Doing the things you love

Hello All! A short update here would be in place. It's been a few weeks since we released our indiegogo-campaign and there's been a lot of e-mail typing etcetera, my typing brain has been exhausted many times over but here we go again.

Maybe a lot of people have written reports about their crowdfunding campaigns but here is ours I guess. One thing that happens immediately after releasing the campaign out to the wild are the spammers that contact you and offer their services to boost your campaing, starting from 5 bucks and going up from there. In an attention economy, these services make sense I think. But it's all very shady and vague, the spammers don't show much data or metrics about the effectiveness of their efforts. Promising to spam people and making 5E sounds like an easy way to make money. I think many people fall for that kind of scam when their campaign hits a standstill.

I had a good chat with the creator of Asmo-charger, they ran a crowdfunding campaign on kickstarter a while ago. Asmo got really nice publicity thru their campaign and almost reached their goal. Of course they had a way longer preparation period, a physical product and marketing power behind them so that is natural. We chatted about why their campaign didn't quite get there and the reasons were obvious: A bit too high price for the gadget (postage costs from Finland were 17E a piece).

Another factor is that they're from Finland (strange foreigners selling their wares to the american market). Makes perfect sense, if I turn the table around, a strange Turkish guy trying to sell some stuff with a weird Finnish accent, hmm, I don't think he made too many sales over here. Selling shit is all about making appearances in the modern world. No way around that.

Our campaign has become to a bit of a standstill after weeks of spamming, that was expected. Insofar we have contacted a big number of 'industry professionals' including the Pope, Lady Gaga, Ron Jeremy, Pepe Deluxe and everybody who's on our Facebook and the names on the stacks and stacks of business cards from the previous events we've attended. Not getting a response from the Pope was a bit of a disappointment, the guy's got 4 million followers on twitter, come on, tweet about our campaign!

Besides messing about with the campaign we've also messing with code. We got a deal with the night of the arts in Oulu and spend a week building some new features for Hoodownr. The adventure/notification thing took many steps ahead and the game stabilized with many bugs squashed. We had a good time at the night of the arts despite not being able to leave the booth for a long time to see all the action. Got a bit tired with the gargantuan push towards the arts-build, I think on the pictures taken from the booth we look like zombies..

Another fun happening was the visit by three Graffiti artists, Ruskig (Sweden), Clean (Denmark) and Tasso (Germany). They came to Oulu for almost a week to partake to the street art project and painted 3 really magnificient walls here. Ruskig and Clean camped at our place and we got a glimpse of all the hard work involved making the pieces. No boozing or staying up late, oh no, the guys left early in the morning and came back when it was dark, covered in paint and dirt and fell asleep in like 3 minutes after the evening tea. I went out to film the painting process on few of the days and I got all this guilt-inducing footage on my hard drive waiting to be edited.

Since last year when we begun our wild parade with Hoodownr, quite a lot of film footage was captured. I'm planning to make a short video about the things we love in case anybody gives a shit =)

Ok, gotta move on. THE CAMPAIGN IS STILL ON guys. MAKE A PLEDGE, SPREAD THE WORD!

Move lovely things later,

Sami
Hoodownr

A design meeting with Clean,Ruskig & Flop

Encouragement from Friends during Night of arts

Building our demo Booth

Tasso painting horses

First five days into the campaign

Hello and welcome to more randomness from Hoodownr!

I thought I'd write down a few thoughts after 5 days into the campaign. We originally got into planning a Kickstarter campaign over a year ago (probably said this already on the previous, Please-Make-A-Pledge-To-Make-Hoodownr-Happen, post). Jumpstarting the campaign last friday, we have learned a lot about crowdfunding.

First thing: It's a lot of work! We spent the first 4 days from morning to evening sending emails and things to people asking them to check the game out. So far we've got almost 1000 visitors on the campaign page which is quite good when considering that we not yet famous =)

Thousand visitors have translated into 3 contributions totaling 80E as of today. That is not a lot but most of the indiegogo game campaigns that started on the same day are still stuck with zero. Yes, we follow the other projects to see how everyone else is progressing, maybe we can learn something.

Most of our friends responded to our call-to-arms to spread the campaign link thru Facebook and twitter, thank you so much,  you know who you are! While mercilessly spamming everyone we're also taking time to read more about other campaigns to find ideas how to improve. It's very think-on-your-feet and we like it.

