#grafighters

In a windowless room in downtown Syracuse, a fierce battle is about to erupt. A muscular warrior stands facing a dragon with…a unibrow? Trogdor, the infamous Burninator of HomestarRunner.com, is about to be slain by none other than Grotolo, a social media warrior – with the body of a He-Man action figure, the head of Syracuse University’s own Anthony Rotolo, and armed with Social Media. Literally. Welcome to GraFighters.

After getting multiple recommendations to meet with the Syracuse-based game startup, I checked out some of their stuff online. It struck me that the game had a few things in common with my own team capstone from RIT, SketchBox, and I knew I had to meet with them. GraFighters is an online game where users can upload their own doodles, let a bit of code figure out the stats of the doodle, and then get started kicking butt! It’s a fun and personal way to relive the margins of your middle school math homework, pitting your sketched out warriors against those of your friends and strangers. I braved a veritable blizzard (a.k.a. just another winter day in Syracuse) to meet with Dave Chenell and chat about the game.

The Brew

This time, I brought along something a bit different. Rather than the usual Chemex setup, I opted for the glitz and glamor of my trusty vacuum pot. What a terrible idea. Vac pots look cool, brew some pretty tasty coffee, but man, they’re a pain to clean, even if you have a sink right next to you. I usually don’t, so I made sure Dave got the first brew, and I took the second, which was fairly clearly tainted by the remnants of the first batch. Protip: make sure you consider all the factors of a brewing device before bringing it along somewhere like this. I totally overlooked the clean up/reset part, and kinda regretted it.

A show stopping PITA, but a PITA nonetheless. The brewer, not Dave...

Luckily, Stumptown’s Ethiopia Yukro is a very tasty, sweet, lemony brew, that’s robust enough to take a little bit of a beating. I was still able to finish off my mug, and Dave seemed to enjoy his as well. Thank goodness for good coffee, making up for botched brews from time to time!

The Exchange

So, down to brass tacks. GraFighters started in the most likely place: in the notebooks of two college students during class. Dave and co-founder Eric Cleckner were doodling in class, when the challenge was issued: “I bet my guy could beat yours in a fight.” The concept eventually left the realm of paper, and went digital, as the two began to try to build a game where users could bring their doodles to life, and pit them against one another to determine a winner. Of course, given limited resources, the game struggled to make significant progress, and the duo turned to Kickstarter for funding.

Such tasty coffee, such messy cleanup.

With a modest goal of $20k, the hope was to get enough money to finish something playable, which would probably be built onto later. Unfortunately, the crowdfunding site didn’t pay off, and Dave and Eric were dead in the water. That is, until they were approached by a European venture capitalist, who took an interest in the project, and ended up contributing $200k, ten times the original goal. With coffers full, and a certifiable interest in the game, the two set to work - building, coding, and crafting a world in a web site. They were now located in their current space in the Syracuse Tech Garden, a small hub in the city that fosters other small tech businesses. They managed to snag an additional team member, Dave Benmen (formerly of Macromedia), through an ad on craigslist, who helped them build the heart of the site. But more on that part in a bit.

Live on the web since September of 2011, GraFighters is a fairly simple site. Users can log in with Facebook, scan or photograph their doodle fighter of choice, and import it into the character builder. From there, they’ll give the doodle some bones, designating the torso, head, arms, legs, with bounding boxes and joints. The process is coached with visual prompts, making it easy enough to follow along, though there’s an element of goofiness to misplaced clicks, or a sub-optimal doodle. If your doodle is drawn with foreshortened limbs, or a strange perspective, or even –at this point- if it’s a quadruped, the software will have more of a silly effect on the character than a realistic bones rig. But that’s really just part of the charm; it’s a doodle for crying out loud, who cares if his arm moves oddly? Once the parts are all sorted out and labeled, Cornelius takes over.

The Burninator himself, rigged and ready to fight.

Cornelius is the aforementioned heart of the system. It’s an algorithm that checks out the drawing you’ve submitted, takes a good hard look, and figures out how to assign the fighting stats. Is your monster a big top-heavy brute? Cornelius will give him good strength, but his intelligence will be lacking. A wiry sneaky fellow will be agile, but not too strong, and so on. Cornelius is constantly under revision, getting tweak to make sure the playing field is level enough to be enjoyable, and the results better match the characters he judges. But again, there’s some charm to the bugs that may still be around, as Dave showed me with a bipedal hamburger character. He imported it as normal, and Cornelius buffed the strength off the chart (it was something like 274, if I recall correctly). Clearly, the burger would have been an intense opponent!

Dave discussing upcoming features for the game. Stay tuned and keep battling!

The Finish

There’s no one reason why a project fails, but usually it has to do with rewards that are too pricey, a funding goal that’s a bit out of reach, bad timing, or myriad other things in life that can get in the way of success (I had finals! I had a baby! My cat got sick! Portal 2 came out!). That’s just kind of how life is. 

