Discord Wizardry that got Matthew Meeple's campaign for Ascendancy funded in 10 minutes

George:0:00

Hi there. My name is George and I help creators launch successful crowdfunding campaigns. On this podcast, you’ll hear from creators and experts, how they consistently launch groundbreaking campaigns. So you can do the same. Our guest today is Matthew Meeple. He’s the creator behind the upcoming game Ascendancy. Welcome Matthew.

Matthew:0:18

Hey, thanks for having me. I’ve always wanted to do one of these. This is a, this is great. Thank you.

George:0:22

Here we are. You are gearing up for a big launch. So normally on this podcast, we have creators who have had a successful campaign in the past. You’re right in the eye of the tornado gearing up for your first launch. So today we’d love to unpack the strategies that you deploy before your campaign. But before we dive into your game, your campaign. Who is Matthew Meeple?

Matthew:0:43

Yeah, Let’s see I started this journey, for game design specifically only about five years ago. I was working as a tech consultant my real passion was always games. I started making my own D&D campaigns. When I was 12 years old and I was always creating worlds and I, I never imagined I, I could actually do this. And then when Kickstarter came along it was like this is the chance. Seeing some of these, big games that had so much content seeing these big numbers,$100,000,$300,000, like I saw that. This you can do something you love and you can make some money like this is incredible. When I saw that opportunity I thought this is something I have to at least try and don’t know where it’s going to lead or end up, but, follow your passion. I guess that’s why I’m here right now.

George:1:30

Do you still have a daytime job or is this like your full thing right now?

Matthew:1:35

I’ve recently switched to this being full time. It can be scary. When you don’t have a whole lot of cushion to do this, but what was important to me was make this project so undeniable that it would give me enough confidence and everybody around me who’s working with me That it has to work and that was basically just making sure that everything, every step of the way is in order and is going to work out everything from the design to the marketing everything along the way. And there’s so many resources out there, including podcasts like this that you have access to, which are free. I think anybody can do this. It remains to be seen how how well Ascendancy does as a project, but I think it’ll do well.

George:2:18

I think that is a very brave and interesting thing to do. You’re pushing yourself in the deep end and basically by quitting your job and going full time on this, you’re forcing yourself, like it’s you’re mentally forcing yourself to just push it as best you can. That’s very scary, but very good. I think it’s the best way and. I think for anyone listening who’s, thinking about this, you’re not going to die if it fails. That’s

Matthew:2:42

Yeah. Yeah. The worst that can happen is is you don’t fund, that’s the absolute worst. Exactly. And that’s really not such a horrible thing.

George:2:50

Exactly. Let’s talk a little bit about the game so people know exactly what you’re working on and what we’re talking about here. Can you give us a summary of what people can expect from Ascendancy? Yeah,

Matthew:3:00

so my game, Ascendancy, is It’s intended to be the biggest, baddest, most insane game of its kind that’s ever been made. I really wanted to make, when I sat down five years ago, a genre defining title. Akin to what… You could say Gloomhaven did for Dungeon Crawlers many years ago. Ascendancy is trying to do similar to that for 4X Worker Placement. So that’s, when you say 4X, that’s one thing, Worker Placement is another. This is trying to blend the best of those two into one epic game. And it’s heavily inspired by Old school PC strategy titles from the late 90s, early 2000s I think when you say 4X, most people think of civilization your exploit, expand, explore, and exterminate. So those are the ways the main. Pillars of gameplay, as I think about it, and then worker placement is such a beloved, familiar mechanic for most people, I think, who play board games. So I thought that would be a great fit for translating a 4X experience into the board game world. And there are games who’ve done it very successfully, like Twilight Imperium is one of the big ones. So I think making it a little bit more accessible to gamers where you don’t necessarily need three plus players and an eight hour all day gaming session, that was the original vision that I had was something a little bit more approachable, while still retaining that big epic scope. And I also thought, if I can do a project this big, this genre defining, then it can be something that’s really undeniable, that even if I quit my job, I think there could be enough interest and enough legs, as far as long term, for people to be into this kind of thing. And it was my hunch, I thought, maybe it’ll work. Based on the amount of people that have signed up for our list and seem to be enthusiastic about it. So far it seems to be working.