One interesting thing that we didn't know to expect was the amount of comments that promoted campaign spamming services. Promises of guaranteed funding for X amount of euros. Blah, nothing we couldn't do ourselves. Some real comments would be nice. Please write your comment here now!

Despite the campaign promotion madness, we have managed to take some time for testing the game everyday. On friday, we drove to Hailuoto ferry, left the car by the seaside and ferried ourselves across to the island. It was really warm still. And dark. Dark and warm seldom happens this far north and it was really magical, felt a bit like a David Lynch movie. We walked around, waded in water and found that the little kiosk had closed when we came back to the pier. It was really quiet until the distant sounds of the ferry diesel broke the silence. Relaxation happened. Take a look at the video clip to see how it was like.

[DANG:] blogger cannot find the video, google loves google not. Click this to see the thing.

Ok guys, gotta wrap this up now. More marketing madness follows. Thanks for reading, please make a pledge, comment and spam your friends about the game!

Sami
Hoodownr

Crowdfundicity!

Hello again and welcome to Hoodownr-newsflash!

After a long time of scheming, we decided to release an Indiegogo-campaign for the promotion of our Indie game! If you are an indie publisher or for some other reason have looked into the intricacies of designing and running a crowdfunding campaign, you know that running crowdsourcing campaings is becoming a bit of science these days.

The preparation requires countless number of hours on excel to optimize the timing of your posts and content and public image and so on and so forth. Everything should be thought out down to a single pixel. Every move you make must be smooth like Jagger.

I think all that research and preparation that goes into designing the campaign and it's assets are critically important. However, there has to be a number of good campaigns from brilliant people with great ideas but without megabucks to spend on honing the tiniest little detail or the literary skills to impress the general public. There are heaps and heaps of projects coming in every minute and only the most pledged or whatever float on top. Does this mean that all of the rest is rubbish? Maybe not.

Last year, we took way longer than we should have fiddling and obsessing over stuff and decided not to launch a campaign. The events that followed, presenting the game to a great number of people, getting great feedback to improve it and seeing the general response and excitement about Hoodownr came into fruition with this campaign. It means less time fiddling with the code which is a bit of a bummer because we want to focus on Making the Darn Thing instead of just talking about it and spamming, spamming, spamming...

So crowdfunding has become of age, turned into something thats just used as an extension of your marketing effort, requiring huge amount of effort to pull off gathering even the tiniest sum to help to complete your thing, with or without additional funding from other sources convinced by your crowdfunding campaign. I know of few projects where the companies had received SUBSTANTIAL funding while preparing for the campaign just to gain marketplace visibility. Why not use some of that SUBSTANTIAL funding to market your thing like every other company with SUBSTANTIAL funding? And paying salaries to your campaign team?

For whatever it's worth, the future of Hoodownr hangs with the result of the campaign. We Believe that we've got something great to offer, please check our indiegogo-page, make a pledge or tell a friend!
There's other stuff going on at our facebook page and on twitter  for those ones who like more fast paced information. We'd like to keep you informed about the ins and the outs of the campaign.

Ok guys, this is it! Make a pledge and help something beautiful to happen Today!

Sami
Hoodownr

instead of slick promo pic: Me and friends doing what we love. This is it!

Summer of eventfullness

Wow, a long break from the blog again. Some timely information for youz guyz now.

We attended Ropecon! It was fun! It was hot! Fliers were passed, sauna and medieval swordsmanship in the blazing sun was enjoyed!

I had a very interesting two weeks, first volunteering at H2Ö alternative music festival in the beautiful Turku, lugging stuff around in the blazing heat and entertaining ticket buyer folks at Lippakiska (small kiosk in front of Turku station that worked as some kind of unofficial H2Ö-headquarters) and trying to desperately find a chiropractor for these two norweigian artists. A very welcome break away from the computer just doing real stuff like carrying things, eating sandwiches and drinking copious amounts of coffee to keep awake thru the long nights of unpaid slave labour (i mean volunteering =) to build the grooviest festival in Finland.