Last week, I interviewed the creators behind a failed Kickstarter project called graFighters. Their story was an interesting one, largely because they're likely one of the most successful failed projects we've seen. After falling about $17k short of their $20k goal, they went on to raise $200k from a private investor who found them on Kickstarter. This is about as close to a Cinderella story as it gets in the world of game development. A few media outlets picked up their story, and the focus shifted to the fact that it's not just individuals like you and me who are looking for interesting projects on Kickstarter. It's also serious investors and companies looking for the next big hit.

But let's backtrack a little here. The graFighters story struck me as especially interesting because it was ultimately a story about failure, and what you can gain from failing. While there a lot of amazing successes on Kickstarter, there are also projects that seem to do almost everything right, but still aren't able to pick up the momentum they need to make it.

Take, for example, these two projects:

Scroll Ninja by Rei Kagetsuki

The Hyrtl Simulacrum by Jeanne Kelly

Both had cool ideas, personal pitch videos, and nice rewards. I'd check in on their projects every couple of days, hoping they'd get that big burst of funding that happens when enough people have passed your project around, fallen in love with your concept, and realized they'd be fools not to pledge.

But it never happened.

And yet, not reaching their goal on Kickstarter didn't mean the end of the road. As Jeanne said in a note to her backers:

"I want to say thank you again to all of you that pledged your support. Knowing that so many people appreciate the work makes it easy to carry on with this project. I'll continue to adapt and refine the piece in the hope to see it brought to fruition."

It's something we see all the time -- project creators who are absolutely committed to their work, and undaunted by the specter of failure. In fact, failure becomes as integral to their projects as success.

Putting yourself out there on Kickstarter can be both exciting and terrifying. Nearly everyone who works at Kickstarter has done a project, myself included. As someone who is more than a bit terrified of coming out from behind her computer screen, making a video and promoting the project was a giant uphill battle. Anxiety sets in and you find yourself thinking "What if nobody likes this?" or "What if I work really hard but still don't make it?" The funny thing is, even the most confident, outgoing project creators I've talked to are plagued by these same anxieties. You walk into this knowing that failure is always a possibility. 

graFighters - An online fighting game for your hand drawn characters

If you've been following Kickstarter for a while, you may remember a game project from last fall called graFighters. Its premise was simple: doodle a character, upload it to the game, and immediately engage in PvP battle against other users' doodles. Unfortunately, even though graFighters had a fantastic pitch video (as you can see above), it just wasn't able to pick up enough traction to reach its goal of $20,000.

But that's not where the story ends. Through their Kickstarter project, Dave and Eric, graFighters' two-man development team, managed to attract the attention of a private investment firm that saw potential in their game. Even though their Kickstarter project didn't turn out quite the way they had hoped, they learned a lot from the experience, built a great game, and ended up raising a wee bit more than the initial $20,000 they'd hoped for. Below, Dave looks back on the Kickstarter experience and tells us where they are now:

How long have you and Eric been working on graFighters? Is this something you started developing while in school?

Eric and I have been working on graFighters for about two years. We came up with the idea at the end of our junior year. We graduated last year and just completed a year of grad school this year at Syracuse University. We have been friends since our freshmen year of college and have lived together since.

We actually came up with the idea while sitting in class (when we were supposed to be taking notes). We each looked at each other's paper -- I had this sweet dragon drawn, and Eric had a really cool ninja. We then proceeded to silently argue the rest of class about whose drawing would win in a fight. We decided there would really be only one way to settle this. That’s what spawned graFighters.

"Floppysaurus": Watch out! This floppy herbivore is faster than a slinky down a staircase.

GraFighters is a fantastic concept for a game. Are you artists/illustrators yourselves?

Eric is a designer and I am a designer/programmer. We are both artistically minded but wouldn’t consider ourselves amazing illustrators;  we're more doodlers. We love drawing and creating anything and that’s really what graFighters is about. Whether you are 6- years-old or 80-years-old, whether you have drawing skills like Da Vinci or have never drawn in your life, graFighters will bring your creation to life.

"ImaSharkBoat": Half Shark, half Dinosaur, half boat.

"Zenny": Loves nature, longs walks on the beach, and the occasional fight where he knocks teeth out.

So you guys launched a project on Kickstarter last fall, but didn't end up reaching your goal. Did you learn anything from the experience? If you were to do it again, what would you do differently?

1.  Give great and tangible rewards. We gave cheesy and funny things like, “virtual high fives” which I assume aren’t that amazing compared to what $20 dollars could get you elsewhere. A lot of the great successes on Kickstarter have used it almost as a way to handle preorders, where they ship products to consumers once they are made.

2.  Promote it yourselves. We kinda assumed that everyone would just magically come. We really didn’t give promoting our page the time it deserved.

3.  Make your goal realistic. We went for $20,000 (go big or go home right?), but we ended up not even coming close. If we had to do it again we would do way less.

You recently announced some pretty exciting news about GraFighters. Can you tell us a bit about how that happened, and where this will allow you to take GraFighters in the future?