My week in game dev #24

Into the Kickstarter zone

May 30, 2025

The last six weeks have been crazy!

The idea was to get the Kickstarter live before the Zzap Live! show on the 17/18 May. I felt it was pretty important that we do that because we showed the game at Zzap’s sister show, Crash Live, back in November. I didn’t want to turn up at Zzap and still not have the Kickstarter, …started. Alas, getting the demo and the campaign ready proved to be a mighty wall of work and we missed it by two weeks. Ah well :)

Still, Zzap was great. We had UrbX running on a massive telly and demoed it non-stop for two days. This involved both standing up and talking. Not typical game dev skills. Sitting in the dark not talking to anyone is more the thing.

One of the big stars at Zzap this year was Jeff Minter, of Llamasoft. I recall, in my teens, playing Matrix and Mutant Camel games and thinking how cool it would be to make games like these for a living. Knowing Jeff would be at the show, I bought a pristine copy of Matrix - for the C64 - and took it along hoping to get it signed. Eventually I spotted him without a crowd and went up with game and pen in hand. I said, hey Jeff, we actually met about 30 years ago at some show in London. He was like, yeah, maybe so…

But the thing about the Crash and Zzap shows is that more or less everyone from the 80’s game scene goes along. And we all know each other. It’s a kind of home coming. These events are special, and I’d highly recommend you pay a visit. The next one is Crash Live in November - tickets selling out fast I believe.

The Brazen team - me, Stoo and Paul James who is testing UrbX for us - headed off to the pub on Sat evening for a company ‘meeting’. It’s all very nice working from home, but sometimes it’s good to talk with people face to face. For me it’s hard to imagine working in an actual office again - and having to go there each day - but if Brazen grows as we hope it might, then perhaps this is something we’ll look at. But, north or south? That is the burning question ;)

We also need a ‘social media person’ that understands TikTok!

Anyway, as some of you will have seen, we finally kicked off the kickstarter on Wednesday, having been forced to set a time and date because of the live launch party organised by Graeme Small. By this point, Stoo and I were sorta shell-shocked by the sheer effort of reaching this stage, but the whole thing went smoothly. The thing about Kickstarters is that while you might have an idea, you don’t really know what the reception is going to be until you press Go. As it turned out, things went well and we hit our (admittedly notional) target in less than an hour. The live launch was pretty euphoric, too. A really great crowd of people turned up. Something we’ll remember for a long time.

So, now we have a month of promoting the campaign and pressing on with the game. And I’ll soon be heading darn sarf to Retcon. Perhaps see you there…

Check these things out -

The KS itself > Kickstarter

UrbX Demo > Demo