George:4:58

It’s very cool. I think there’s two types of creators that I tend to meet. One is. Your kind that wants to do the most epic, biggest thing out there. We’ve spoken to the guys behind Oathsworn and Tanares, which both are also these sort of, even just from a physical perspective, huge boxes with, a million parts in it. And then there’s creators who start really small with a little card game to test the waters and then build it out from there. And I think both are very interesting strategies. I’m looking at your landing page right now, ascendancy4x. com. It will also be linked in the description. And the first thing we see is is an image of that box and all the elements. There’s different inserts, there’s meeples, there’s print work. Talk us through what you needed to do as a creator. to get to this point from finding illustrators to writing rules. What did you have to do to get here?

Matthew:5:55

So much. And this is why it took me five years and this is way longer than anybody should design a game for. Look, there’s so much that goes into it. And if you made a game, obviously you know this, but the way I break it down is there’s to get to that image that you see there on the page. You need three main things, I’d say. One is the visual arts talent, and that includes illustrators, graphic designers, and optionally sculptors. You need the marketing and you need the game design itself, right? The first part, I think the visual arts talent is the most important. I have very little visual arts talent personally. I’ve learned a ton during this process of doing this. I went basically from zero to capable enough. But finding illustrators, graphic designers, sculptors is actually relatively easy. It’s not hard to find people with these skillsets. What’s really hard, almost impossible is people who are really good, Reliable and three available during your time frame. So that took me years and I’m still looking to find more of these people. When and if I find them, I try to hire them on the spot. So talent in this industry when it comes to visual arts is really just worth its weight in gold from what I found. The other part of getting to that image and that landing page is is the marketing. Essentially in this industry. The product is the marketing. So all the visual assets that I have, those are my marketing materials. It’s, it is possible, to get interest in eyeballs with a descriptive post on the socials and I guess leveraging influencers in some way, but over the longterm you really need to have those visual assets really incredibly good to be undeniable in this industry. And I think you just, you need to spend money on marketing to get the talent, to get the eyeballs and all those things. The last part, I think, is the game design itself, and to me, I’m not going to say it’s the easiest part, but it tends to have, I think, the lowest bar for entry, because there’s how many games that come out every month that are released. I think it’s hundreds of games, if not more than that, if not thousands. So I think it’s easy to design a game. What’s, again, really hard is designing a good game, and even harder than that is a great game. You’ve got the mechanic side of things, you’ve got the content side of design. These are completely different things, in my opinion and they use different parts of the brain. I think when you’re designing a novel mechanic, let’s say that, that’s very hard, it’s very hard to do well, to make it integrate and work with your game. And and then you’ve got all the content that supports your mechanics. And it’s almost like a song When you’re writing a song, you have the structure of it, and then you’ve got the lyrics, and then you’ve got the production, the actual sound of it, and all these things need to come together in a way, like music, to have a finished game design that’s compelling and interesting and ultimately fun. I’m not even going to get into all the playtesting and all that, which can take years. A lot went into this finished image as you see it. So it’s a ton of work and there’s no shortcuts.

George:9:08

That’s a great analogy with the song because obviously folks can imagine all the things that go into making a great song but then when this song is finished you have to Promote that song and it has to you know, people need to know about that song and people need to not by the cds anymore, but you download it on spotify and watch it on youtube. So what is do you have a team right now or are you doing this all by yourself?

Matthew:9:33

I definitely don’t do it myself. I at the beginning I did And I was trying for years to find people to help me with this and against finding those good people, took a really long time and I think it’s something about the creative industries in general. Creative folks they’re flaky and It’s not when I used to do consulting for technology projects where people schedule an appointment, they’re there on time, they’re gonna deliver the work generally when they say they’re going to, it’s not like that on board games, at all. You’re constantly having to Be a project manager and trying to get assets and the work to a certain standard. It’s really tough. Yeah, I could never do all this work myself. And granted, my game is big, right? If you have a small game, forget everything I’m saying. None of this applies. But if you’re trying to do something really big and genre defining these are the challenges that I’ve had.

George:10:21

So it sounds to me a little bit like there’s an order in which you can do things yourself to not at all. So game design, like you said, I think maybe that’s where you start when you have an idea for a game. Then marketing is something you can learn, but then visual arts, if you’re not an illustrator, that’s just something where you have to hire.

