INTERVIEW // JULIAN GOLLOP | BETA
things done. The biggest problem for me was that you are working to please a number of people in publishing organisations, and you don’t have that direct relationship with the consumer, which I was used to with my early games. I expanded the idea through my game Laser Squad Nemesis, as we had a lot of contact with the community of players that developed around it. I really enjoyed that. I felt that was totally missing at big publishers. Trying to please marketing people and all the different stakeholders in a project can mean you’re pulled in all kinds of different directions. For me, being a producer as well as a game designer in that situation, I was always trying to manage a lot of people’s expectations. Then there were projects getting cancelled. Even I worked on projects that I cancelled, because they weren’t going anywhere. I wish I’d cancelled some of them sooner. Working within a big publisher seems an extremely inefficient way to make games. There was always a lot of work done on a lot of things that should have been canned, and a lot of promising things that got squashed for, in my opinion, completely invalid reasons. You get a lot of that going on, and for me I wanted to go back to that direct relationship with the players of my style of game. That’s what I want to be doing.
Now, you’ve just finished a very successful crowdfunding project for Chaos: Reborn, and you’re using Unity for the game. Does that feel like the kind of thing you wanted to get back to, in terms of direct player contact and creativity?
Is it a return to my early days? Yes and no. Yes, in that it’s a return to me creating the vision for the game, without interference from other people with other ideas about that vision. Of course, there is still an element of needing other people to buy into my idea, but it’s very different from working with a
publisher where you have a vision for your game, and then it gets altered by people, mutated into some horrible, mutant, bastard offspring of a ginger demon.
But there are improvements in terms of where I am, too. I guess back in the early days of my career, I had a very limited pool of people to test my games. It was my friends and family. Now, with the internet you can contact thousands of people who want to try out your games. That’s certainly better than it was, and is very exciting to me.
Working for a publisher, your
vision gets altered into some horrible, mutant offspring.
Julian Gollop
So I am getting back once again to a place where I am the proprietor of a vision, but now I can expose my vision and game’s design to many more players, and very early on. During my Chaos: Reborn Kickstarter I found that side of things very rewarding, and very stimulating.
That campaign did very well there, hitting $210,854 when the target was $180,000. What did you learn from this?
What I kind of knew before was how important PR and getting the campaign exposed would be. I learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t during the course of the Kickstarter campaign, and that was a real eye-opener. Initially, my focus was on the traditional gaming press. And I got a lot of coverage which I worked hard for.
But then, I switched focus to try and get more YouTubers on board. I had a playable
demo so I got them to play the game with me. I also managed to get Ken Levine on board to try it out, and Jake Solomon, who helped me with some celebrity games.
At that point, when we made that change in strategy, some of my backers were already YouTubers and they were doing well, making videos of the game and showing on their channels. So we began targeting more YouTubers, and even when they weren’t the biggest channels, I think it made a difference. The YouTubers seemed to help a lot. In terms of the traditional gaming media, I also learned during the campaign about who and what made a difference. Rock, Paper, Shotgun was really up there.
Reddit had a real impact too, I put real effort in there. I did a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’, and that did seem to give a noticeable boost. Overall, I knew how important PR was about getting your game out there to people, but I guess now I realise how fundamental it has to be to your strategy to maintain the level of awareness needed.
Releasing the prototype to the public really mattered too. I was really nervous about that, because I had a rough prototype, but it had a lot missing, with bog-standard Unity GUI and so on. But the players responded well. Some became ambassadors for the campaign. My backers became my PR guys, and it was great. I could have planned more in advance, but doing a Kickstarter is about trying to respond to what’s going on as best you can, while the campaign is still active. I went through fear and terror and excitement, and had to change the way I was doing things as I did them. And then went through having to spend a day twiddling my thumbs while I wondered what the hell I was supposed to be doing next. It was a real rollercoaster ride. I enjoyed most of it, and was very worried for some of it, but it did work out well in the end.
www.gollopgames.com
JUNE 2014 | 35
YouTubers and Reddit were more effective at spreading the word of Chaos: Reborn (above) than most of the
traditional gaming press
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68