Acttil and Elemental Labs have announced that they’re canceling the kickstarter for their futuristic action RPG, Reborn.
Creator and producer Franz Tissera had this to say regarding the whole thing:
“After thinking about our Kickstarter campaign and talking to backers regarding our reward levels, and various other requests for ports including our stretch goals, we really want to consider a re-launch of Reborn with many things corrected and refined,”
You can see the entire official update regarding the relaunch below:
REBORN (REDUX) in November 2013
Hi Backers,
So after thinking about our Kickstarter campaign and talking to backers regarding our reward levels, and various other requests for ports including our stretch goals, we really want to consider a re-launch of REBORN with many things corrected and refined. I also want to make sure that the current backers also receive a special incentive for staying with us and supporting REBORN. I hope that you come back to us once we re-launch REBORN in November, 2013. We will not forget about anyone and as such, I will be contacting each one of you to inform you of your reward for supporting us!
Please allow me to explain what has happened thus far. Below are 6 factors that I have assessed that helped us to identify the root cause of our current failing Kickstarter campaign and how to make it more informative and stronger for everyone when we re-launch.
[1] Listening to our backers – I took many good pieces of advice about our campaign on Kickstarter in correspondence directly from you, our backers. With this knowledge, and as an indie developer, I want what is best for you and for us. I know that we will not be able to appease everyone, but for those who will allow us this chance to rectify this, I say thank you! I have had a chance to study and understand Kickstarter long and hard regarding the: a) overall funding progress over time, b) where our backers are coming from through the internet, c) stats on our video, d) reward popularity graphs, and e) our individual backer activity in terms of your comments, backing, and overall activity with us.
[2] Our Kickstarter “Story” and Rewards should be limited, simple, and clear – such that we condense the amount of text to a limit. In this initial campaign, I made my overall campaign including the reward language far too verbose and lengthy. I realize that you guys don’t have all the time in the world to read through everything, so this is an edit I would like to do in the re-launch.
[3] Reward’s language, value, estimated deliver, and int’l shipping fees are unchangeable once reward is selected – I did not realize that a campaign’s reward language is etched in stone after it’s made available in a live campaign and just ONE backer selects the reward. Once it’s selected by one of you, we are not allowed to change anything about a reward except for the quantity, regardless if it is an update to better the reward level.
[4] I want to be conservative and realistic in setting our fundraising goal – we are getting many backers asking us if 200k is enough for us. Truth of the matter is, we have lots of code base created, but the new models (3D characters and environments), except for the Musashi model, is not quite ready to be displayed or discussed. The previous Musashi model is not representative of the current model we have, and we want to take this time to get in our mocap data to flesh out our gameplay features with the new assets.
[5] The length of our campaign matters – such that we should have given ourselves at least 40 days or so (10 days extra buffer) in case of life.
[6] Marketing! We have to be more active, social and voiced in order to get our project out there into the eyes and ears of the crowd-funding community. In this redux campaign, building on the great word-of-mouth will greatly help REBORN. Since many of us are not filmmakers by birth, our chance of REBORN’s videos going viral is slim, but we need to be more active with people, like you about our project, both online and in person. Most of you have expressed concern around the sheer lack of media attention. This much is certain…So suspending this campaign now will give us the chance to reach out to more press including top tier press.
In our redux campaign, we will show the following:
[1] A behind-the-scenes motion capture session with Shin Koyamada with a technical breakdown of the process that goes into mocapping a set of character animations.
[2] A glimpse of our gameplay.
a) Menu system, HUD, Combat/Combo system.
[3] AMAA (Ask Me Almost Anything) to follow up with hard real-time/live questions.
[4] SOJOBO in-game turntable turnaround.
[5] 3-5 lines of very straightforward text explaining our rewards and a complete rework of the rewards levels. Concise reduction of homepage text with current visual aid and some never before seen assets.
[6] Restructure the rewards list to better accommodate your desired level.
[7] Offer Mac & Linux support in a higher stretch goal tier.
[8] Languages and Subtitles: English and Japanese initially. French, German, and Spanish to come later upon reaching higher stretch goals.
[9] Improve the stretch goals and be more detailed and offer better incentives for the community because at the end of the day, we are making this game together.
Sometimes it’s hard to examine failure while the pain caused by it still lingers, but being an entrepreneur means sometimes getting back up off the canvas when you’ve been knocked down, and simply refusing to accept a result you don’t like. To me, failure is often a great chance to rediscover one of the many paths to success, and Kickstarter is no exception to this so that is why I am considering this move with your acceptance.
