Last year, developer Lat Ware and his team successfully launched a Kickstarter campaign for the brain-bending title Throw Trucks With Your Mind. Now that team is back under the guise of Crooked Tree Studios with a fresh puzzle platformer, For My Brother, which was featured in the latest edition of our monthly look at interesting crowdfunding campaigns, Kickstart This!. We chatted with Katy Levinson, the co-founder of ArcBotics and now Business Development Manager for Crooked Tree, about social media campaigns, art design, and Michael Bay’s The Rock.
Andrew Rainnie, Warp Zoned UK Correspondent: You are seeking $150,000 in your Kickstarter campaign for side-scrolling puzzle-platformer For My Brother. Explain the concept of the game in the length of a tweet (140 characters).
Katy Levinson: An emotional MetroidVania where you become a monster to protect somebody you love by defeating bosses and stealing their powers.
WZ – Andrew: The game uses an Insular art style to give the game a clean, hand-drawn look, which gives it a fresh, unique feel, like a Roman fairy tale of sorts. At what point did you fix upon this, and were there earlier art styles attempted which were later discarded?
Levinson:We threw some things around. I brought up culturally-inspired art styles because I always loved watching the little details in Disney’s Mulan which harken back to traditional Chinese art style roots, and I always loved looking at pictures of traditionally drawn Japanese art, particularly the waves and the samurai. You get to see what a culture is in that stuff: what they value, what they consider beautiful, and how they think humans should be. Mulan and my love of anime proved to me that those little details can enrich a visual style without dominating it, but then of course everybody showed me The Secret of Kells and I realized that was just the tip of the iceberg.
I’m not an artist though, and by the time we were doing mock-ups we’d settled on Insular art as the influence. It fit the story, and fit the creatures we were dreaming up. It was also a really nice chance to bring up a beautiful time and place we felt people didn’t think about a whole lot.
WZ – Andrew: The overarching story and motivation for your main character is to essentially protect her brother from monsters by becoming one herself. That is a deep, psychological discourse between the player and the character, recalling Nietzsche’s quote, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” How did you go from the mindless fun of Throw Trucks With Your Mind to this?
Levinson: We were very unified in our wish for a deep and emotionally touching story. We would have loved to have had the opportunity to do this in Throw Trucks With Your Mind, but there is only so much you can pack in a game and still ship it on time. On the engineering side, bolting physics on the side of Unreal 3 and getting the headset working was more than enough to keep us busy. From a user standpoint, the headset is so novel and bizarre that we worried a story would compete for attention. You see a lot of with really weird or ground-breaking mechanics where they ship a simplistic story to keep it from being distracting. Katamari Damacy, pretty much anything weird from the SNES, and even things aren’t weird now but were way novel at the time like Super Mario Bros. The only consistent exceptions are MetroidVania games and RPGs, and Throw Trucks isn’t either of those.
There’s a quote attributed to Valve which says “When you’re reinventing everything keep it 30% new and 70% familiar so your audience has something to hold on to.” At Crooked Tree, we think this is a smart idea.
WZ – Andrew: The game is being developed for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but is there a chance we will see the game on a home console?
Levinson: Yeah, this was a stretch goal we really wanted. Unreal 4 makes it possible of course, but fronting licensing fees is not a great time.
WZ – Andrew: Crooked Tree Studios is based in San Francisco, a city well known for its Silicon Valley. What is like being a game developer in an area with over 2,000 tech companies?
Levinson: Living in Silicon Valley I guess is like living in a town with multiple colleges, except our colleges are tech companies. Our lives wind around them in really weird ways. Google is the big one, has been for years. It must feel like one out of every three engineers you meet has worked for Google at some point.
Honestly, none of us live in San Francisco. I like cities, but that city is more expensive than it is awesome. Sadly, nobody knows the geography of California well enough for any other words we say to make sense and it is a huge state. Lat and I are based about half an hour south of San Francisco, but we’re actually a digital office so we’re the only two. Of the remaining employees Matt Olch and Caspian Priebe are from Seattle, while Kiyome Provost, Lynda Miller, and Stephanie Chan are from LA. Machinae Supremacy, the band who is writing the soundtrack for the game, are from northern Sweden, except one member who lives in a neighboring country.
I didn’t believe in digital offices before this job, and I certainly don’t think it’s a perk now, but maybe we’re coming to a place in technology and our culture where having a physical office is more of a luxury than a necessity. It’s certainly the case for our team right now.
WZ – Andrew: Can you quote me any lines from The Rock?
Levinson: Nope. How sad! My fiancé has such a love of 80s and 90s action movies, and finally this love could have been useful! I suppose he will now want me to double down in our studies! I can sing for you.
“I am a rock, I am an islaaaaaaaaaaaand!”
The lyrics are a little emo, but man, Simon and Garfunkel have great harmony. My co-workers believe I am under some delusion that I live in a musical. Especially after a drink or two, I’ll respond to almost any statement by breaking into song.
WZ – Andrew: As a developer, do you get the chance to actually play any games? What platforms do you own, and what games do you enjoy personally?
