Xenocell: Viral Video and Launch Litany for the win!

After over four years of development, it looks like Xenocell is getting close to its launch. Read on to learn about what Xenocell is and why we need some help getting it off the ground.

The last few days have been nothing short of crazy. We've started an IndieGoGo campaign and TotalBiscuit re-tweeted news about it to over 120,000 Twitter users. While I definitely would like to ask for everyone's support in making the Xenocell launch happen, I also wanted to share a little insight about our fundraiser and what I learned while choosing to go the IndieGoGo way.

The highlight of our IndieGoGo campaign has been TotalBiscuit's re-tweet about Xenocell. There are some interesting stats to go with this. In 2 days, the re-tweet earned me over 50 other re-tweets and about 146,239 impressions. It earned us about 1,000 views of our campaign video on YouTube so far, though most likely slightly less than that as I still had other promotions running in parallel. Every day from 5 am PDT for about 6 hours re-tweets increase with the 5 am PDT time being the most significant. I'll let the numbers sink in... :)

TotalBiscuit is a well-known gaming commentator online - his videos have earned him views in the hundred millions. I've known him for about 12 years now as he was a core player in my previous game, Droidarena. He's even composed a music piece for it for an in-game contest (which he probably would prefer not to be shared).

Xenocell plays in the same universe and they both share many of their features, but Xenocell employs an entirely different set of today's technologies - it uses Torque 3D and relies heavily on Amazon Web Services for handling the backend stress of tens of thousands of online players. However, to be able to get started until we actually earn the money for the server upkeep, we need financial help - so this is why we created this campaign on IndieGoGo.

Clearly, the best part during the aftermath of TB's re-tweet has been the increasing number of dedicated, helpful people who started to spread the word on forums and gaming sites, and gave me straight, honest criticism about the currently available information about the game and how it plays.

We had our 15 minutes of fame for now, and whether that gets us anywhere remains to be seen. I am now acting on my future players' advice and getting more information out to more people. Here's the campaign video - check it out!

If you're interested in any stats, details or have any questions, be sure to ask them here - I'll happily answer and share anything that can help you work magic with your campaign in the future. As for ours - we are still crossing fingers and are in desperate need of your help! :)

If you can, please help us launch the game - either by contributing or sharing the link to the campaign using any of the social tools there.

Thank you very much!

--Konrad

I first posted this article over at GarageGames, but it can never hurt to have a backup here! :)