News

I’ve been working on a new version of the main funding chart for a few months now primarily to get rid of the focus on trends as a lot of folks don’t understand what they mean and how they should be used.

One of the variations of a chart I’ve been toying with, I lovingly dubbed the “envelope”. The TL;DR of this chart is that it takes all successful projects, normalizes them so we can use them on a day-to-day scale, then applies them to the current goal of the project and gives a dot for the beginning of each day of those projects with the goal to be above that dot before you end the day. I’ll cover it in more detail once it goes live as I’m still tweaking.

The reason I started working on the envelope chart was something I observed when folks were using the mini chart and would get discouraged after the first 1/3 of their campaign when the day-to-day started falling below the linear trend for success even though they were doing fine overall and their movement followed the normal swoop of campaigns. Here’s why.

If I showed you this chart, what would you think?

For those who aren’t familiar, how do you easily describe at a glance “yeah, even successful campaigns have this swoopy thing that happens in the middle and it kind of looks like this…” <insert inadvertent inappropriate gestures>. But in all seriousness, I wanted a clear at-a-glance “how do we compare” kind of chart.

Now, what if I showed you this new chart that showed the average daily growth of most successful projects (grey dots) and the funding line above them (blue dots). Now what would you think?

This is the issue I’ve struggled with and didn’t have a good way to describe it until now. Here they are (visually) together:

Notice the gap between the top of the linear trend (red) and the top of the grey line even in the first week, even how it continues to spread until the last 3-4 days where it slowly creeps back together a little. This is why using linear trends to project the likelihood of funding is bad. I’ve said it a thousand times, trends are NOT projections. The best use for the trend chart is to judge momentum over time which is why the updated trend-specific chart has the day-to-day movement.

My goal in using the trend chart initially was to give projects a tool to encourage backers to reach daily manageable goals and have some tool that broke it down day to day instead of shooting for a large unobtainable number, and while I’ve heard wonderful feedback that it’s helped folks – at the same time I’ve gotten frustrated comments from folks who think it’s a bad thing too because people who don’t know any better assume it’s a projection of the final outcome.

As much as I’ve tried to educate to the contrary, it’s done little to change the perception as people keep tweeting the trend # as a projection nearly every day. It feels impossible educating folks to the contrary, so I’ve decided to just stop using the trending number front-and-center all together because people continue to assume regardless – and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The only thing I’m struggling with at the moment is (a) is the grey line descriptive enough on it’s own without being confusing and (b) what would people like to see in the upper right hand corner for the summary? Funding Percentage? Days left? Distance from success average? Let me know in the comments.

Oh, and the project above funded masterfully. Well done Michael Brown & team:

Hey, I didn’t forget you were here. And after two conventions and a personal move, I’m back and coding like crazy.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been quietly adding new features to the site over the past couple of weeks, like…

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I’ve received lots of suggestions on what folks would like to see in their mini-charts, so I’ve made some of those changes which you should see in your mini-charts Today! Here’s a few of the more visual pieces explained:

… and as always, if you have any questions or concerns, just let me know!

Tonight I was excited to wrap up a little embed-able mini-chart project I’ve been toying with, so I thought I’d share it with everyone. The motivating idea was that it would be a smaller chart that you can embed on your project page, homepage, forums, blog posts, etc. It updates automatically, just like the big charts on the Kicktraq project pages do, and has some nifty stats for backers to get excited about with their projects.

First, the new chart is a nice consolidated view of the larger daily progress chart. It shows the last 10 days of activity along with a progress bar of the total funding level. In addition, backers and project owners can now see what is required each day over the life of the project to reach successful funding. The chart calculates the remaining balance to fund, what’s needed each day to meet that goal, displays the current total for the day, and finally if it’s been met for that day.

This gives project owners a great tool to encourage backers to help them meet a manageable daily goal instead of the entire total. It also allows project backers a way to measure the success of their efforts, as well as a tool to share with others about how projects they care about are doing.

