The Adventures of Rubberkid Brings Out Some Amazing Stories

The Certificate Pledge, made by Ariel Marsh

Ever since I started publicizing The Adventures of Rubberkid, I've found that a LOT of people who learn about it instantly connect to the game. I set out to make the game for kids, but I've heard stories of adults tearing up a bit over it, connecting very strongly to one of the bullied kids or another, or just talking about how much they were bullied, or their kids, or anyone they know. Bullying has even been in the media a lot lately, and I think it's great that it finally seems like people are showing their support against bullying these days.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to write this post was because of something that happened today. When I started my Kickstarter, I did the math on every single level for everything that the rewards earned EXCEPT  the certificate pledges. I don't know why I forgot, but I did... And apparently, five color copies comes to anywhere between $2.50-$5 around here! I checked online at a half a dozen places and they all were 49 cents or more... Except for one UPS store that only charged the 25 cents we were aiming for (another UPS store in the area charged double, so it varies from store to store even!)

We went to pick them up today and the lady there said that she thought they were really neat, and asked what they were for. I told her a little about The Adventures of Rubberkid and how it fights bullying and so on, and she said that she thought it was great! She had done some school work (thesis? studies? I don't remember honestly) and so she was intrigued by it.

As we were getting ready to leave, another guy in the store who was making copies (not sure if he worked there and knew about them or just overheard us) turned and said that he thought what we were doing was great, and that he lost his son two years ago to bullying. Angel said she was sorry to hear it, and he said that he was in Heaven now, and bless us for bringing light to such a horrible problem.

It's times like these when I realize that I'm on the right track and doing the right thing. Every time someone tells me their story or shows any kind of appreciation, I feel that much more successful. Thanks so much everyone!

The Adventures of Rubberkid Backer Cards are Complete!

One of the levels from The Adventures of Rubberkid: help
the "too fat" and "too skinny" cheerleaders out as they cheer!

While the Kickstarter has ended, The Adventures of Rubberkid is still raising funds to help promote it to schools and libraries, as well as get it translated into additional languages. You can contribute with Paypal and still get all the awesome rewards for doing so here!


As for progress on the game, seven of the eight levels are now complete and the final one should be done tomorrow! You can always play the latest version of the game for free here :) Also, I'm starting to send out the backer rewards. Today, in fact, I finished the printable "Backer Cards".

Penny's Backer Card!

What are backer cards, you ask? There are 15 cards - one for each of the kids in the game, plus one for Rubberkid, one for Mrs. Bookworm and one for the bullies - each with a little info about each of them. There are also three "printing pages" with five of the cards each for easy printing and cutting out! They end up slightly bigger than playing cards and are colorful and fun, as well as excellent tools for bullying education!

Anyone who contributes at least $10 gets you a signed postcard, 5 signed certificate pledges (if you're in the continental US) AND all of the images! Plus, now that they're complete I'll make sure you get them the same day that you contribute!

Page three of the printing pages!

In the First Half of February this Developer Gave to Me...

In my first tracking of self-awarded work points, I'm just under 70% of my full potential for getting work done. Not too shabby for a beginning, especially with still not feeling 100% well anyway :)

As for what's been accomplished, in under 9 full work days I got back into Rubberkid (which was a heck of a task on its own after almost four months!), made 2 1/2 levels of the game (leaving just half of one and the extra stuff) and have hit my goals with social network growth, newsletter subscriptions and so on.

The only area that (still) needs work is earning some income. I did make a sale this month, which is awesome!

And for the rest of the month, I've got rewards to send out for the Kickstarter pledgers, Rubberkid should be complete this month (but won't be released since I'll still be looking for sponsors) and there's the #1GAMCRUNCH next weekend (the 22nd-24th).

Still a lot of excitement coming up, and in all honesty, I'm probably the most excited of anyone about it! I'm really having some fun working on Rubberkid, and last month's #1GAMCRUNCH resulted in quite a game... This time around, Ariel Marsh will be helping out (she's the one who has done a LOT of art for The Critterverse).

And one last thing: The Adventures of Rubberkid has been updated on the web as well! All of the levels but one (Chris, the Critter Crusher) are playable now.

The cheerleader level - featuring Jane and Jenny - is now functional! They do a little cheer as the bullies hurl their insults.

Kickstarter Postmortem: The Adventures of Rubberkid

The image that graced the top of the KS.
The "Get Extra Bonuses the SAME DAY!"
was added later on in the project, but I
didn't save the image separately. Oops!

For those not familiar, The Adventures of Rubberkid ran on Kickstarter from November 30th-December 30th, 2013 and had a goal of $750, primarily to raise funds for promotion and getting discs to libraries and schools, but also to pay for music and sound effects.

