Star Wars as Unlockable Kickstarter Rewards [Guest Post: Kevin Allen Jr]


Kevin Allen Jr. just posted this on Google Plus, in response to this week's Kickstarter-centric posts. It's all so good I just wanted to share it with you all:

+Daniel Solis has been talking a lot about kickstarter on his blog lately, and he's had my wrapt attention. His most recent post (linked below), gave me a nifty idea.

See I skimmed the title of his blog post in my RSS reader and got an idea of what he was going to talk about but i was WAAAAAY off. (NOTE: What he actually talks about is useful and interesting to anyone who's thinking of launching a kickstarter. I'm not going to talk about that. I'm going to talk about what i thought he was talking about.)

Examining the reward titles/levels Solis whipped up, I got the idea that depending on how far over goal your kickstarter goes you would "unlock" new parts of a games (or other transmedia project's) meta-fiction.

For example: Lets say you were making a game that essentially re-created the experience of the Star Wars saga.

- At 100% success the game play emulates A New Hope. The game is totally complete, and we don't need any more to have a satisfying experience. You play the game, blow up the deathstar, kiss your sister and a wookie gets the last word.

- At 200% success The Empire Strikes Back is brought into play, the game provides ways to incorporate that films darker tone, cloud city, lando, degobah, etc. But it leaves you with a bit of a cliffhanger/mysterious ending.

-Only if the project is funded 300% do benefactors unlock The Return of the Jedi parts of the game. This rounds out the experience, delivers on promises and threats put forward in the first two levels of the game. People will want to get here. You want people to want to get here.

There's a motivation for backers to put more money in after the initial goal has been reached, because now the project they've already invested in will be even richer. Also by adjusting the scope of work to the overflow of funding you will actively be showing people where their additional monies are going (pro tip: people like that).

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