove that idea wrong (which I am really failing at! - haha). I just wanted to document a game from beginning to end and walk people through the whole process on a simple game, while helping people design/plan resources/plan their team/plan production pieplines/which software to project manage with/how to manage/etc. So they can take baby steps to something bigger and get closer to making the game of their dreams. Game creation is about team work, so you need to be a great team leader and coach to make a game - again, this is only my opinion.

At Disney I had 6 game producers report to me with every problem that came at them for their games (they each had a minimum of 3 titles). I helped clear roadblocks and made sure their games remained on track. The cool thing was that I wanted to do that for folks for this class, and document/record it for everyone to leverage.

Totally going to run with your advice on having people test out the product before purchase! I am making the first part of the class now and will be releasing it on my new website that will be launching in the next few months. Kickstarter taught me a lot. Many questions, many ideas and a lot of fun.

I totally appreciate the observations! They are helping me make something right now that I have not seen online yet and I hope will serve many very well in the future - I will also charge a bit more for it this time around!

Any other questions feel free to reach out. I do appreciate you taking your time to even review my Kickstarter.

Stay well,

Armando Soto

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Hey Sildaekar,

So sorry about the crazy slow response. My password didn’t work for a while so I could not login.

No worries on anything above! I think this is all apart of the journey of putting yourself out there! What I got from it, is that I didn’t sell the class right. In terms of the class I was really hoping that I would cover a lot of it - but the real kicker would have been answering everyones questions. The questions that I can’t think of because maybe something comes natural to me - or heck, maybe it is something I have never run into.

Game making is a team solving problems. Problems are good! We would have all been a team. So yeah, it would cover theory and story. If your game was a 3DS game I would let you know that you need to output left and right versions of a movie if you have video in your game that needs to be on the top screen. Weird stuff, if you needed to know. We would not cover marketing - but as in the TV show Mad Men I think they were quoted as saying " Marketing is the most needed and unneeded profession in the world." From my experience it’s probably just as important as finishing your game. If you make an awesome game and nobody knows about it, it could get buried forever. But I am sure this is obvious to you. I was thinking about having a couple of my rockstar game marketing buddies have a 1 hour Q and A session, which I think everybody will love. But no real formal class on it just yet. But I will add that into it now. Questions like these are helping me shape my class even better.

Yeah, making a game for commercial release proves to be very difficult! I actually did the biz dev for Riverman Media and helped them get Game of the Week on the Apple App store. This was something I never did before, but I pulled it off. It was good times.

On a totally different note…

Did you see that Nintendo is offering indie devs houses dev kits and Unity Pro? Here is the link, sign up and see what happens!: https://wiiu-developers.nintendo.com/sign_up.php

It would take a miracle for my Kickstarter to fund now…but when I do have my class ready I will update this thread for sure.

Stay in touch if you like, here is my linked in: www.linkedin.com/in/directormentor/

Best,

Armando

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