[Kickstarter] Mini Racing Adventures - Minimo Studio: 3D side scrolling physics based racer

Hello I'm Jack one of the founders of Minimo and we are a small (3 guys) indie studio looking to get our very first game out there. We have just launched our very first kickstarter and would appreciate any community feedback and any support. We wanted to create something fun for our first project and something that we felt we could accomplish and deliver on. Even tho it's not ground breaking we hope all the added features we plan to add will make it worthwhile. I feel in creating a game it's really important the game works like it is supposed to work, with collision, mechanics, design...etc. Hopefully this will be a stepping stone for bigger and better things! We plan to launch on iOS and Android, then we will see how the market responds.

Check out our kickstarter for more video, images, and info.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1950105300/mini-racing-adventures-3d-side-scrolling-racer



Some levels we have designed.


Some of our upcoming vehicles.

Let us know what you think and we would appreciate any feedback.

 

Seems like you guys are putting a lot of work into this. I gotta say it looks pretty good!

 

Thank you for the encouraging words. Hopefully we can build from this experience.

 

Looks pretty good, great work guys! I really like the visual style, and I'm a sucker for anything physics-based. Backed!

 

Thanks so much Sully! Our campaign def needs more exposure. If anyone has tips or advice, even brutal honesty I would love to hear it.

 

@Schneider21 is our resident KS marketing guru!

If you want good quality - focused - well spoken advice I'd see if he could spare 20 minutes on a no holds barred review.

 

Thanks for the recommendation, @theANMATOR2b I saw this when it was posted yesterday, but had a cat situation that needed to be dealt with (no worries, she's fine now).

The Good
Overall, your campaign looks great! I was a bit worried at first with the sound quality in your video when you guys are talking, but it got a lot better after that first segment, and the video was rather professionally done.

That professionalism carries through the rest of your presentation as well. I LOVE the way you showed off the models including the textured wireframes. Really shows a level of quality in the assets you've produced. And the level of polish is high enough that it's obvious you know what you're doing. It's encouraging to think I'm not just buying someone's copy of Unity Pro for them.

The characters are cute and remind me of Marvin the Martian. Animations are all nice and clean and consistent in style.

You provide a lot of information about your plans, your rewards are all nicely thought through, and you seem like genuinely smart, talented, nice guys that I would love to help see your dream come true!

The Bad
A savvy backer might pick up on the indication that the goals you want to achieve for your $5000 target are pretty much all done already. This kind of suggests that you don't really need the money to meet that goal. It isn't really until you get to your stretch goals that funding would translate to new features. This makes me feel that if your campaign isn't successfully funded, I can still just pick up the game as if it were funded at the minimum once you get it to market. While you do have the pie chart indicating where your funding is going (that's good!), it's not really clear why you need that $5k to get this game finished, you know?

Your website is, well... garbage. I don't mean offense, and I think you're probably well aware. Either finish it and make it worth visiting, or don't link to it, though. Having an incomplete site kinda works against you.

I say this one to everybody, and it applies here: PROMOTE! I can't find a Twitter account for your team, nor a Facebook page. Ideally, you would have had both of these set up and been sharing content for months before you even launched the Kickstarter. It's probably too late to use them effectively now, but it's still a good idea to set those up and start acquiring followers and fans.

The Ugly
Honestly, I think the biggest thing you'll have to compete with here is just the simplicity of your game. Don't get me wrong... It's cute and charming, and I too loved Excitebike. But people are really used to backing innovative and Big Idea projects, and your game is relatively simple and small.

I don't think a game has to be super innovative to generate interest, but it needs to have something to really grab people. Unfortunately, visual polish and style aren't enough, I think. It may even cause backers to put your game into the same ballpark as AAA studios (since the quality seems to be there), which will then lead them to drawing comparisons between games in the same genre. Does that makes sense?

 

Thanks so much for the feedback, really appreciate you taking the time for your input. I'd rather hear critical input than people that just shower the project with compliments.

Your right to point out that the $5,000 goal might need more thinking out as we could launch this game at it's current stage(although still some bugs and several selectable features need to be applied). I just didn't think we could ask for $15,000 or more on the goals and actually get that lol. Right now our team doesn't feel the game is complete and would love to add these additional features included in the game. I guess you could say we were originally going to charge $1.99 for the game but wanted to give everyone a chance to try it by offering it as a free to download and use in-app purchases. As our very first game and having never published in any app store we weren't sure what method to go by. If one actually was better than another? We still don't know. We are literally 3 guys trying to live out our dreams of just making games, hopefully we can make a career of it.

I really need to get on board with twitter and learn the ins and outs of that social media platform. Both the links should be working as far as I can tell. But we agree the website does need work but theres not a lot of content to put as this is our first project.

I really appreciate the feedback as this is exactly what I was looking for thanks again!

 

I totally understand where you're coming from. KS is such a weird platform for stuff like this... You might not actually need the $5,000, but you DO need the $15,000! It doesn't make any sense, but that's kinda how it is. Except if you ask for $15k and don't get it, you get nothing. So better a little than nothing is the mentality a lot of people go in with.

You guys are moving at a good pace, though. Keep promoting the campaign wherever you can, and keep those updates coming! Hopefully you push past your minimum target quickly and start chipping away at some of those stretch goals soon.

 

I share your twitter novice-ness! I gotta get that going so when I finally get to a presentation stage things can be in place.

Regarding the lack of content for the website - please think VISUALS!
Every little thing Agung does should be updated to the site at least weekly. It doesn't even have to be in a finished form, but it does need to be presentable. Everything! models, textures, animations, assets, environment, character, vehicle, little accessories, IAP assets, logos. Everything in your game can have a separate update to your site. You have tons of content that can populate a website.
Additionally the back end 'code' content can also be presented in the same way but it has to be presented to the viewers as easy digestible front side supporting stuff. Most future players don't really care about how the back end works as long as it works correctly. Hope that last part is understandable.

This is one reason blogs are awesome when used as game development sites. People can sign up and get updates when you update the site. Each week can be a dev-log type event for your team. This takes coordination from the team but it's a great way to promote and market. (my opinion)
Coupled with facebook (ugh) and twitter updates which basically say "hey check out our new update on the site" and that's how it's done.
If your willing facebook can also be used as the main site. It's basically a blog so everything stated above can be accomplished there.

At least in theory - Humbly admit I have not done this myself.

I sent a PM for Agung because it was slightly off topic.

 

The models are pretty good. Good job.

 

Thanks guys for all the feedback. Really has opened my eyes to some things. Yeah we got the Facebook site, but the website is bare bones. I'll have him posts most of the concepts directly to the FB. Thanks for the tip. Learning new stuff everyday here, this is an amazing journey regardless of the results.

 

We are now on Steam Greenlight. If you like our project please visit and VOTE yes!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=398154883