FlickFleet is a space battle game with a difference: dexterity!

You control a fleet of starships locked in mortal combat, but this is a dexterity game where actions are taken by flicking your ships and weapons.

How did you prepare for kickstarter

We had found a friend who had access to a laser-cutter at work so we managed to get a number of prototypes knocked up and playtested. When it felt like it was going well we sent a few prototypes to blind-playtesters and the feedback was very positive.

At that point we decided we’d go for it, Paul joined the company (it went from Sole Trader to Limited company) and we were looking into how to get it manufactured. The ships we’d cut of out perspex were great, but laser cutting was very expensive and to get a mould made and was going to be prohibitive unless we made multiple thousands of copies.

But why kickstarter?

At this point we investigated the posibility of doing it ourselves. I’ve previous for hand-crafted games (I’d hand-crafted 100 copies of Border Reivers and 300 of It’s Alive! during my Reiver Games days and was in the middle of hand-crafting 200 copies of Zombology – a semi-cooperative card games about ‘scientists’ trying to cure the zombie plague using alternative medicine) so I knew I could do the boxes, dashboard and bagging the bits. Paul was really excited about getting a laser-cutter and doing the laser-cutting himself.

The only problem was a small run would cost us thousands of pounds, and the laser-cutter was another £3,600 on top of that. We didn’t have that kind of money to throw at the project – so Kickstarter was a natural choice – we asked for £12,000 for the laser-cutter and the raw materials…

Where there any issues, moments of doubt or was it all plain sailing

Kickstarter was a deeply unpleasant experience for us.

We didn’t have a huge audience lined up ready to back (our mailing list was 136 people!), our marketing budget was less than £100 and Kickstarter is becoming more and more competitive – we had to spend a decent chunk of our campaign page selling ourselves and our experience, as a lot of backers don’t like backing first time creators because of the extra risk involved.

We crawled towards the finish line over a very stressful month eventually funding 5 hours before the deadline. We ended up only £127 above our target and after a few payment failures actually below it.

Why self production over third-party manufacturing

When I ran my first company I had two very successful years hand-crafting games and selling out of them, then I made the leap to ‘professional’ publisher, getting games manufactured for me and selling through shops and distributors. I made that leap too soon, and ended up with thousands of games sat in a warehouse slowly eating through my cash in warehousing costs. I did not want to do that again.

We went to Kickstarter with a target that funded a small hand-crafted run and a laser cutter, but had things in place in case we were more successful and had to get the games professionally manufactured.

Most manufacturers have a 1,000 or 1,500 copy minimum, hand-crafting lets us go much lower than that if we’re prepared to put in the hours and both Paul and I enjoy it!

How’s that gone for you & what’s next

We fulfilled the Kickstarter four months EARLY!

That’s something we can be proud of – all reward levels were shipped on time and the feedback has been great – people are really enjoying it.

So much so that we’re back to Kickstarter for a reprint and with an expansion pack containing scenery, new ships and some cool new scenarios.

Check it out!