Matthew:10:41

And I think you, you can. You can learn anything and you can learn anything good enough to get by. And yeah you can release a project and I’m sure you can fund and do okay. Again, what I’m talking about is I’m trying to do something at the highest level, starting from nothing. That, that’s my challenge. To get to that. highest level of visual art and game design and marketing I think acquiring a very high level of visual art skill at the age of 45 I’m not sure if my brain can still do that. Marketing, on the other hand, I think is exponentially easier to learn as a skill set. And you can spend money, of course, spending it in a way that generates a return is the challenge and learning it you can learn a lot from from these podcasts and from talking to experts who, who will gladly help you on the marketing side. But it’s still, you still need those visual assets to. To get those eyeballs and for your marketing to really work right so so that the visuals is really the foundation. I think of any big project. As far as the game design. I brute force my way into this so I had a process where there’s always blockers went when designing a game where. A lot of it’s good, but then there’s this one piece of it. Let’s say it’s the combat, for example, and something is just, it’s just not firing in the way that you know it should or could. So I would have a process where I would dedicate time to just thinking deeply about solutions. This worked for me. In the morning and at the night, I’m the most creative. I have boundless ideas. During the middle of the day, I have nothing. I just, I can’t think about this stuff. So I would block out from when I would wake up for the first three hours, before I go to sleep, the last three hours, to just sit down and think, What is the weakest part of this game right now? And whatever that is for that given week, I would just laser focus on that. And I wouldn’t do anything else until I had a better solution and it didn’t have to be the best solution. It just had to be better than what I had. So it was an iterative process of going from this game is 80% good. Now it’s 82%. Then the next week it was 84%. And I did that for several years, and by, IM improving it just a few percentage points at a time. And I did this with music when I was composing for TV shows, years and years ago. Whereas if I had a production, it sounded pretty good. Maybe the symbols or the Toms or the snare drum or something just wasn’t as good as it could be. I would spend. Days just swapping out either that instrument or that drumhead or that one little Maybe lyric of a song to make it just a little bit better and I find that really small gradual improvement It’s if we’re wearing this a great suit, it looks great Everything fits but your ties messed up or you know It’s one little detail is off like that the whole it can ruin the whole thing So I think Looking at it holistically, having a process to improve the weakest link of a project, whether that’s the art, the marketing or the design itself that, that was my way of getting it, ready to be undeniable.

George:13:51

I think having an insane obsession with your work is amazing. I think having an unhealthy obsession with your work is amazing. I think, giving up your sleep sometimes is not healthy, but it is, it does produce good results. I, and I guess also one of the, one of the most amazing things in this is that you didn’t lose your obsession over the course of multiple years. Like you said, because that is also a risk, right? With this strategy, if you’re. So detail oriented at a certain point, you just don’t want to do it anymore, but you’re still excited for it right?

Matthew:14:21

Yeah. And, I should be honest. I’ve just, I’ve thrown out this whole game design five times. And so over five years, this game has been completely leveled to the ground and rebuilt. Because that was what I had to do to get it in shape to this point, and if I didn’t do that, I could have launched it, I could have released it, maybe it would do fine, I’m sure it would do okay, but it wouldn’t be the best it could be, and I think the moment you compromise on your creative vision, that’s when you lose the plot. Anything great, I think you just can’t, you can’t do that, you have to go all the way, and In a creative endeavor like this when in your mind situation and you’re giving up your job, I think you have to go all in this way to make it work.

George:15:06

And it’s also a matter of pricing strategy. If you just build. The best thing in your category, you can charge the highest price for it. And you can just charge an absolute premium for it. And I think that is important too. Let’s not be funny about it, but I think there’s a real value in that as well. If that’s what you’re delivering, then you can charge for that as well. Do you have any idea of what it’s going to cost?

Matthew:15:33

It’s so I did a survey and I had guesses as to what would based on other Kickstarters of this size and scope. But I really wanted to really know, so I sent out a survey to we’ve got almost 4, 000 people on the list. Got about 500, 600 responses. And I asked, Hey, what do you want to pay for this game? What do you think is a good value? And they told me, and I’ve got it broken out in pie charts, this many people said they would pay up to$50, this many people said they’d pay up to$100, this many$150, and then$200. And I learned exactly how much value people think this game is worth. And that, that’s what allowed me to set the pricing.

George:16:12

That is a pretty smart and advanced strategy. How did you learn your marketing skills and these research skills? Is that all self taught? Is someone helping you with that?

Matthew:16:24

Jamie Stegmaier’s blog is one of them. Going to, Gen Con four years, five years in a row all the big conventions, seeing what other companies are doing, talking to customers, finding out what they want. There’s so much free content out there and I would just, dedicate time to, to research, to learning. Cause I knew my marketing was just as important as the product, if not more, definitely more important because if nobody knows about it, if not enough people know about it, it doesn’t matter. You could have the greatest product in the world if you can’t sell it. If it doesn’t become evergreen, if you don’t achieve critical mass what are you doing really? So I, I wanted to make sure that I learned the marketing and I knew that it was something I could learn. And anybody can do it. You just gotta take the time and learn from the experts.

