Possible Kickstarter?

Hey guys. I'm a new player that has been playing zero k for a couple months, and I'm extremely impressed with it; it blew away my previous favorite RTS, Supreme Commander. It's unique, reasonably balanced for the most part, and offers much more strategic variety than most of the games in the genre. The main thing I've been kind of disappointed in, though, is the size of the player base and the lack of visibility: to find this game I looked up "RTS games like Total Annihilation", found an obscure article on an even more obscure website which mentioned Spring, and then sifted through spring games until i found Zero-k. I was thrilled when I saw that the game had been greenlit on steam, as a result; what better way to give a free game visibility?
I've been watching the progress on the game, and although the main contributors (Google, Licho and the rest of the dedicated programmers) are doing an excellent job, it's been going rather slowly, which is to be expected from people who have jobs besides working on the game. I don't think the game will be done for another year or two at this rate, and every year the graphics are going to get more outdated and it's going to be harder to attract new players. What I'm curious about is if it would be possible to start a kickstarter to get some money to hire someone who would do things such as clean up the lobby UI and do other various things that don't require in depth knowledge of the game, but are still essential for the steam release. It would help speed things up a bit and give the game a more professional sheen that could retain newer players a bit more easily. I don't know a lot about coding, so i'm not sure if this is possible (ie the language for coding the lobby is not well known, or even how expensive doing something like this is), but i figured I'd ask if this was feasible.

no ty. staff is cencerous enough.

I think that kickstarter campaign would have very low chance to succeed. We don't have good dedicated artists to make awesome videos, pictures etc and game like this is a hard sell.

Also to hire an external coder for a year or so would cost tens of thousands..

Imo it's worth a try if it does not demand lots of extra work from existing devs which can be focused on actually improving the game.

The game is "Done", it's been "Done" for years. We just only have one shot at a steam release, so we want the game to have a really good new player experience, a nice looking lobby, a smooth download, install and first play experience. We got in a germany gaming mag, chip.de, some years ago and had this massive influx of players, but we were not prepared, most of them only booted the game up once, many left because we didn't have enough german veterans to instruct them, many didn't even get past their first game. Given the workload of just maintaining the game, getting that stuff done has taken a long time given none of it is really required for actually playing the game. The skills needed are also only possessed by a small portion of the developer base (Mostly Licho): I've not been an active dev for a long time partly due to uni and life but partly because my skillset is prettymuch useless at this point for doing anything except maybe creating singleplayer content. I designed a lot of the game and made a lot of the units and models, but that work is all done now.

We could definitely do something better than just maintaining the servers with the money we get, even the stuff we get through donations, personally I'd like to just throw money at Licho so he can work on Zero-K more. He needs to be willing of course. Whether we pay them or not though, many new developers who come to contribute take more time to train up than the usefulness of the work they do. Maybe this would change with money incentives, but given the years of effort put into this game by the current devs anyone hired would have to be pretty hardworking and impressive to be worth it.

In the end, Steam and Kickstarter are basically the same. They're ways to 'sell your product', only Kickstarter you sell it before it exists. Ours already exists and we aren't looking for money. So they're ways to put your name out there, but the attention you get through either are often merely a slight amplifying effect to your current PR machine (We don't have a PR machine). There are dozens of games like us toiling in obscurity, most you log in and the servers are dead. Nothing is sadder. We've actually managed to keep a playerbase alive for years and I'm actually pretty proud of that.

You want to help, help throw some attention our way. Any gaming communities (You said you played supcom?) or forums or sites you're a member of? Post about us. The way you would about any new game you've discovered, not some obnoxious PR exercise. Get your friends to play. Where would you go to find out about a game like us? What sites or blogs or streamers would you look at that you'd expect to find us? Tell them about us.

Frankly after years of doing this I'm not sure how to break into mainstream attention. I would have thought that after producing so much content on YouTube (Shadowfury mostly, but many others) we'd get somewhere, but all the related videos to Shadowfury's VOD's are hilariously unrelated things based on the usernames of those playing (ElTorero's games get bull fighting, Kshatriya's games get videos in Hindi, games on the map "Iced Coffee" get "How to make Israeli Iced Coffee"). If we just managed to get featured by one of the old Starcraft 2 streamers (Who are mostly bored of SC2 at this point) or even Supcom or PA streamers, such we'd get a huge number of RTS veterans (Or, better yet, if Shadowfury suddenly exploded in popularity, he deserves it). We have to snowball our way up to that, but we need to be ready.

Sprung cannot into popularity.

Wow, Sakoth, that's a bummer. It would've been great if those players had stuck around. I agree with you that the main things this game needs to have at the very least a semi-successful release is a nicer, more intuitive lobby and a working download.

As for telling people about the game...the same thing happens with that German group: people are quickly turned off by the game because the lobby is hard to understand at first, and there's not much of a guide to get started (showing them where the tutorials and bot 1v1 is, introducing them to commander upgrades, ect). There are actually a couple threads on the SupCom forum where people brought up zero K, and it always got shot down as an unpolished look-alike. This obviously isn't true, and shows that they weren't able to get a good first impression and ditched the game quickly. I even saw on a different thread that someone introduced ZLO, a popular Russian SupCom player, to the game, but he didn't like it much because the lobby was confusing.