It's a video game, of course; more specifically, it's a video game for elementary-school kids that aims to fight bullying. The entire time the campaign ran, there was a playable version of the game available that had five of the nine total levels, although music/SFX/pausing were not in the game, and additional graphical touches still needed to be added.

I actually started off writing this like a standard postmortem (what went right/what went wrong), but really it makes much more sense to explain a Kickstarter in the two main pieces that make up a campaign.

Planning and Formation

With The Adventures of Rubberkid, I decided to use Kickstarter. I tried an IndieGogo campaign in the past that failed pretty hard, but I blame that on a bunch of different things and it would take just as long to go into all of that. The point is, I probably would have used IndieGogo instead if I hadn't tried it before since they accept Paypal as well, and you can set it to take whatever money is collected whether the campaign succeeds or not. I went with Kickstarter because I hadn't tried it yet, because it's the most popular (especially with the people I know!) and because a part of me was sure that a game about bullying would end up in the Staff Pick section at one point or another.

With my platform chosen, I did research about it. As of the time of writing, you can estimate roughly 10% of your total pledge amount will be sucked up by Kickstarter and Amazon Payments (which handles the credit card processing, and most importantly, paying YOU!), and another 20% will go toward fulfilling backer rewards.

As much of my spreadsheet as I could screenshot. The higher
amounts really aren't vital to show anyway.

I spent two solid days coming up with the spreadsheet to the left with the goal of ensuring the all-important 80% earning per reward tier. As you can see, it dips down quite a bit in the $40-$90 level, and my rewards were rather tame by most standards! Above all else, I'd say to keep this in mind.


Let's say that you need $7,500 for your project. If you don't pad your goals and set your goal at $7,500, even if you end up majorly succeeding and hitting $10,000, it's very possible you'll STILL end up below your original goal when all is said and done due to fees and reward fulfillment!

ONE OF THE BIGGEST THINGS I FACED WITH THIS CAMPAIGN WAS THAT THE GAME ITSELF COULDN'T BE A REWARD! The Adventures of Rubberkid is a free game. Seriously, let that sink in for a minute... Go check out 10 random video game projects. Heck, go check out ANY 10 random projects! Odds are, at least 9 of them include a reward level that gives you whatever they're making.
With a free game, that's not possible!

Promotion

Like I said before, when I started my campaign, I felt that it would become a staff pick for sure at one point or another. I also figured that it would get lots and lots of pledges since it's a free, noble game, despite how simple it is, just because of the topic it covers and how unique it is in that manner. I thought that, if I started it up and gave it a good push start (a week of promotion, maybe two, tops!) then I'd have time to work on the game, update it for everyone with new levels, and that'd bring even more attention to it! Plus, then the game would be mostly done by the time the campaign ended!

Ha ha ha... I'm funny sometimes!

Funding Referrers! One of many awesome pieces of data Kickstarter gives you to use the entire campaign

It never got above the tip of page three of the most popular in the video games category (which means that, even if someone clicked "games", then "video games", it was #30 at its peak, putting it in the 10th column from the top). Oh, and if that isn't enough to convince you that Kickstarter itself really didn't help it out, why not just look at that image above? The green-shaded lines are through Kickstarter... Of the $821 raised, not even 10% came from Kickstarter sources. Also, according to most everything I had read, the "48 hour email" is typically a pretty huge factor, but you'll see how untrue that was in this case. I'm thinking that's because I did post about it so frequently, but I can't be sure.

The ENTIRE 31 days of the campaign were spent promoting. Not just on Facebook but everywhere... I used various sources to find "mom blogs", as families are my target audience; I hit up all of the gaming news media I could find (thanks PixelProspector!); I spent a day pitching to libraries when Technorati (blog database) was down; I wrote to local media; hit up facebook groups, some celebrities (why not, right?), and when it got really close to time I wrote to individuals on Facebook (friends and family). Those last minute messages did NOT focus on asking for pledges, especially since it had already crossed the line into "successful"... These messages were to simply let people know what I was up to and ask them to pass the message on, since the game will need help getting to as many families as possible.

Also, and I cannot express this enough: DO. NOT. SPAM! When I posted in groups, I made sure to focus only on groups that made sense (game developer forums, but ONLY ones that had a "tell us what you're up to" area; groups focused on bullying, and I always expressed my thanks for letting me post, and letting them know I'm sorry if they considered it spammy and to delete it if so with my sincerest apologies).

The top portion of my OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet. You didn't think I'd screenshot actual websites and info, did you?

