Holodance VR: IndieGoGo and Greenlight Update and Lessons Learned news

UPDATE: Holodance will be going into Early Access on Steam on April 5th, 2016!

The IndieGoGo-campaign didn't quite turn out the way I hoped even though there was some highly appreciated international reporting about Holodance via VR-related media.

Have a look: Holodance in International Virtual Reality News

One of the lessons I learned is that actually, running Steam Greenlight and IndieGoGo campaigns simultaneously may not be as great as some people say. I believe none of the articles even mentioned the Steam Greenlight campaign - they all linked to the IndieGoGo-campaign. And crossover from IndieGoGo to Greenlight was minimal. One reason for that - and that's the second lesson learned: I launched these campaigns too early. Way too early!

When I launched both the IndieGoGo and Greenlight campaigns, I had an idea of what Holodance was going to be that was really limited. I had a trailer that I cut the night before going to Gamescom because I wanted to launch the campaigns during Gamescom ... which may be a great thing if you have a booth there, or at least a team of people talking to gamers interested in VR and distributing flyers (which I did, and which was fun and awesome at times when I met people really interested in VR - but also quite frustrating when I met people who completely were not interested in VR, or rhythm games for that matter ;-) ). It's not such a great idea if you're just a single guy.

Of course, through going public and receiving feedback and also having people offer to join the project, there was quite a bit of inspiration to change the game into something much more awesome than originally anticipated. The first step - which I still announced publicly - was to make the game about dancing with dragons. But then, it has evolved into a much more exciting concept and the team has grown from a single person to several people collaborating internationally.

So maybe launching "too early" wasn't as bad as it seems - it just had a different result from what I expected:

On Steam Greenlight, only about 200 people voted "yes", 13 followers, 961 total votes and 1257 unique visitors. Currently that means 24% of the way to the Top 100. Not bad, maybe, but by far not enough. On IndieGoGo, I've only raised $891. That's about 6% of what was needed.

Even though these campaigns didn't quite make it, we greatly appreciate your support ... so, most important of all:

Of course, all of this doesn't mean that I will stop developing Holodance. Quite the opposite is already happening! It will just take longer than originally planned because I have to find alternate ways of funding. The HTC Vive will apparently also be released to consumers later than originally planned, so this is not as bad as it may sound: If all goes well, Holodance might still be release with the hardware that you can play it on, or only shortly after.

By the way, that was also one of the things I didn't really think of when designing the perks for the IndieGoGo-campaign (another lesson learned): What use are "Early Access" perks when the only people that can actually use those perks are other developers currently busy developing their own games? Another "too early" to check ;-)

So, we could have tried to push the ongoing campaigns with new materials in little steps (and possibly spoil the surprise for players actually playing the game) or start fresh once we're actually ready.

At the moment, Jashan is doing some coding work for multiplayer, finishing up the new game-design and is also creating a Unity video course (= "alternate way of funding") while Samuel is working on the art assets and Efe is composing new musical tracks. We'll keep posting sporadic updates when we have the news ready ;-)

Here's a current gameplay video (still the the prototype art assets - the game will look quite different soon):