Think Like A Game Designer - Think Like a Game Designer: Shards of Infinity Kickstarter Special

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

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Hello and welcome. I am here for a very special episode of the Things Like Games on our podcast where I get to talk about the Shars of Infinity saga collection. What is the Shards of Infinity saga collection, you ask? Well, it is the ultimate version of my deck building game, Shards of Infinity, which includes all the content from all the expansions, every promo card we've ever released, super cool upgraded components, a brand new saga game mode,

and a bunch of new promo cards that we are going to unlock in the Kickstarter. So the Kickstarter is going live at the same time that this episode releases. So that's Tuesday, July 11th, launched at 10 a.m. Pacific time. So if you're hearing this anytime in the month of July, please go to kickstarter.com and search for Shards of Infinity and you'll be able to find the app and go. Or you just go to stoneblade.com and we'll have a link for you there. So of course, I very much appreciate everyone that supports my kickstarters and projects. It's the thing that helps me keep my business going, keep doing cool things and making cool things for all of you. But even if you're not interested in it, I still want to be able

to share the lessons. We're applying a lot of interesting lessons to this particular Kickstarter. One is we're listening to a lot of the fan feedback where some of the components were not as high quality as people were looking for from some of the earlier expansions of shards. And it was very hard to put everything back into the box, especially once you started getting all the expansions. So we wanted to solve those problems with upgraded components, adding art to our destiny cards, didn't have art before. And we wanted to face a really interesting and difficult challenge because we wanted to create the ultimate version of the game, which meant including all of the expansions. But what that means is we now have all of the rules and all of the components that are being presented at once. Now, if you're a fan of Shards of Infinity and you've played it all the way along, then this is going to be an easy upgrade for you.

the components are better. We even have an all-foil edition if you're interested in that sort of thing. So it's a great upgrade. But if you're new to the game, one of the things that we focus on when we're designing expansions of Stoble Entertainment is introducing little bits of new information at a time.

The base version of the game, Shards of Infinity, is just like every other one we make, is as stripped down as we can make it, to make the core tension, the most important part of the game, which is a deck-building game, which uses an innovative mastery mechanic, which is sort of like your personal leveling up,

to make the cards transform and get better. And this is kind of the main innovation of Shards of Infinity, so that instead of just paying to buy cards, you can choose to pay to increase your mastery level, and then cards get more powerful, including the Infinity Shard that starts in your starting deck that starts off, it'll only do two damage when you draw it, but if you can get all the way up to 30 mastery and draw this card,

it does infinite damage, hence the name, Shards of Infinity, winning you the game immediately. And this is something that we're really excited about, teaching players about, because it lets you take what are traditionally the most boring cards, in a deck building game, right? Everybody starts with the same set of very basic cards, and you acquire new exciting cards as you go. And in this case, we can make even the boring basic cards turn into game-winning, really cool, powerful cards. And so this balance of paying

and increasing your mastery and playing for the long game versus trying to acquire more cards for your deck, or what we call fast playing cards from the center row and get power immediately, is really at the heart of the game. It's the core tension of the game. And if you just pick up Shards of Infinity, easy, you learn it. You learn this new mechanic. You can play it, incorporate, operate it and go. And then with the expansions, we add new cool things. So in the expansion for relics to the future, we added much more unique powers for each of the shardmasters, the character that you play as in the game, including these relics that when you get to Tenmaster, you get to pick one of these two relics to add to your deck. And then so on with further mechanics down the road.

In Shadow of Salvation, we added a PVE, like cooperative or solo mode where you can play against bosses in a Choose Your Own Adventure book that we actually had voice acted, which you can get the voice acting walkthrough for free on our website. And we have a lot of really cool, innovative, different types of challenges and puzzles to play. And then finally, into the Horizon as expansion, which introduces the destiny mechanic, where you can pick new custom, always available powers that turn on, and you're vying for different abilities there. Each one of these mechanics is very easy to learn on its own, but trying to teach you all

of them at once can be a little bit overwhelming. And so this inspired us to create the saga mode. And what the saga mode is, is sort of a almost, legacy light edition. If you want to learn more about legacy games, we talk about it plenty and other episodes of the podcast, but the idea is that you start with just the basic version of the game, and then as you achieve certain things, like, for example, killing players with the Infinity shard, or creating victories, you mark with stickers on the progress chart, and then you slowly unlock new content. And you can actually tell the story of Shards and Infinity, which is a

