Thinking of Kickstarter? Check out Warballoon's brave breakdown of where the money goes first.

Update #19: What the hell did you do with our money?

Posted on April 15

 

In honor of tax day, we thought we would give some insight to our backers (as well as potential kickstarters) to how we spent the funds we were given at the end of September. Hopefully it sheds some light on why money disappears so quickly for game development.

Our kickstarter earned $36,967 after asking for $20,000 so that was incredible.

To begin with, we didn't get all of that. We lost about $2,000 to no-shows, just people that pledged and the funds did not transfer.

That got us down to $35k, and kickstarter and Amazon Payments take their portions, which got us down to right around $32,000.

Now, right off the top you had $10,000 for prize fulfillment. That includes printing the posters, the shirts and shipping everything (thanks Australia). If we had to do it again, we would have probably had the price point a bit higher for the t-shirts and posters, as those turned to be a very large expense. We also would have included the cost of a 3rd party fulfillment house - we just aren't equipped or skilled in that area, and it was (still is) something that we struggle with.

After that, we had $22,000 remaining. From there:

Music - $6,000
Attorneys, startup fees, CPA - $4000
Poster art - $2000
iPads - $1000
PAX East - $3000

TOTAL: $16,000


Leaving us with around $6000, which is income, so that was taxed (piece of advice to other kickstarters - spend that money before the end of the year).

So were right around $4000 remaining and even that cursory math isn't working as there are other things that weren't big tickets but sapped the coffers. There's odds and ends etc, so that goes rather quickly as you can imagine.

What would we do different? Keep the attorneys out of it. We got a little nervous after we recieved all the Kickstarter money and wanted to make sure our business was set up correctly. We registered our LLC's, got operating agreements etc, but in hindsight a nice piece of napkin paper probably would have done just as well. You plan for the worst (we all start hating each other and people start leaving) but if anything the team has gotten closer, so it seems like a lot of wasted money. If we could take it back we would. Maybe we will get another attorney and sue them.....wait.....

Rewards are something to watch out for as well. We just didn't fully appreciate the cost of printing 200 posters, shirts, and more than anything shipping. Shipping is a) expensive b) a pain in the ass when you have tubes and c) time consuming. None of those things are productive. We don't resent having sent that stuff off - we think the posters and shirts are awesome and we are super proud of them and it seems like everyone loved them, so thats great. But they were a lot of work.

So that gets us to the present. We have still taken a lot of debt on ourselves (over $50k), and hopefully this can help give insight to other kickstarters and would-be-developers on what to expect. We promise to keep this stuff open as possible and if you have questions, or feel like telling giving us a piece of your mind for the way we spent the money, hey, we're all ears.

Tell us your thoughts.

All that said though, its been great and the game would not be where it is if it wasn't for kickstarter. We're extremely confident were going to hit our summer release date and that never would have happened without you guys. We have made a game we're really, really proud of and you guys should be too. We have always felt an obligation to make your investment worth it, and hopefully we dont disappoint.

Cheers,
The Warballoon Team

 

via kickstarter.com

I don't know anything about this game, but it's very brave of them to post the more or less exact breakdown of what happened to their cash.

Guild Wars: Sleekly Seksy Sins of DOOM!

While reading this here post, I came to the realisation that very few games I've played allow for the kind of sexy Kate Beckinsale has in Underworld - you know, all sleek and black and covered and reeking of dangerbyooty. In fact, the only game that came to mind that let me come anywhere close to an approximation of that look is Guild Wars, with their girly sins.

Best part is, two pieces of this set are starter armor models, two are non-elite, and only the boots are elite. (Elite = expensive.)

The guy beside my blondie is Unknown Sin Who Happened To Be Standing There, and my girlfriend is Suicide Granny.

Guild Wars 2 Beta: Either don't play a charr, or wait for the actual release

Incredibly beautiful world. Unfortunately, its beauty is matched by its lagginess and confusingness (lol is that even a word) and bugginess.

Especially for the charr personal story, things are so ridiculously easy up to the arena bit, the leadins of which are ridiculously easy... then the siege devourer appears. That + lagging at least 3-5 seconds on all my skills in there, not to mention moving, makes the fight impossible. Not sure what's happening there, I don't lag THAT badly anywhere else.

When I managed to finally beat it on a fluke, I couldn't figure out how on earth to get OUT of the arena, so in desperation I teleported out.

WHOOPS! Now I have to do the fight AGAIN, everything I did has been reset.

._.

Also keep getting errors when trying to log into my existing charr, and when trying to create new characters. I have no idea whether that's because we're only allowed one character in beta, since the error messages certainly don't say *that*. So I'm left trying to log in over and over, and then seeing errors over and over.

And the LAG! Not even just on skills, MOVING seems so slow compared to GW. Not to mention the zoom. WTB MOAR ZOOM PLZ. Zoom feels like I'm stuck in a closeup. >.<

Contrast this to how amazingly smooth the intro is for a newbie in Prophecies, and how you can zoom way back to get some proper perspective.

I'm probably not touching GW2 again until the actual release. The beta can go hang.

Unhappy nugget is unhappy.

Added:
So I went and tried a human necromancer after it stopped bugging out... Uh... okay the Charr setting is gorgeous. The human one is just blah, on top of all the other problems.