George:17:07

One thing that really stands out for me in what you’re doing is your Discord server. I just joined it before hopping on this recording. There’s a bunch of really cool automations and gameplay in there. You’re welcomed. You’re asked to choose a team, so to speak, as you’re joining. Tell us about your Discord strategy and the importance of Discord in launching a game these days.

Matthew:17:30

Discord is a very specific demographic That young, kids are on it all day. Sometimes it’s, they live on discord for folks in my demographic it’s much less but it was important to, to understand this channel for me and it’s a whole ecosystem, right? They’ve got plugins that you can configure yourself to automate things like welcoming new members. We have a little Royal Advisor is one of the characters in the game, and he welcomes you to the server, you can interact with him, he’s powered by AI, so you ask him questions, he gives you like a snarky answer, so that can be a lot of fun, but getting engagement is something I’m still trying to learn in Discord to be honest, so I try to welcome everybody who comes to the channel, but some Discord channels Have very high engagement and participation, and they’re very active, and they’re always talking that’s what I’m trying to get to, and there’s some games out there who have servers that do that, and there’s other games that are big brands that have a lot of Players in sales, but they’re not very active and they’re not they don’t have a lot of engagement. So fostering that is not something that just happens. You have to really facilitate that yourself. And that’s something I’m still trying to work on and try and trying to figure out how to do exactly.

George:18:44

Yeah, it’s like a new part of the marketing makes, these days, like how to facilitate and engage your community, wherever that may be. But obviously discord is the big one right now. It’s it’s just as important as knowing how to run Facebook ads these days but yeah, I think your server is is really cool. So I definitely recommend everyone to check out the server for some great inspiration, the welcome flow with the AI super creative. And what I love about it is it really draws you into the universe that you’re building, like you get a really good sense of what this is all about and what your game feels like. And I thought that was just so smart, especially for pre launch because no one has the game yet, but you can already interact with the characters.

Matthew:19:28

We tried to integrate, the carrots there. So when you join, you’re encouraged to go and choose your royal house, and that gives you a color coded role. Discord has these roles which give you different powers and it’s like a status hierarchy that I think appeals to people’s lizard brains. So when you choose your house, you’re on a team, and then all the other people who are the same color as you you’re, technically, rivals with all the other houses. So it’s just a fun kind of way to back in the day’s World of Warcraft, you’re either Horde or you’re Alliance. And that’s a lot of fun to, to have a team, that you’re on, that you can go to war against the other team.

George:20:02

It’s super smart. Everyone should definitely go check it out. I think it’s one of the better Discord welcome flows I’ve ever seen. That’s Discord. What other things do you do to market your game?

Matthew:20:13

I believe Facebook is the most effective channel, at least that I’ve found, for marketing a board game. For better or for worse this is where board gamers are to be found and marketed to. I think outside of going to an in person convention when you… Create a page that’s fine. That’s the starting point. You need to have your gaming page, but it’s not very interactive and Promoting it I’m not sure does much for you as far as Communicating with your customers. So having a group, and this is, I think covered in other channels. But when you when you create a group for your game, these are your super fans. These are your core audience. I try to make sure that they always get the newest information first the coolest stuff, the best perks. And So having that group, I think, is really key to to making sure that your project your base is really covered. And then, I think having a strategy for Going after the groups that you don’t own. So for example, Board Game Revolution, Board Game Spotlight I have a list of I think the 15 top board game groups. And then within those, you’ve got the individual games which are similar to yours. So the way I have my spreadsheet is I have all those big, high member count groups, that are similar to mine, like Civilization. Mage Knight, Twilight Imperium These, I think they’re, there’s crossover interest. So I try to be active in those groups as well. And when I say active, This is The annoying part of Facebook is people, Especially gamers, They don’t like it when you market your product to them directly. If you do it indirectly, that’s fine. You get a pass for this. So finding out what’s going to annoy people and what people are going to enjoy hearing from is really tricky. So one of the things that works is if you could say, if you post a piece of your content and you say, Which do you prefer, A or B? So when I was working on the frames for the champion cards we had several designs, I picked the two that I thought were best, and I just asked, hey, which of these frames do you think looks better? And we got 60 comments. I was like, oh this kind of works, this is a good way to do it, and I didn’t get kicked out of the group, and people seemed to ask questions about the game. When when I did it another way Hey, check out this game, Ascendancy. It’s coming soon. People don’t like that for some reason. If you make it engaging, and you make it a question and you tiptoe around the fact that you’re trying to get eyeballs on your game, then it’s fine. So it’s this weird game of promoting on the groups in Facebook is one thing. The other side of that is the paid ads. And that’s a whole other science that I didn’t want to learn. I didn’t want to deal with it. I hired the crowdfunding nerds, Andrew Lowen’s company to manage it for me. For the first few months, they did a great job. I worked with a guy named Sean from Ireland. He really knows his stuff. Highly recommend them. And then when I got comfortable with the process, I was able to take it over and save a little bit of money. And so now I manage the Facebook ads myself, but those also only work for a little while. And then people get banner blind and you need to change your creatives. You need to change your audience. So it’s constant work. None of it is like you just set it and forget it. Like things in marketing, they work for a little while and then you need to do something new. It’s a constant battle for for getting new people. And at this point we’ve got maybe. Seven, 8000 people across all of our lists. And I think that’s a pretty good place. I feel confident in the campaign doing well at this point. It’s always a battle to get more eyeballs and more people on that list. And it’s always new creatives and new methods to get there.