And groovy it was. 100 artists, 9(!) stages in two days. And we pulled it off too! Nice crowd of hippies wondering about (I think the attendance was like 7500 people) without no fuss whatsoever, nice maze of a festival area, things were arranged so that there was a new thing to see everytime you turned around a corner. And heaps and heaps of mirrorballs. And a weird, huge, string chtulhu thing hanging from a tower crane. The preparation, festival and teardown days were easily the most fun I had this summer. Mark H2Ö down in your calendars ladies and gentlemen, if you happen to be in Finland next summer and need some groovy time with like minded entities, H2Ö is for you!

Being quite exhausted after all the work (and the heat!) I finally dragged myself down to Helsinki, the grand capital of this wonderful country. More heat, intense coding to get a sample adventure module ready for ropecon. Result: did not make it in time. Perfectionism never helps with a tight deadline. Anyway, made good progress with the thing so it was all good. Took walks around Herttoniemi, very nice part of the city near the sea and enjoyed some nice Nepalese food. Dream!

Friday happened, mr Z and about fourty others rolled out of the ropecon bus in Dipoli, espoo. They'd left 6am in the morning, the bus's air conditioning had conked out very early on and it sounded like they had a lot of fun in the bus with air temp rising over 40c with people getting sweatty and panicky by every kilometer that passed. But they made it!

Ropecon was bustling with life, two blacksmiths banging away on the parking lot, thai foooooooood stall, this and that and a long queue. We had our sailor merchant passes but joined the line with everyone else (actually that's a lie, we went to smoke with this resin doll maker and tried again when the lines were much shorter). It was hot! Getting inside the dipoli we noticed how bit the event was. And hot! We got a place at 'kokemuspiste' (the experience zone) to promote our wares and set up the table with video facility and fliers. It took about three minutes for one of our permanently stoned friends to finds us and start dispelling any non-hippies around. And there were a plenty =)

Running the test booth was a hard exercise, it was so hot inside and the air was so bad, it was easy to tell that the building was not designed for any summer activity. But the people Gamed on! On every floor there was something going on, Boardgames, Card games, Japanese mahjong, MTG tournaments.. you name it. Being stuck at the booth was a bit of a bummer in a way, I wanted to LARP!

Towards the end of the night me and the Tornio Hippie equipped ourselves with some beers and headed over to the sauna. Skinny dipping! It was still ultra hot but refreshing anyway. After the sauna we dragged ourselves to a nearby seashore, somebody had brought a boombox bicycle and people grouped to drink and relax. Maybe it was RPG people this time around but the beard and long hair situation hadn't changed much comparing to H2Ö. And they played Michael Jackson. And it sounded awesome. =)

Saturday morning was more game promotion, the feedback was very good and people excited to hear about Hoodowr. All I can remember is the heat my aching bones after sleeping for few hours on this dorm kind of thing without no mattress. H2Ö won that round, at least the accommodation (some random commune where it was OK to crash at even nobody knew you) on a proper sofa doesn't kill you like a hard concrete floor. My bad tho, I foolishly thought that I would go back to the apartment for the night. Note to self: Next time prepare to be lured by Beer, Sauna and MJ and bring a mattress, even a tiny one.

The evening got too hot for me and after a brief visit to the DISCO LARP (of course there is a disco larp!) I headed back to get some shuteye. Sunday was just coma and softdrinks sitting on the lawn and listening to people ramble on and on about matters of extreme importance for roleplaying folks.

The bus aircon had been mended and we headed back to Oulu in relative comfort and more explicit moobs than you can shake a stick at. Our accountant and bassist Olli was kind enough to come and pick us up at 4am-is and dropped what was left of team Hoodownr back to basecamp. There was no milk for coffee, disappointed, sleep!

All in all a lot of fun was had and now it's back to the old grindstone to finish and release the game, Last week was fiddling about with webGL again (I made a crappy summer intro at hoodownr.com in a fit of nostalgy for summer coding when life was new, take a look if you've got a webGL browser like Chrome). This week is more coding and planning and an announcement. Huuum. Ent-like.

Hope you enjoyed! To Be Continued!

Sami
Hoodownr

mahjong at ropecon

lounge bar with swings and h2Ö

the real lawn lounge seating area

your arm's off!

more gaming at ropecon

the signmaker dude at h2Ö art department. it's all analogue

more mirror balls please!

h2ö accounting dept with the latest gadgets!

wish I had more shots of the site and the lights.. kick ass!