Here are a few live samples of the new chart:

The Bad:

The bad news, it looks like from some preliminary research, Kickstarter doesn’t allow you to use externally referenced images in your projects any longer. What their editing tool does when you select an image to use in your “Story” page, is upload a copy of it to their Amazon S3 instance and link to that version inside your editing window instead of using your external reference. I can only assume “update” pages are the same, but I don’t have a way of testing this. Unfortunately I had no idea this had changed since the last time I helped a project owner with their project, so I never noticed it until one of the initial testers brought it to my attention tonight.

Given my experience with seeing huge improvements in response times lately both with the old layout and further with the new layout, my only conclusion is that they are trying to make load times of project pages as fast as possible. The easiest way to ensure speedy delivery is to ensure all the assets on the page are loaded from their crazy-fast amazon S3 instance – in essence using it as a CDN.

This poses a problem, as the embed-able chart can’t be used with this new architecture, as it just uploads a snapshot of your chart to the CDN and the data never changes unless you manually “upload” a new version. That’s just not feasible.

So, I suppose the real question is, is this a feature project owners are interested in for their project pages, or am I just spinning my wheels? I’m happy to chat with Kickstarter about it, but not unless it something that folks want for their projects. It could be as simple as Kickstarter adding a checkbox on the upload page, defaulted to off, that said something like “use external image reference” or the like. I’m not sure if they’ll be open to this, but I’m happy to take the time to ask.

It’s really up to you, just let me know via the comments below, and I can do the rest.

Kickstarter updated the project pages today, which look awesome. However, we had no clue, and we’re totally broken mostly fixed now.

However, here’s the state of things…

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Living in Columbus, Ohio and being a board game fanatic, a trip to Origins Game Fair is an absolute must every year. This year was a little different for me since not only was I there to check out the latest in board game hotness, but also to meet some of the makers of games I’ve been a backer of for almost a year. On a whim I hit up one of our Columbus-area embroiderers, got some Kicktraq shirts made up, and hopped on my bike to head downtown. With Kicktraq being brand new I wasn’t sure what kind of trouble I might get myself into, but I was sure I would be buying new games. It went better than I expected being recognized and hearing lots of “Hey! Are you the Kicktraq guy?” all weekend long.

Lucky for me I brought along some saddle bags since I left with a load of new games as well as pictures from both recently-closed, soon-to-close Kickstarter projects, and more. Apologies to all the active projects that closed recently given the ill-timing of my visit to Origins and my limited-connectivity 2-week vacation soon after. I really wanted to feature as many active projects as I could, but the timing was terrible.

Without further adieu…

Disaster Looms!

We met with the folks at Break From Reality Games where we got a preview of their new game, Disaster Looms! Research! Explore! Colonize! Survive! Collect Income. Oh yeah, and save the planet if it is profitable.

I was happy to hear how excited they were that their game funded right before Origins – and got a sneak peek at some of the ships they’ve already shared in their recent updates. What I really enjoy is that some of their ships are of an atypical design in that the “cityscape” juts out of the side of the craft like giant skyscrapers, you know, because gravity doesn’t matter in space. Now that’s a neat touch!

     

Disaster Looms! closes in a couple days and is currently at 175% of their goal.

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Goblins Drool, Fairies Rule!

As an amateur rhymer (I get myself in trouble a lot), I really loved getting to play Goblins Drool, Faires Rule! – A card game of rhyme and reason for kids of all ages - by Springboard… Powered by Game Salute. I grabbed this for a fun family game for us, and can’t wait to play it on our family game nights. Goblins is also on Kickstarter, trending well above their goal at 524% with about 8 hours left for backers to get in on the action.