It is VITAL that you keep a database, in whatever way works best for you, so that you can update throughout as well. I updated twice throughout, and having a database made it easy to do so; plus, each time I updated, a couple more people wrote articles! I began each email with something like "I'm updating you on The Adventures of Rubberkid, a project I wrote to you about a few weeks ago that deals with fighting bullying" etc. I would also add the most relevant info at the bottom, whether I'd sent it before or not. Spam filters, people being busy with the holidays or simply not being interested at the time can lead to people not reading emails, and I'm certainly not going to force them to search for old emails!

While I won't show you any examples of my database beyond the header of it there, it should give you a good idea. I type the website in, without the www (so, for example, "TheCritterverse.com"), the contact method can be either their email address or their contact form URL, and then the contact name is pretty straightforward. In the blue, I keep each game as I pitch in a separate column, and when I write to someone, I put that in the column. So if I emailed someone about Rubberkid today, I'd put "Emailed 1/9/13 5:35pm". If, say, that person contacted back, I'd put "Contacted back 1/9/13 [said whatever]", and then if they wrote an article I'd put the URL to the article and highlight the square green. If they write and say they're not interested, I put that and change it red. This way, with future updates, I can sort that column and easily update.

Additional Info/Advice

• If you're running a low-goal campaign like I did, keep in mind that any campaign with a goal under $750 that runs 30 days or less ends up in an additional area - "Small Projects". I would have been a part of that and could have told you what happened with it, but I didn't realize it had to be 30 days or less... Mine was 31... *sigh*
• Most every crowdsourcing advice page states that you should promote ahead of time. It's difficult to do that, though, since you don't have a URL until it begins. My suggestion would be to do a lot of almost-promoting before starting. Get your press release written, plan out some days with some special promotional stuff to get extra eyeballs, prepare your email and contact form text, create your database, get it running well, save LOTS of email drafts so you can just hit "send" when it begins... And let friends and family know ahead of time, so that when the day hits, you'll hopefully have some good pledges on day 1. Nothing hurts more than having $0 after a day, or two, or five...
• Don't be afraid to change things as you go! Update, update, update!
• Since my goal was lower, my total number of pledges was lower. I took advantage of every pledge to thank the person on Facebook, which then made for an excuse to promote the campaign again. I'd share the link, and then in the text I'd say something like, "Thanks so much for pledging to Rubberkid, [whoever]! Now we're up to [however much/% number]". With a lower goal, too, it was more often I could easily say "Only $20 away from 40%" or "Only $5 away from $200!" People LOVE to be the one to get you to hit that round number!

I realize this is a LOT of information, and that I'm really not the best at expressing data, especially with being sick this last week or so and the data being a bit cold in my mind again... But if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to write to me, comment below or reach me any other way!

The Adventures of Rubberkid Kickstarter: Day 5 Begins, Project Wonderful Intro

We're coming into day 5 just over 12% of the way there, with 26 days to go! In fact, as of writing, I'm $9 shy of $100! By comparison, my IndieGogo campaign hit $30 in April the entire run! According to Kickstarter, once a project hits between 20-25%, the rest is downhill from there. I sure hope so, we'll see :)

A few days ago I found out about a place called Project Wonderful. It's an advertising site where different websites put placeholder ads on their site, and then people bid on them for placement. For example, if The Critterverse did it, I'd have 4: One leaderboard across the top, a couple squares across the side and then a leaderboard across the bottom. Each one of those would be bid upon by the others on the website.

Now, what's cool about it is that the bid can be absolutely nothing. For a website like The Critterverse, that gets about 40 page views a day, that's about the highest bid I'd get. Free bids don't require anything but an account and the ad itself (and to find it!)... You don't even have to link a bank account to do it. The only catch to free ads is that they can only run for 2 days at a time, so that others get a chance too, and you can only run 200 of them. I gave it a try overnight and found that my ads had over 2,000 views with 0 clicks. Again, this was over night, so it was about 10 hours and it was the slower time of day for browsing.

I deposited a little over $5 into my funds (using paypal, still no bank info whatsoever; in fact, they run on CC or Paypal, no auto-renewal whatsoever) and gave it a full try. Ads have run for a little less than 2 days and I've spent 65 cents, gotten 218,000 displays and 30 clicks. That means that my CPM is 3/10 of a cent, and my cpc is 2 cents. TWO CENTS! This is because, on Project Wonderful, you bid per day, not per click or per view.

Now, mind you, since my bidding amounts were so small, it's a very slow game I'm playing at the moment. I also didn't give a whole lot of attention to where the ads are on each site (if I bid more than 5 cents, I would check, but otherwise didn't care too much).

