10/22/25-11/5/25 – working on ads and samples
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve adopted the Agile development methodology to keep my focused and maintain my productivity as I churn through all the tasks needed to launch a successful Kickstarter campaign and start my publishing journey.
The tl;dr of Agile is to work in 2-week sprints and at the end of every sprint have deliverables that you are getting feedback on and continue to iterate on. I think it’s hugely helpful and I’d highly recommend checking out my post if you’re looking for some basic structure to guide your own work.
I decided to share the output of my sprints for two reasons: 1) to keep me accountable and give me a place to publish my outputs, and 2) provide a live look behind the curtain of how I’m tackling this self-publishing journey.
So, what did I accomplish this week – copied from my sprint board:
- Change ads: Because I had to push back the launch date of my campaign, I was concerned I was showing people my ads too much for a campaign that didn’t appear to get any closer. I did a little research into Meta ads delivery and changed my settings to not show my ads to anyone who had signed up for my mailing list, interacted with my website in the past 90 days, or interacted with my Facebook page in the last 90 days. I believe this will reduce any ad fatigue/annoyance.
- Blender board state image: I wanted a better board state rendering for future ads.
- Playthrough video/animation: Since the game has a unique system I want a video that people can watch to more easily understand how it plays. What I decided after some feedback is that it’s somewhere between a teaser and a full playthrough, so I need to look at other Kickstarter campaigns to see what direction they took for their videos. I’d love to get your reaction to the draft video.
- Feedback and investigation on manufacturing sample: I got my manufacturing sample back and I was very happy over all with the quality, but there were some issues I’ll need corrected before the final run. Small things like resizing/positioning the cover image, and some print color and transparency issue I need to understand the cause of. I reviewed the files sent the issues to the manufacturer so we can work through what needs to change.
- Clean website and point to Substack: I had a blog section and diary on my website I wasn’t using so I cleaned those up and added an RSS feed of my Substack instead. (I eventually reverted this back to my website – snip, snap, snip, snap).
- Blog post: I made a post on how to navigate manufacturing to get a professional copy of your game.
- Investigate solo mode: I did some brief investigation into how I could do a solo mode for Quickdraw and how solo modes worked for similar games. Next step would be a draft of solo rules.
- Ship samples: I mailed samples out to two reviewers to get feedback and some reviews generated ahead of my campaign.
Let me know if you have any questions on any of my tasks or feedback you want to provide. I’d love to hear it all!