Tradewars Rising Kickstarter project : first few days

We see a lot of Kickstarter projects floating around.  Some are truly amazing innovations, some are really cool game concepts, and some are.... well, less cool to me, and others are just bad projects (or bad presentations).

In a nutshell, Kickstarter is a great way to get the word out to populations and allow them to pledge their support for money, for which they get cool swag, rewards, thanks and all manner of good stuff.



The OLD Tradewars2002 game

Tradewars is an old brand that has been around since the mid-70's when Bulletin Board Systems were being dabbled on by geeks.  It was a text-based space strategy game where you could play with/against several dozens players using up turns every day, over a number of days, until one spaceship captain came up on top with more points than the others.  The experience for the license owners (called SysOps in the day), was that they could modify the game and differ the experience to their own BBS crowd, which made every instance of Tradewars unique and interesting.
Sylien Games, my games company, has been developing a modern version of the game, called Tradewars Rising on top of a super game engine, for a number of years and we've started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the last bit of development that will allow us to:
- Finish the game (debug session, user experience polish, and some fixes)
- Enhance, augment and polish the web site community experience
- Debug and seriously improve the underlying game engine.



Player checking out another's base

Check out the Kickstarter and get involved!

What's most exciting about Tradewars Rising is in face the engine because, just like the old days and NEW for today's game makers....  The engine allows players to create their own game elements and ultimately their own full game (called whatever you like), running on our servers, no hassle, without the need to write any code. 

Yep, you heard me... our tech if finished, would eventually allow players to create their own games without using code.  Only forms and images, and you have our very own browser-based strategy MMO you can then monetize.

So far, we had really strong and heavy supporters early on in the first 5 days or so bringing the first milestone to complete most of this stuff at 38% of funding amount. 



Front art for the Kickstarter project

We need volume of visitors to the Kickstarter site to bring it up to the next level to get it all funded and beyond as we have plans to do the following on stretch goals beyond the needed $89k to finish the game off:
- Get the "Make your own full game" code fully in place
- Put in the TyphoonLand game that he have as a prototype phase (fleet combat and MMO player strategy, with great brush art use)
- Full 3D game viewer right in your browser
-  And more improvements to the game and engine that we can't list here.

We've had great comments and feedback from being showcased at the #AccelerateOTT event last week, and the Post-Mortem with #Microsoft we did this week, but we need people to drive this out into social and popular.  We need massive spread. 

Can you help us?  Sure.. Visit the page, and Share, Tweet and pledge, even if its only $1, its fine.  :)

Let make this project a huge success together and usher in a new era of game development on multiple platform browser for all to enjoy!

I'll definitively take the time to write a blog after this is over as a post-crowdfunding effort.  These things DO NOT happen on their own.  Takes a lot of effort.

For now, see you all on the other side of the wormhole!  Fly safe!

Tradewars(R) Rising V1.2a and on

Its been a while since my last blog post. Much has happened in my life as an entrepreneur and as a person. Going from small success to the next in the development of my business Sylien Games through our flagship product Tradewars Rising has been an inspiration to me and has taken up most of my time.

Here are the highlights:
1. Deal to have a free minisite on the browser-based game site bbgsite.com
2. On-site statistics going up and up, and spiking as soon as the TWR tutorial went up, followed by a new probing marketing test looking for advertising opportunity sweetspots which increased our registrations by 2x.
3. Lots of compliments from players on the quality and fun they are having on site.
4. Other partnerships from Asia and North-America coming up with other game community sites.
5. Simplifying of administrative processes (which is a timesaver for me!)
6. Launch of V1.2b of TWR which is essentially some new minor features and mostly the most annoying bug fixes.
7. Establishment of a Level system on site to promote player growth and give them in-game perks if they become Premium (paying) members.
8. Possibility of a couple new consulting contracts coming up.

There's more but those are the ones I can discuss and off the top of my head. Suffice to say, I'm at peace with this and looking for more.

Funding upcoming
The whole exercise is designed to get into the right position to get proper funding from a publisher or VC. And in order to do this, we must show scalability and that it is "worth" investing in growth. I.e. if we spend $1 in marketing, do we get the money back (or close) in revenues from this drive. If we can show profitable or level ROI off of adverts now, as well as a significant market to grow in, it isn't really a problem to get investors involved. Doesn't matter how poor the economy is, there are always people with money looking to invest in good deals. All you gotta do is show them that its a relatively safe and highly lucrative deal, and, the hardest part, having the right contacts to get connected to the investors with $$$ that know your segment of the market and understands your product.

We're almost there.

So we're working on V1.2b, then V1.3 of Tradewars Rising now. After V1.3, we'll be in a very strong position with the product as most features and fixes will be complete in there and the product will be mature with a metrics path to show just about any piece of data we want to anyone. Getting here was hard, but we're all happy of what we've done so far. :)