Jeeyon Shim carved a brand new path in crowdfunding for her souvenir video games

For Jeeyon Shim, making video games wasn’t a interest, however a necessity. After she was laid off from her out of doors training job because of the pandemic, the self-taught designer began doing full-time recreation design in 2020. She shortly amassed a loyal following for her work in narrative-driven “souvenir” video games, an experimental offshoot of role-playing video games that contain deeply private, player-created artifacts.

In 2022, Shim is as soon as once more venturing into new territory. She determined to crowdfund her newest recreation, The Snow Queen, on a Squarespace web site that she constructed herself — completely circumventing Kickstarter, which many see as the apparent selection for inventive initiatives. The Snow Queen was totally funded in 90 minutes. It ended up elevating over $30,000 (384 p.c of its unique $8,000 objective). “I wished to see the place I used to be with my very own viewers,” she says. “How many individuals might I entice to a mission on that mission’s deserves, and on my deserves?”

“I began on this area of interest of recreation design as a direct a part of my final job,” Shim says of her earlier profession as a program designer / coordinator at an organization that taught out of doors abilities through live-action roleplay. Throughout this time she additionally dabbled in video games and established herself with small experimental initiatives. Shim’s first crowdfund was for Wait For Me, a journaling recreation with designer Kevin Kulp. They initially requested for $500 — a rookie lowball that Shim says she’ll by no means do once more (Wait For Me in the end obtained over $22,000).

When Shim started a long-term collaborative partnership with artist / designer Shing Yin Khor, she knew she’d discovered her footing. Beginning with Discipline Information to Reminiscence, the pair outlined souvenir video games as each a style and a helpful shorthand for his or her work. (“Shing and I aren’t the primary individuals to make this recreation type,” she clarifies; they merely gave it a reputation.) Coining the time period was, in the long term, a wise approach to promote Shim’s extra experimental artwork, but it surely nonetheless means doing a bit of extra work to succeed in newer, broader audiences. “I can’t actually lean on present trade phrases for the sake of copywriting or advertising,” she explains. “And one of many issues that I’ve realized about tabletop is that usually these trade phrases don’t have constant definitions.”

With regards to getting an viewers psyched a couple of new factor, Shim’s background in working with youngsters is a large asset. “Individuals say as children become older, they’ll sit via extra verbalization, and that’s true, however nobody actually desires to,” she laughs, mentioning that you simply nonetheless want an enthusiastic, heat strategy with adults. ”In some methods, crowdfunding and constructing crowdfunding is sort of like facilitation or expertise design… it’s a must to outline your phrases as you go.”

Picture: Jeeyon Shim

With The Snow Queen, Shim caught to an analogous path of self-definition. She’d initially deliberate to make use of Kickstarter, however in December 2021, the crowdfunding large introduced that it will be adopting blockchain expertise for a lot of its operations. Shim, who lives within the Bay Space, turned to her buddies in tech to debate her issues concerning the atmosphere and the prevalence of monetary scams and fraud in Web3. She realized that essentially the most eco-friendly types of blockchain are nonetheless way more detrimental to the atmosphere than present infrastructure, and have become involved about safety breaches that would have an effect on herself and her backers. “Even when Kickstarter was saying… that you simply don’t should choose into the blockchain aspect of issues, how do I do know operationally how a lot of my enterprise they’re placing on the blockchain or not? I can mainly solely take them at their phrase,” she says.

So Shim turned to Squarespace, which she recommends for folk who’re all for an unbiased excavation into their viewers. “It provides you each analytic you want, and you may mainly plug and play,” she says.

“Kickstarter is changing into, if not a storefront, more and more a platform the place success is proportionately contingent on the viewers that you simply’ve already established,” she says. “An unbiased web site made sense for this one mission as a result of it was an information-seeking mission. I wished to anchor my instinct and see how on monitor it was… and get a really feel for what it will be to divest fully of a platform.”

An unbiased marketing campaign web page additionally gave her room to dive into her thought course of. ”On present crowdfunding platform pages, it’s exhausting to speak about that sort of factor at size, as a result of these markets are actually oversaturated, you need to be as temporary in your copy as doable. On an unbiased web page, you are able to do bizarre shit if you wish to, and it’s tremendous.”

Broadly talking, what Shim is doing isn’t new, but it surely’s uncommon in an age when “Kickstart” is a synonym for “crowdfund.” Shim invokes the affect of comics legend and crowdfunding pioneer Spike Trotman, who runs Iron Circus Comics. “She did unbiased crowdfunding via internet rings on individuals’s blogs within the historic darkish age of the web, earlier than there was any sort of centralized social media platform in any respect,” says Shim. “Individuals would have pages on their Geocities or Angelfire blogs that have been simply hyperlinks to different creators that they appreciated or issues they appreciated.” That advanced into curated RSS feeds and Google Reader, which might be used to create your personal knowledge infrastructure of artists and creators that you simply wished to assist.

At present, Trotman has a profitable publishing enterprise and continues to make bodily merchandise that generate “lengthy tail” earnings (Shim is especially into the sensible nature of Iron Circus’ wire-coil-bound Poorcraft cookbook, which lays flat once you open it). Shim hopes to discover lengthy tail earnings for herself with the identical considerate strategy to merchandise. The Snow Queen, which was initially deliberate to coincide with Kickstarter’s Zine Quest occasion, may have a zine that the participant can draw on or reduce out pages from. Sooner or later, she’s received her eye educated on non-games distribution chains, to have her books in comedian shops and even artwork shops.

Shim’s devoted constants are her instincts, her hard-won viewers, and her Patreon. The Patreon earnings covers hire, however she nonetheless has to handle vital healthcare prices, pet care, and residing bills. Regardless of The Snow Queen’s success, she is aware of that proper now she will’t go fully unbiased with all her initiatives, together with her subsequent recreation, The Longest Relaxation. She’s additionally received a whirlwind of concepts for the Snow Queen web page, which she’s changing again into a private web site. Ultimately, she desires to combine Twine-based video games into the web site or provide exclusives to her Patreon subscribers through Squarespace’s personal web page function.

“As soon as I get the grasp of it… I wish to begin incorporating extra interactive experiences like that into the crowdfunding itself… such as you’re enjoying a bit of little bit of make-believe, as you resolve to purchase this factor or not,” she says. “I simply suppose that’s enjoyable. It has no enterprise benefit in anyway. It’s simply one thing I need to do.”