Did You Know That One EVN Project Has Had Four Successful Kickstarter Campaigns?

In 2014, VNs Now spent a lot of time investigating the use of Kickstarter by visual novel developers. Our recent reports on The Guardian’s Spell Kickstarter showed us that the process of crowd-funding isn’t as well-structured as many people (including myself) were hoping for and that the system is vulnerable to abuse. Because of this, I have quietly put more time and resources into investigating English Visual Novels that use crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo in an effort to provide more disclosure to potential donors.

The biggest question mark during my investigations was over the head of a little project called Swords of Edo. Originally conceived in 2013, the Sword of Edo project has had several Kickstarter campaigns since under the creator’s name (AJ Tilley) as well as a pseudonym (Face2Palm) which has raised a grand total of £35,885 for the game’s development: just a bit over $50,000. In the name of full disclosure, I played a demo of Sword of Edo earlier this year during one of its crowd-funding campaigns and never wrote of my experience because the game was completely broken.

However, things seem to be looking up for the project. Now called Sword of Asumi, the game has a release date and plans to be ported to Steam as well. Considering the mess other Kickstarter campaigns have left in their wake, I had a lot of questions concerning Sword of Asumi and Mr. Tilley, the game’s creator, was gracious enough to answer them for you all. I want to be clear that I reached out to Mr. Tilley strictly to try and help other developers learn from his process and, to the best of my knowledge; there is no reason to suspect anything other than a series of mistakes from him and his production team. I hope you find this short interview informative.

 
VNs Now: So far your visual novel has had four Kickstarter campaigns and raised over £30,000 overall. Can you tell us what the funds have been used for so far?

AJ Tilley: Sure can, mostly artwork, good artwork is expensive, beyond that I cannot lie that I have made many mistakes in the process of creating the game and that has led to a lot of funds going down a rather horrible sinkhole of which there was no return. Thankfully I am blessed with a good living and so have recouped the losses through my own work and used that to keep the game on track. Still I look back at a variety of mistakes and though a [sic]proscribe to the idea that we learn through mistakes, I wish the mistakes hadn’t been necessary.

 

VNs Now: What is left to do in your game so that it can launch at the tentative date you’ve given: early 2015?

Tilley: The date has actually been set in stone as 30th January 2015 on Steam, it will likely release shortly before that DRM free through AJTilley.com. The main game play should be completed by the end of December however thanks to the latest Kickstarter we have been able to commission unique JPop theme songs and a new unique soundtrack so we can throw away the licensed music, the deadline for which is January, so that is what determined the final release date.

 

VNs Now: You mentioned on The Sword of Asumi Kickstarter page that your game will release on Steam at launch. Can you tell us how the process went after being Greenlit?

Tilley: Fairly smooth to be honest, which was a surprise as I have heard horror stories, but I found the steam SDK easy to use. It took a day or so to integrate the game and get a test version online and tested on my own machine. And now less than a few weeks after it was accepted I have provided beta keys to all the original Kickstarter backers so that they can enjoy automatic updates and am working on learning the more in depth SDK items so that we can include Trading Cards, Steam Cloud Saving and hopefully Steam Achievements as well.

 

 

VNs Now: Seeing how the game has spent so much time in development, what do you think would be a fair expectation for players to have of your game?

Tilley: I wouldn’t like to say, I hope they will enjoy it, that’s all I hope for, this game was wanted by the community, put in development thanks to the community and has involved their interaction and feedback throughout development, so I hope it will be good and enjoyable.

 

VNs Now: Considering the length of the game’s development, what have you learned about creating a visual novel? Also, what have you learned about Kickstarter since it was such an integral part of developing the game?

Tilley: What have I learned, well I sadly am taking time out of coding to write this so I can’t write the fifteen pages of life lessons which will make Starlight Drifter even better and easier to create or Post-Apoc a new visual novel experience than what has been seen before. So to try and boil it down, the key thing I have learned is no matter how good you are if you want to make a good game you can’t do everything yourself. You might have a good idea for a story but the game will be better off if a dedicated writer at least edits the script. Multiple artists are always better than one artist and triple redundancy is a matter of necessity when creating a game, both in asset creation and contracting employees. Ultimately you can’t plan for everything but you can try and the more you try the better the game should go and the easier development will be as well. P.s. you should also stick to your own deadlines or shun yourself from the world until you can.

Kickstarter is I think even harder to boil down. I personally love Kickstarter I have funded the creation of four games, two 8inch figurine productions and a 240 page graphic novel. I have more things in mind and like that Kickstarter is expanding. My biggest love of the crowdfunding platform is simply because it allows for great community interactions through surveys, messaging, comments and updates. It is easy to get every supporter the latest news and allows for a greater deal of transparency of development which I think is lacking in most development of AAA titles. The more a community understands about the game the more they will support it and accept the decisions that need to be made during development. Not sure that answers the question, but it was a tough one.

 

 

Before we close this story, I feel it is proper to inform every one of a few things. The first is that this interview occurred a few months ago and I’ve been holding this interview until now because I wanted to deepen my investigation. The second thing is that, since the time of the original interview, Mr. Tilley has launched two more Kickstarter campaigns. The first, Starlight Drifter, was successfully funded in August at the tune of £13,211: just over $20,000. The other game, still in the middle of its Kickstarter campaign, is called Echo Tokyo and described as ‘an open word dating sim’. So far, Echo Tokyo has raised £3,995 of its £8,000 goal with the campaign slated to end this coming January.

To date, AJ Tilley has raised a combined £53,091 to develop three visual novels: just over $82,000. To put that into perspective, that makes Mr. Tilley the third most successful Kickstarter creator in the EVN community after Fred Gallagher of MegaTokyo and HamletMachine of Starfighter. You can learn more about Sword of Asumi and AJ Tilley at his website here. This has been JP3 reporting for VNN.