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Tentacle Bento

One of our favorite non-Kickstarter games, Tentacle Bento by The Soda Pop Girls was also on-hand to demo their game. Originally a Kickstarter, this game was slated to fund but canceled (presumably due to its risquè nature). Each game puts you in the enviable position of being a horrid, tentacle flailing, slime oozing monster from outer space, cleverly disguised (of course) as an adorable, and newly enrolled student at Takoashi University, an all-girls school nestled in scenic Japan. Cheeky and fast-playing, this game is totally a win for anyone who enjoys anime-style artwork and trick-taking card games. Fully funded on their own site, backers have about 12 more hours to help them work toward their stretch goals.

While I was there, I also demo’ed Super Dungeon Explore, and couldn’t help but nab it and take it home with me.

Impact City Roller Derby

Another Springboard – Game Salute game I really liked was Impact City Roller Derby, the board game that captures all the action of the fastest growing sport in America. Talking with the Impact City folks, they truly have captured the essence of roller derby in a game for those who really love the sport.

What’s neat is that teams can actually have custom play decks using photos from their team to supplement the game, and they get a sizable portion from every sale of the supplemental cards that goes directly to their team.

Here are a few shots of the game board, and some of the bonus pewter figurines offered as upgrades for the game:

   

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At only 89% of their goal with about a week left to go, there’s plenty of time to help their jammer cross the finish line.

Sedition Wars

Then I stopped in and chatted with the super cool guys from CoolMiniOrNot about their latest success story, Sedition Wars: Battle for Alabaster. Much like their last project Zombicide, this Deep Space Horror board game with 50 amazing miniatures from Mike McVey is looking amazing the more and more they add to the overfunding levels.

Here are a few shots of the booth and some of the incredible painted miniatures from the game:

       

At well over 1500% of their funding goal, it’s getting more than interesting to see where they’ll end up.

Legend of the Lost Dutchman / Rise

I caught a glimpse of the giant Rise sets that Crash Games had talked about in their Kickstarter campaign, so I had to go over and play with Michael Coe, who was doing demos of the game. I didn’t get a chance to demo myself as I was chatting up Patrick about their current project.

Legend of the Lost Dutchman by Crash Games is their new treasure-filled adventure game for 2-5 players. Players take on the role of prospectors trying to find the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. Watching some younger kids having a blast playing the game with Patrick was neat, and getting to meet and enjoy some of the great art done by Ian Rosenthaler was awesome. Did I mention I’m a sucker for art?

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With 35 days to go but only 21% of their goal pledged, you explorers out there should definitely take a look at this project.

Dice Hate Me Games

I went around and also chatted up some folks with successful projects to get a sneak peek for myself as I’ve backed most of these, but also to see what else they might have up their sleeves for projects we may see in the future. The first booth was Dice Hate Me Games of VivaJava and Carnival fame. My daughter loves Carnival, and I recently nabbed their new iOS app for Lucky Dice, which came free with Carnival, so we play a lot of their games on kids game night.

I had the opportunity to talk with them about upcoming projects and got to play with the VivaJava components a little. Later that night in the Board Room, we had a chance to watch a a play through during one of the late night demo sessions. After watching, and as a backer, I’m even more antsy for it to show up on my doorstep.

They’re also working on a few fun new games that they might put on Kickstarter in the next year. The one I’m most excited about is Compounded, which is a really neat game based on real chemistry and vetted by actual chemists. Now, before you turn your nose up thinking it’s going to be your standard educational-board-game bore, it’s not at all! The chemistry aspect is more the theme than the basis for the gameplay even though it’s completely accurate. Games like this are what excite me most about where Kickstarter creative content is going and what I look forward to sharing with my family.

They were showing two additional games, Take The Bait and Soapbox Derby. Soapbox Derby is a card game for kids based on a soapbox derby race theme. Really cute game. Take The Bait feels like a nice light euro where you’re a fisherman on a lake competing for the biggest catch. Here are a few images of both:

   

Tammany Hall

Tammany Hall by Pandasaurus Games is a board game of backstabbing, corruption, temporary alliances and taking power at all cost. We had the pleasure of playing a demo session late after the main hall was closed (special thanks for John Moller from Unpub for taking the time to teach us). I’m always wary of backstabby-esque games, but it was surprisingly more fun than I expected. I was already a backer before, but was even happier I was in for a copy for myself.