BUT HERE'S THE KICKER!!! Out of those 30 clicks... 16 of them only cost 3 cents! And they come from mostly small sites! This is definitely going to be something I try differently next time around...

So how valuable were the clicks I received? I don't know. Off the bat, not at all, since I haven't gotten any Kickstarer contributions this way... But perhaps they've told friends, LIKEd the campaign, are waiting for later... Who knows? Either way, I'd definitely call it a pretty valuable site.

Oh No! Kickstarter Has Tracking Statistics For Me?!

I just found out the most horrible thing... When someone contributed to The Adventures of Rubberkid campaign, I clicked the link and found this "Project Activity" page with all kinds of reports... There are all kinds of them!

This one shows funding progress...

...there's also one for the % of contributions that come from Kickstarter and those that come from external links...

...like these external links...

...and then there's one that shows the # of video plays (both on and off Kickstarter) and reward popularity!

If they had ANY idea how hooked I get about graphs...

The Adventures of Rubberkid Kickstarter: Day One Done!

One day over (well, barely over... It launched at 12:24 yesterday and I'm writing this at 12:45) and 5% of the way to the goal. That's AWESOME!!! Thanks so much to those who have helped. If you look at the page, it shows "4 backers" but it's really way more than that: so many others shared it, talked about it, supported me with it... I'm immensely grateful for the support!

And when I woke up this morning, I found a message that the game touched someone so much when they helped Patrick, the learning-disabled boy, and found out he became a teacher to help teach other children with learning issues he actually teared up! I truly aimed this game for children so much that I never realized it would affect adults too, but looking back... It's not difficult to imagine. We've all been affected by bullying in one way or another, many of us still feel it to some degree today, long after the bullying happened... So why wouldn't we feel emotional with it?

I'm working on really promoting it now... I reached out to a few places Friday before learning it's smart to wait until Monday or even Tuesday to email businesses and such since otherwise the emails will end up buried in their inboxes... So I'm searching for awesome bloggers, writers, website-running-people and anyone who might be interested and writing to them, saving the messages for Tuesday around 11am and will send them then.

For now, I'm focusing on social media (FB/Twitter), learning about Reddit and all the other ones and writing about it here!

Have a super awesome weekend everyone! If anything big happens, I'll be sure to blog about it :)

The Adventures of Rubberkid - The Kickstarter!

Good grief it's been a while since I blogged! Honestly, it feels like it's been a while since I did anything... Between a medical issue with a family member here, getting the Kickstarter together, Thanksgiving, the release of When Asteroids Attack, having to record myself on video... I've just been so wrapped up in other things that I haven't even considered it!

So, the Adventures of Rubberkid is up for approval over at Kickstarter... And I'm watching my email number like a hawk. Ever do that? While waiting for an email, just keep your email open in another tab and every time the number increases, drop everything you're doing and go click it? I can see why they suggest 30 days or less now... Even more than the fact that it's a lot of work to promote, it's nerve wracking! It's not even live yet and I'm going crazy...

Anyway, I'm really REALLY hoping it does well... I really don't know what to expect. I ran an IndieGogo campaign a while back and it made $30 ($10 came from my mom!). Granted, I put hardly any work into it, maybe shared it once on FB and no where else, didn't make a video... So hopefully this time, especially since now I have a truly important goal, it'll succeed :)

If you don't know what Rubberkid is about, this post sums it up perfectly :) http://cataclysmicgames.blogspot.com/2012/10/about-adventures-of-rubberkid.html

The game itself won't take much more to finish, so my goal isn't very high. I do have some amazing stretch goals that I'd LOVE to hit, though... I'd love to see it translated, and there's a sequel to the game (the Cyberbullying Edition for teens), there's also a kid's book and a comic book in the mix as well!

Have a great day!!!

ABOUT The Adventures of Rubberkid!

I talked about my to do list with Rubberkid, but never really talked much about the game itself!

About The Adventures of Rubberkid

The Adventures of Rubberkid is a game that's all about showing others how horrible bullying is! The player dons a suit made of rubber bands, bouncing insults back at the bullies who fire them at innocent critters. A level is failed if the player lets enough insults through to destroy the happiness of the critter they're insulting.

Before the game even begins, the player enters their name and is able to print out their own dedication - a certificate that shows their pledge to protect those who are bullied and to never bully others themselves.

(Note: the images below are all from the still-in-progress game, so the graphics are subject to change. Click on the images to make them larger!)

After an intro level where the player learns their controls, they help out their first fellow students and start up the ABC - the Anti-Bullying Club.

Each saved critter child has their own little bio, which not only explains why the poor critter is picked on, but also what would have happened if you hadn't helped them out, and what will become of them now that you have. Poor little Penny here is a fine example.