The human area actually left me convinced that GW is more beautiful than GW2. The charr area at least really impressed me in terms of looks.

...I feel like someone who got engaged to this gorgeous all-round wonderful (by general repute) girly, even though there were some niggling misgivings, and who decided to BE OPTIMISTIC. And then this morning I had me a little grope and... AAAA THERE ARE TEETH WHERE TEETH SHOULD NOT BEEEEE.

._. Here's to hoping launch day doesn't make me feel the same way.

Pan-fried miso-marinated steak with onions, salted fermented soybeans, and strawberries

DA TASTIES!!!!

Zomg this is absolutely lovely. Particularly because I have trouble getting steaks as rare as I like in most restaurants. They look at me and insist on hearing 'well-done' when I say, 'rare', which results in my having to start repeating, 'BLOOD, I want BLOOD.' The blood trick gets me rare steaks, but also very strange looks.

But nao, nao I can cook my OWN! Mooohahahaha.

Steaky Goodness Requires
Miso - enough to liberally coat and massage into your steak bits
Cooking wine - I use Chinese plum wine
Onions - enough to cover 2/3 of your pan after slicing
Salted fermented soybeans - roughly 1/6th of the amount of onions you use
Steak! Any sort, after the 24-hour miso marination it'll be juicy and tender
Strawberries - enough to arrange prettily around the plate
Ghee - dollops for frying

Side Dish
Sweet corncob - 1 per person
Ghee -  to taste
Salt - to taste

Marinade da Steak

  1. Slice steak into 1.5 inch thick bits
  2. Massage with miso till steak is coated and happy
  3. Plop in a soup dish
  4. Pour plum wine over the lot till the bottom of the dish is covered
  5. Cover dish with aluminium foil, toss in fridge
  6. Ignore for 24 hours

Make da Steak

  1. Dollop ghee into frying pan, use more than you think you'll need
  2. Wait till ghee does a kinda nice streaky thing when you tilt the pan
  3. Scrape miso off steak bits with spatula (if you have paper towels you can blot with those, I am too primitive a cook to have them)
  4. Plop in pan, steak bits should sizzle nicely but not attempt to kill you via oil splattering
  5. If steak attempts to murder you with oil splatters, turn heat down until it stops doing that XD
  6. Cook to the doneness you like
  7. Put on plate to let it rest

Make da Tasty Soybean Onions

  1. Mix sliced onions and soybeans into your leftover miso and plum wine marinade
  2. Pour the whole lot into the pan of tasty leftover cow-juice and ghee
  3. Cook until onions are nicely caramelised with just a hint of bite

Make da Silly Corn

  1. Violently yank corn leaves and silk off corn, cackling all the while
  2. Pour a mug of water into rice cooker
  3. Put (empty) bowl in rice cooker
  4. Balance corn on empty bowl
  5. Close, hit cook, ignore till it beeps

 

Serve da Tasties

  1. Move steak bits to new plate, so their juicies don't bleed all over and offend your eyes - and so kittehs can lick the resting plate
  2. Cover with tasty soybean onions
  3. Slice strawberries and arrange around steak bits
  4. Steal corn from rice cooker
  5. Dollop ghee on corn
  6. Sprinkle salt on corn


EAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT! YAY! EAT! EAT! EAT!

Particularly try eating strawberries with steak AND onion and soybeans all in one mouthful. O.O It is surprisingly wonderful - the strawberries sit on top of everything like a sweet fruity melody, and the rest is just amazingly umami.

RedAnt on how Clicktale doesn't quite tell the whole tale.

This Clicktale review is completely independent – we’ve used it on several projects where we wanted to better understand user interactions. We’ve had a chance to look at both the way it collects data and how it reports this information. We’ve also had the opportunity to compare the results against other other software tracking tools, as well as other approaches to the same task such as physical eye tracking. We started using Clicktale based on many of the positive reviews we’d read, but on further investigation many of these were paid reviews (via affiliate commission).

Clicktale is a software tool which allows you to track what users are doing on your website. It is used to analyse how people behave and what they do on particular pages. We’ve used it on several projects to try to gain a better understanding of how users were travelling through the site. More specifically, we were trying to get a better understanding of how they were using particular pages & forms, and what steps we could take to improve our conversion rate.

To summarise our experience, we were quite disappointed with the results. The Clicktale reports seem to illustrate certain behaviours and user problems, but after some investigation we realised these weren’t problems.

Users were in fact behaving differently to what this tool was describing.

We wasted a lot of time investigating issues that we couldn’t reproduce, and worrying about defects which weren’t there.

Our problem was that we realised that some of the Clicktale data was wrong… but the trouble was we didn’t know which bit.

Using Clicktale is not like looking over their shoulder. Clicktale records mouse position every second or so and keyboard strokes. Then, in a separate process, a Clicktale bot visits your site and takes a screenshot of that page. The actual playback is an animation of this screenshot and an image of a mouse cursor moving over the top of it. Similarly the heatmap uses this screenshot.

There are a few problems with this approach, but the primary one is that the screen that you’re seeing in the playback can be quite different to the one that your user just saw.

via redant.com.au

We've been using Clicktale too... This kinda explains some of our results. ._.