Sorry I didn’t get a chance to nab some photo’s, the demo was on a whim and I’d already hauled my camera home.

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Tammany Hall closed June 15th at 432% of their goal with some really cool over-funding extras.

CleverMojo

I had to stop by CleverMojo and tell them how much we love Sunrise City. It’s become one of our favorite games (even though when I see the “Mob Boss” card, I cringe). We stopped in and got ourselves some buttons, and got a chance to watch a quick demo of Alien Frontiers and see some of the components for the expansion up-close-and-personal.

Yesterday, they launched a Kickstarter project to put Alien Frontiers on the iPad. I didn’t have a chance to chat with them about it, but it looks promising.

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Mayday Games

Mayday games has had a string of successful projects and most recently wrapped up Lemonade Stand, Eaten By Zombies: Cahoots, and Weykick. They also won the 2012 Origins Award for Best Family/Party Game for Get Bit.

We had a chance to play a demo of Lemonade Stand which was great, but Weykick was a hit and there wasn’t any chance I was getting near that with all the kids surrounding it every time we walked by. I’m glad my 6-year-old wasn’t there, or we might have had to get one of the Weykick sets. He already loves Get Bit, and it looks like they’ve revamped it for a retail release with a neat window that shows the actual components that come inside.

Again, congrats to Mayday Games!

And Others

We also got to visit with Christoper Badell from Sentinels of the Multiverse - really, really awesome guy. I saw a quick demo of Zpocalypse but they were busy so I sadly didn’t get to try it myself. Dan Yarrington from GameSalute gave us a peek at Launch Pad and Off Your Rocker  - made me even more disappointed I didn’t get in on the Off Your Rocker 6-pack deal. We met Matthew Duhan from Gozer who ran the squeaker of a campaign Titans of Industry. And Jonathan Schwarz from Weaselpants Productions who demo’ed Red Shirts, which I took home. I chatted with Stephen Buonocore from Stronghold Games who released Confusion: Espianage and Deception, my birthday present to myself last year, and he talked me into getting Panic Station which I’m excited about cracking open. And I got a chance to play with a giant Microsoft Surface table with the D20Pro software by Mindgene for tabletop games.

This, of course, doesn’t account for my full game shopping spree which also included a copy of Dixit Journey (we really love Dixit, and are hoping the very literal 6 year-old can get in on the action with this new version); Jungle Speed, a cute matching and reflex game; Divinare, a contest of late 19th century clairvoyants; the latest version of Oz Fluxx; Undermining and Mondo by Z-Man Games; Yamslam by Blue Orange, maker of one of my son’s favorite games Spot It!; a Steam Punk Dice Set by Q-Workshop (I spent probably an hour digging through their awesome dice); and a couple of copies each of Let’s Take A Hike and Kittens In A Blender (1st edition). Whew!

So, that was my crazy Origins 2012 “on a whim” weekend report. Meeting with folks at Origins just confirmed I’m headed to Gen Con in August, so if anyone wants to plan a meetup or dinner, I’d love to chat with you!

I fixed a couple of user-facing bugs last night, and wanted to share:

That should do it for today. I’m hoping to have a new article up soon with a whole slew of tips inspired by some folks who are starting their own campaign soon. Because I’m asked so much, I thought it would be a good resource just to post all the common tips I share with people on here. Keep your eyes peeled!

So, some of you may have noticed this morning that pretty much every project was showing closed and/or deleted. Needless to say, as soon as the issue reared it’s ugly head, I got lots of tweets and emails about it. As one user put it, “I had a mini heart attack when I saw our project was closed”. You and me both, believe me.

I’ll spare the technical details, but essentially in an attempt to combat some issues with really old kickstarter projects, I put in some new verification code which was working great in the test environment, and I deployed it late last night so it doesn’t impact folks as much as possible. However, when one of these projects got added, it caused all the projects processed behind it in the queue to be marked with it’s same state, which was really bad.