George:23:54

I think you raised a very important point as well about working with outside consultants, helping you I’m assuming that the folks that you hired ran it out of your own ad account and that’s why you were able to take it over. That’s such an important thing. We obviously also run an agency. So we also do that. But I think some creators when they’re choosing agency. An agency, they forget to ask this question, right? Do the ads run out of my account or your ad account? Because when it runs out of the agency’s ad account, whenever you stop with them, you don’t own the data or the pixel data and you don’t know what they did. And so I think that a good choice for creators is to do what you did. Have the agency run it out of your own ad account so that you can learn from that and then take over And I also think that a good agency supports that and wants that To happen. It’s invaluable. Yeah. Yeah So we’ve covered discord. We’ve covered facebook. What other Tools are in your toolbox? Email?

Matthew:24:55

Yeah, so there’s I have a schedule for content that gets sent to the lists. It can be, it’s either, it’s always something visual because the, people get trained, I think, when they see your email, if it’s going to be something that they want to open, that they’re going to enjoy reading, or if it’s just another spammer that they got on this list of and they regret or they just click delete when they see it, so I try to be very intentional that everything I send to our list is something that’s going to add some value. Value or some excitement or make them think, Oh, that’s interesting. Or that’s cool. That’s always the goal. So I try to plan out the content in advance. I’m not great about this, but always have something new visually that they can see what, maybe it’s a mini, maybe it’s a cool new illustration that the artist did. Or best is some video content where I can explain some of the game mechanics. I’ve recently set up all this nonsense in the background to try to keep people’s interest and, try to explain things so that it’s really hard to communicate things like game mechanics, I think, over a blog post or just text. And I think showing it visually is way better for people to comprehend what you’re talking about. So having a content plan and sending it out with some regularity, hopefully at least every week or two, I think is really important to use your list. Because if you’re not, if you have a list of hundreds of thousands of people and you’re not Marketing to them, what’s the point of it? You really should be leveraging it and that’s the whole point of this right because if people don’t hear from you until you launch What is this game like, so

George:26:25

So We’re inching closer to your actual kickstarter Campaign. Do you have a launch date already announced? Is that fixed or is it still up in the air?

Matthew:26:36

It’s going to be in August. It will be in early August it’s right after Gen Con I’m hoping that people will still have some money left over after buying so many games there.

George:26:48

Are there any final things you want folks to know about your game? Or should they just go to your landing page sign up during the discord and discover everything there?

Matthew:27:00

Yeah, the discord is great for interacting The Facebook group is better for people who are a little more old school who aren’t quite, the discord type person Getting on the list at ascendancy4x. com will, you’ll get the notifications from me every week or two about the progress of the game The YouTube channel is for visual explainers and seeing things in action. So yeah, those are the main channels.

George:27:26

Amazing. We’ll link that in the show notes as well. Matthew, thank you so much for the extreme thorough explanation on everything. I feel like we have gotten. Five years worth of knowledge in a one hour conversation. So I really want to thank you so much. Anyone listening, go follow him. All the links are in the show notes and we are very excited for your upcoming

Matthew:27:49

launch. Cool. Thanks guys. I love your podcast. And I think there’s a real void out there right now for really high quality. And I’ve tried all the podcasts and I think you guys are definitely at the top. So thanks for what you’re doing.

George:28:03

Thank you. That means a lot. We’re just getting started. Thanks Matthew.