Since first impressions are always the most important, I don't think spreading the word would be the best until there is a better lobby UI and maybe even a tutorial. When those are finished, I would highly suggest asking the streamer BRNKoINSANITY if he would mind taking a look at the game. He consistently gets 1000-2000 views on all his SupCom streams, which sounds small but would certainly expose a number of RTS enthusiasts to this game (not to mention the SupCom playerbase is only around 2500 players). Even getting 50 of those people to keep playing the game would be a huge success for Zero-K. Like I said before, though, the game really shouldn't be put out there until the lobby makes sense and is more welcoming to new players, because that will allow this game to benefit the most from advertisements of this sort.

quote: the n1 thing that should be handled RIGHT NOW is newbs experience - Firepluk

Supcom's multiplayer server "FAF" is mostly successful because it allowed people who already owned a well funded and advertised game to play with other people. As a result, it doesn't have and doesn't really require a gameplay tutorial (heck, there's one built into the main game already). However, the lobby is for the most part extremely noob friendly and easy to navigate. There are a number of minimalist tabs at the bottom, each with a different category: chat, find games, maps, rankings, ect. Find games includes a simple "click to play" matchmaking button, and a list of game types you can host, each with a description of what they are and how they play. There are a bunch of "new players please" games open at any given time, which means that having such a simple setup makes it easy for newbies to find their way around.

I think something zero k could take from all this would be to make the bot hosted games (which I didn't understand at all until a few weeks of playing) as separate from custom games by having a simple dividing line of sorts and a title over each section: Public matches, custom matches, ongoing matches, each with a little rollover text description if possible (none of the faf players, including me, seemed to understand what the bot hosted matches were). Another thing zero k's lobby needs is to make the home tab simply a link to the zero k site. Commanders need their own tab, because the current setup is extremely confusing and cluttered. Having a separate tab with "your profile", followed by "your commanders" (possibly with a very large "edit load out" label on each module) and the upgrades directly below them would very nice. Having a little tutorial text at the top, like "here you can view your rankings and create custom commander load outs" would do wonders for newbies. All in all, the game just needs some transparency.

Like FunWithGuns, I've been playing (and still am playing) FAF before discovering zero-k. For me this discovery was more recent though: 4 days ago.

I concur that the lobby experience is rather confusing at present, and that this is an important thing for new players. Personally I found it very confusion on how to host a game, how to pick a map, and then how to get back to the place where I'm hosting the game after navigating away. Having this be in the same list as the chat is not intuitive at all.

What about allowing people to put some more stuff on their profile, and making it easier to view who your friends are, etc? While that is not about the game at all, I suspect it makes a big difference when trying to grow a community. At some point I was looking for a way to mention my FAF username on my profile, and was disappointed this was not possible.

Saktoth suggested the core demographic for Zero-k is mainly SupCom and PA players. For those people, it's probably nice to make clear that (a) this game has the features that make those games awesome and (b) what additional things Zero-k provides. At least for me this would have been interesting. One thing that I noticed is that the list of prominent features on the homepage here somehow seems less impressive than on the FAF site, which is probably because of wording and certain things not being listed at all.

One bright note: the game experience for me went rather smoothly. The very first game crashed on start, but worked well directly after. This was actually a nice demonstration of the rejoin feature :) Since then I only had a single crash, in 20 games or so. On Linux I cannot get the game running (lobby works), though I suspect this is not the games fault, as a good portion of games don't want to run on my Linux for some reason.

While some people have already noted they think money is not the problem, I'd like to add an additional caution to providing monetary incentives for development. There is a risk of discouraging existing contributors. If someone has been putting their effort and free time into a project for years for free, then it's not that hard to see how paying someone for doing a small part of what they did can discourage them or otherwise send the wrong message. While you can pay them as well, this adds the risk of actually making money the primary incentive for them to contribute, and then when you take the money away, they will stop contributing.

PS: how do I post images or quote lines?

quote: However, the lobby is for the most part extremely noob friendly and easy to navigate.

Fun fact: FAF lobby design was based on ZKL...
Though I gotta agree it does look nicer and is easier to navigate.
+ ZKL has these awful browser elements.

quote: PS: how do I post images or quote lines?

Another thing that needs resolving. Any "modern forums" (from this century) have easy to access formatting tools.
Here is this point again: while Zero-K itself is ready and has been ready for a couple of years now, the infrastructure is still dead in the water. There is only one person working on it and as witnessed that is not nearly enough.

quote: I designed a lot of the game and made a lot of the units and models, but that work is all done now.

Except that jumpjets are still not coherent, sea combat is dull and all bombers (besides thunderbird) are quite silly.
In addition to that there are some really old models that need remaking: flea, crabe, hunter, strikecom and so on.