Thankfully I deployed the new “Contact” page a couple days ago and people were able to put that to work to let me know when it started happening, which is exactly what I needed to help figure out when it blew up. Thank you all for that.

I was able to at least roll the status updates back pretty quickly, so people could use the charts without the messages over them. However, the tracking data needed rolled back into the active tables, which I just didn’t have availability to get it done until much later in the afternoon. I wrapped that up a few hours ago after pinpointing the issue and fixing it before rolling back the data and re-enabling tracking, then hovering over the tracking process for a couple hours to be sure all was as it should be. Read the rest of this entry »

If there is any doubt that the right exposure at the right time can have an amazing impact on your project, here are a few recent examples that really struck me when I noticed them.

Knock Down Barns

Knock Down Barns in the Board & Card Games category are a great first example of how the right opportunity can completely turn your project around. On April 11th, they were a featured project in the weekly Kickstarter email. Before their exposure from Kickstarter, their project looked on track to just meet its goal by the project end. Now, with less than a day to go, they’re sitting at 14k, about 250% of their intended goal. Here’s what that exposure looked like for them:

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… and the backers per day blew up to nearly 120 for a single day, more than all the prior days combined.

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Zpocalypse

Zpocalypse is a game I’ve followed pretty closely because, as some of you know, I’m a big boardgamer myself and it was on my list of games to possibly pick up this year. I’ll try not to be too jealous, but these jokers got to meet and hang out with Felicia Day at PAX East, and she posted about the game soon after on April 11th on her Facebook page, then again via twitter later that evening. While the daily pledge chart doesn’t show a whole lot, the backers and pledge charts show the real impact of the post. With countless retweets and favorites, along side over 230+ shares, 840+ likes, and over 100 comments, Felicia’s Facebook and twitter posts nearly quadrupled Zpocalypse’s average backers from the 10-day average prior, and carried through boosting their daily backers & pledges way above the average for the campaign. Almost all projects get some kind of boost at the end, but they were lucky enough to enjoy a 12-day boost that pushed them into the stratosphere. Even though there are two other boardgames scurrying right up behind them (Zombicide & Ogre), that surge at the end of their campaign planted Zpocalypse firmly as the #1 funded project in their category – almost doubling the previous project (D-Day Dice). Well, at least for a few more days.

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And if we look at the trend convergence chart, notice the normal downward slope takes a sharp turn up on the 11th.

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Just thought I’d share a couple fun examples as I dig through data at 1am on a Sunday morning finding anomalies for the projection matrix. These are what make building projections a challenge and a total shot in the dark. But, it’s what I do. I like a challenge.

Yes loyal Chrome users, we finally have an extension for you! Head on over to the tools page to download it now!

Also, I’ve been feverishly working on some new functionality (cough… rss… cough…), and I decided to go ahead and pre-release some experimental graphs using some of the new projection matrices we’ve compiled so far. If you’ve ever seen the move The Net, I won’t need to tell you how to see some of these new goodies. For the others, I’ll leave you “a small slice” as a clue. These graphs can change at any time because I’m constantly tweaking them. So, you hotlinkers out there, keep that in mind. We normally don’t mind hot-linking, but the experimental ones we suggest you use Imgur or the like to host them until we put them “up top”.

Lastly, holy cow, the stats lately on the site have blown me away:

• Almost 1000 active projects put on the site by all of you. you all are tracking in less than 3 weeks, 217 are Day-1 projects!
• Nearly 700 closed/archived projects so far.
• Upwards of 65% of you are returning to the site everyday spending nearly 5 minutes poking around!
• Over 300 Firefox users so far have downloaded the Kicktraq Add-on.
• Since we’ve started tracking, just in the last few weeks, we’ve served over 300k graphs!

… so thank you all for continuing to visit us, and sharing new ideas and feedback with us on twitter. We couldn’t do it without you!