The veteran British designer Julian Gollop warned the crowd at Digital Dragons to underestimate the challenge of crowdfunding at their peril.
In a talk called "Gooey Blobs and Chrysalids - milestones in my 32-year career in game development," Gollop finished with his experiences running a Kickstarter campaign for a remake of his 1985 Spectrum game, Chaos.
Ultimately, Chaos Reborn exceeded its $180,000 target, but it only did so by $40,000 and not until the final days of its funding period. Given his enviable track record - which includes the classic 1994 turn-based strategy title, X-Com - Gollop admitted to the Digital Dragons audience that he expected an easier ride.
However, Gollop did make a huge amount of effort prior to launching the Chaos Reborn Kickstarter campaign to ensure that it had the best possible chance of success.
"I had done a lot of work on PR and promoting the game: on my blog, on Twitter, I got journalists looking at the game so I had coverage in print and online," he said.
"For me that was an easier process than for most because of my history and people were interested in what I was doing anyway, but still, it was a lot of work. I even delayed the Kickstarter [twice] all because I didn't think the PR was sufficient yet.
"If you're going the crowdfunding route, you have to do your PR and promotion consistently for months before you even start."
And yet despite all of that effort, and despite having a playable prototype to show interested backers, and despite having the sort of reputation that allowed him to bring in a figure like Ken Levine to help with the cause - on TotalBiscuit's YouTube channel, no less - with just five days to go Chaos Reborn still hadn't reached its target and the donations had, in Gollop's words, "flatlined."