story we're really proud of, and we've invested a lot of time and energy to. As you play through the game, unlocking the new expansions, unlocking the new content becomes part of the of the play. And so for new players, they can go through this experience and learn things bit by bit. And even for experienced players, this can be a really fun mode because it starts to introduce some different trade-offs and different play modes and you can actually track which of your characters, which of the main shardmasters that you're playing as is winning, which of the players are winning, and involve the game as you go along. So we're really proud of this new game mode. And of course, you don't have to play that at all. You can play the traditional way. You can throw everything out

together. You can play the cooperative mode. We've also added a sixth shardmaster. In the original game, there were only four, and we introduced one more in Shadow of Salvation. And so now there's six. You can play up to six players, which also expands the content. And so really, whenever you're working on expansions, whenever you're working on new things, you always have to answer the question, what's new and exciting about this product, and how does it stay true to the core of what the experience was? And we feel that the Shards and Infinity Saga Collection creates this definitive mode.

Now, there's a couple of other things we're doing with this Kickstarter, and I want to talk about the principles of Kickstarter, because it's not a lot of an easy track, right? We've, as a company, we've raised close to $2 million or so on Kickstarter, and each project is unique. And one of the things we're trying to do, one of the most important things is to have clarity on your page. And so we've reduced the number of tiers. You basically can choose to back where you just want to get access to the pledge manager and not make a decision. You can back it to get the game, which is all one, one skew, everything in it. You can get it with the all-foil version if you're into the fancy stuff. And if you want, you can get extra sleeves

to protect your cards and a cool neopillion play mat. And that's, And we try to make it very clear that even though there's so many different game modes, even though there's so many different promo cards, that when you go to the page, you instantly know what's going on. So one of the tips for those of you out there that are thinking about doing your own Kickstarters, take the preview of the page as you built it and share it with people who don't necessarily know anything about your game and get feedback for them, see what types of things they get hung up on, see what questions they have.

Both use that to repair an FAQ, frequently asked questions page, but also use it to make sure that you answer those questions ahead of time so that when you look at the page, they won't even have those questions because every question that a potential backer has, every uncertainty that they have increases the likelihood that they're going to leave the page and then they're not going to come back and they're not going to back and support your project. So one of the things that I think we've done the best at over time is just getting more and more clear with our offering. So it's something that's really important. What's the clear message? Why will I like this game? What am I getting if I back? What's the value and the unique value proposition for me? And then finally, you know, be able to

answer the question of why go to Kickstarter, right? We could have launched this game normally without having to go to Kickstarter. It's not that hard to make because we've made a lot of this product already, but we wanted to be able to engage directly with fans because it lets us do the coolest things, right? We can have higher quality components when we sell direct to consumers through Kickstarter than when we sell it through distribution. We can also get to unlock cool new stuff like extra new promos

and have this super cool foil version, which probably won't even make it to retail. In essence, it's something just we're passionate about and it's letting us build exactly the kind of thing that we want to build, the coolest version of the game that we can think of and be able to interact directly with fans and do that. The final tip I'll give in terms of just how to design these things for Kickstarter is over time we have learned to shrink our kick starters.

This Kickstarter is only going to last for 16 days. We used to run kickstaters for a full 30 days. And what we found is that the extra time in the middle, not only do you as a creator, that you tend to get the least amount of dollars in, but you also still have this high expectation of creating content. We have pre-planned cool, exciting behind-the-scenes content, contests, upgrades, stretch goals, all these things so that every single day of the campaign is a hit, right? In essence, you're designing the game of your Kickstarter, which means you need to have high energy, you need to have people have reasons to come back, reasons for people to care, reasons for them to feel engaged and feel participatory.

And it's a very high burden. Like, I don't want people to take this lightly. I've often joked that Kickstarter should be called kick finisher because your project should be at least not. 90% done before you go to Kickstarter, and then you can use information from backers to get to that final 10%. And you also want to be spending a ton of effort, if not just in marketing ahead of the time for the game, but also for building the campaign itself, for pre-building the updates, for putting in that investment. So even if you're not interested in backing Shards of Infinity, you can go and take a look at the page and see the work we've put in, and let me know what you think. Ask questions, see which areas we've shine and which areas we can still improve.

because like with everything else in the game design process, running Kickstarters, launching your games, finding the way to reach your customers and best serve your customers is an ongoing learning and iterative process. We apply the same core design loop to these aspects of marketing and kickstaters and launches as we do to each aspect of game design. And so you as a community have been a huge support for this. We continue to share those lessons. If you'd love to check out the Kickstarter, either for learning purposes or to back it,

you can go to Kickstarter.com, search for Shards of Infinity. And of course, if you can't back it, but you want to share it on your favorite social media platform, that's also incredibly helpful. In any case, we will return next time with another exciting interview. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your support. And I appreciate you for being such a great part of this community. So until next time, happy gaming.