Levinson: I love to game, but I haven’t been able to play since April with the Kickstarter and the Kickstarter prep. I’m looking forward to having weekends again soon so I can get back into it.
I’m a PC gamer but I use a controller because I type for a living and don’t want to tempt fate on carpel tunnel by spending my free time at a keyboard too. Going down my Steam list of most hours played, in order it reads: Skyrim, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Terraria, Prison Architect, FTL, Mass Effect, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Borderlands 2, Rogue Legacy, Magicka, and Bastion. Not on there is my recovery from my Dwarf Fortress problem and my general love/guilty pleasure of trading card games. I loved SolForge for a while, but there are more people to play against in Hearthstone.
Sometimes Lat and I work in gamer memes in front of potential investors and non-gaming press when we need to communicate quickly and privately.
WZ – Andrew: Back to For My Brother. You mentioned Machinae Supremacy, who are on board to perform the soundtrack. Talk us through how that collaboration came to be?
Levinson: My fiance, Cliff, has always been a huge fan of Machinae Supremacy, and I like them a lot too. When Machinae Supremacy announced they were doing their first North American show, we joked about flying 3,000 miles to Washington D.C. to see it as our vacation together, and we were both shocked when we found out we could actually do it. We ran into the band in a bar the day before their show and wound up hanging out for long while. They’re incredibly down-to-earth guys, and we tried not to drool on them but we were pretty impressed they put up with us.
The next day, after their concert, Cliff wanted to get some swag signed so he disappeared. He didn’t come back for several hours so I called him to ask if he was still stuck in line or if he wanted to go party with us. Turns out he had somehow wound up in a room party with Machinae Supremacy, and thought that it was so normal that it wasn’t worth telling anybody about! He really wanted me to bring the nice tequila so the Swedes could try it. They politely told us it was “very interesting” but we still all wound up friends on Facebook.
WZ – Andrew: Speaking of Facebook, you leveraged your fans and kept updating backers about which social media channels were best to spread the word about the game. How often were you crunching all these numbers? What avenues of social media did you use?
Levinson: I’m an engineer. I don’t crunch numbers, I look at my tools dashboards. I’m very lazy, except when making devices to let me be lazier. This is why I’m an engineer. There is this idea that engineers are always sitting around calculating things that I find weird. You know your stoner friend who suddenly transforms into Nikola Tesla when there is weed but no bong? That’s an engineer. Writers, artists, accountants, people who make their living on polish, these are the people I find industrious and meticulous post-college. We have no time for that. We have Star Trek to watch and household objects to prove chemically explosive.
Anyway, Kickstarter is incredibly hard to work metrics into. They don’t let you put JavaScript in, which is understandable considering a cross side script which auto-pledges $10,000 would be hilarious, but they also re-host all images which makes tracking pixels hard. We’re pretty much stuck with their tools dashboard and whatever we hook into that client-side via Greasemonkey, which in this case wasn’t a lot.
Kickstarter, if you are reading this, please give us some proper metrics access when you’re done asking creators for proper financial transparency! Also thanks for the Staff Pick and we heart you.
As for what channels we use, our big three are Facebook , Twitter, and Tumblr.
WZ – Andrew: Although it is still running, the Kickstarter campaign has unfortunately not caught on, with just over 20% of funding achieved and seven days left. Is there anything you wish you had done differently before, or during, the campaign?
Levinson: A lot of things. We crunched some hard numbers, and really went against the grain in trying to fund the production of a game rather than reap rewards from a game we already made or build hype for a game we were making primarily from other financial sources.
You look at 30+ person studios like Double Fine making much larger games over a year or more span and only asking for $400,000. Back of the napkin math says this is laughable: in a magical world where you have no advertisements, no taxes, no rewards, and no Kickstarter cut or credit card cut and you trim your staff to 30 employees, then everybody only makes $13,000 over the often multiple years of game development. On the other hand, literally millions of consumers have been trained to believe this is totally normal. I really wish Kickstarter would ask you to disclose what percent of the total product cost you are funding; we’ve seen this issue in other areas too, but nobody is interested in that. There was a very strong trend, all the data said don’t do this, you can’t sell things and re-educate consumers at the same time; we did it anyway, and we paid for it.
Thankfully, despite our best efforts, it looks like we’re going to make it anyway, albeit via unconventional means. I cannot wait to tell you more, but for the moment we are focused on finishing the Kickstarter campaign.
WZ – Andrew: Do you have any advice for those who may be considering launching a Kickstarter campaign?
Levinson: Shipping is way more expensive than you think. International shipping is a zoo. Momentum matters. Design things your backers want, then cull for things you can do, not the other way around. Get the press involved a month before you launch.
WZ – Andrew: After For My Brother, what does the future hold for yourself and the team at Crooked Tree? Any game ideas you wish to share, or genres you have the urge to tackle?
Levinson: We want to make really immersive experiences, but other than that we’re too young a company to really know what’s next. We have a lot of ambitious ideas, but time will help us learn which ones we can actually do and which ones will really touch people and matter to them.
Our thanks to Katy and the entire team at Crooked Tree for taking time out of their day to speak with us. The Kickstarter campaign for For My Brother is still running, and we would urge gamers to check it out.