Once you've founded the ABC, you've got to help other critters and fill the seats (each desk will be filled by the end of the game). To do so, you've got to go through the eight levels of the game - using a Mega Man-like level select screen where the player can save whichever they want in any order they'd like.




There are essentially four types of levels:

1. Some scroll sideways (like Carrie in her wheelchair at the mall) and end after a certain period of time.
2. Some work like a simplified breakout, where you have to constantly bounce a thrown piece of paper up at the bullies until all of them are gone.
3. Some simply ask you to protect an innocent critter until all of the bullies run away (like Alan - the chess player - hiding between the desks)
4. And some involve protecting a critter until the time is up (like Cathy, the purple critter who is picked on for being "different" and coming from another island while she eats lunch).

Adventures of Rubberkid (GOALS) Oct 8-12 2012

I remembered yesterday how well I do when I'm challenged to do something - dares, fellow game developers all pushing to make a game in the same time (Ludum Dare and the like), any kind of competition really - and I realized that there really aren't any long-term challenges for small game developers. I have friends who make games, but most of them make HUGE games; that'd be like comparing my half-mile walk to a marathon runner...

Every day that I work, I use Evernote to track my goals for the day, and use it like a little journal... Which is fine, but it's not public. I figured that maybe if I make my goals much more public, I'll get behind them a bit more and really give every day my all! So here goes my first week of publicly declaring my goals! I'll give the whole week all in one blog post, and then post each night to show how it went.

Just a note: my goal is to start work each day by 11 and finish around 7. You'll notice that I go very late on Monday...

Monday, October 8th

With any luck, I'll get the menus completely done (aside from the credits), the intro comic and the intro level itself.

12:00     Set up the goals for the week and post the blog

1:00       Create the setup screen. Allow the player to choose whether they want to use the mouse or keyboard to play and print their dedication once it's done if they want. (http://blog.gbala.com/2009/04/print-movie-clip-in-flash.html) (1 hr)

3:00       Create the comic strip that shows Rubberkid, sick of being insulted, and convinces them to become Rubberkid. (2 hrs)

4:00       Give the player an empty classroom (create the normal classroom but with no desks) to play around in and learn the controls. The SPACE key or a click will let them begin the real game. (1 hr - includes coding in the controls)

5:00       Create the intro level. (1 hr)

6:30       Create the post-intro-level screen (special for the intro screen, since it leads to the ABC for the first time and has multiple helped critters). (1.5 hr)

8:30       Create the graphics and set it up (2 hrs)

Tuesday, October 9th

The Anti-Bullying Club will be set up, AND the first REAL level should be done too (the Chess Player)

1:00     Create the graphics for the ABC and set it up (2 hrs)

2:00     Once the art is done, set up a tutorial to show off what can be done in the ABC and describe it. (1 hr)

2:15     Each critter should be set there, but the ones who aren't helped yet should be set to invisible. (.25 hr)

3:15     Allow the player to click on or bump up to the saved critters and view their info. (1 hr)

4:15     Allow the player to go "out the door" by clicking it or bumping up to it. This should bring up the popup that displays the level select screen, which also needs to be created (1 hr)

6:15     The genius chess player in the classroom (2 hrs)

Wednesday, October 10th

Knocking out four more levels, bringing the grand total to 5 out of 8!

2:00     The wheelchair-ridden girl in the mall (3 hrs)

4:00     The purple critter in the lunchroom (2 hrs)

6:00     The Critter Crushing champion in the Critter Crushing fields. (2 hrs)

7:00     The learning-disabled critter at the whiteboard (whatever classrooms use now) (2 hrs) - START (only do an hour!)

Thursday, October 11th

Finishing the rest of the levels, the post-game comic and the post-game credits (not including the music/SFX credits of course) and therefore everything in the game except for replacing the art for the mall, bus and critter crushing fields and the audio! :)

12:00   The learning-disabled critter at the whiteboard (whatever classrooms use now) (2 hrs) - FINISH (Should be abour an hour)

1:00     The gay critters in the mall (1 hr)

2:00     The cheerleaders in the Critter Crushing fields (1 hr)

4:30     The hand-me-down clothing critter in the bus (2.5 hrs)

6:00     Create the post-game comic (Rubberkid and the other ABC members help rescue the whole school and convert the bullies!) (1.5 hr)

7:30     Create the post-game credits. Have it show the player's Dedication at the end with another chance to print. (1.5 hr)

Friday, October 12th

It's all about music today! Have to find music and SFX for the game; no specific deadlines since I know music and SFX hunting can't really be rushed...

Well, there it is... Wish me luck!