Game designer Jeeyon Shim’s The Snow Queen moves off Kickstarter

Jeeyon Schim, an award-winning designer of tabletop games is now crowdfunding to fund a brand new project called The Snow QueenThe keepsake fantasy video game ‘The Keepake Fantasy Game’ is a magical blend of art and reflection built on chess-based gameplay mechanics. After raising more than $100,000 for previous projects on Kickstarter, this time they’re doing it on her own. This is the For The Snow QueenShim will be completely independent and abandon the crowd-funding platform to make something custom. And so far, it’s working: Shim’s The Snow Queen reached full funding — $8,000 — in 90 minutes following its kick off. It’s currently raised 162% of that goal at the time of writing, with 30 days to go.

“I want to put this out as a helpful example for people who feel tied to existing platforms to launch a project,” Shim told Polygon in an interview ahead of the crowdfunding campaign. “I want to show that it’s possible to do things, to launch a project, on your terms.”

Image: Jeeyon Shim Games

The Snow QueenShim described it as a fairytale, fantasy, two-player game, which uses the mechanics of Chess to propel the story. The two main characters, Snow Queen and village girl, are the center of everything. Details of these players’ creations will be made before the game begins. Their worlds will mirror one another for the Snow queen and village girl player-characters. Eventually, both of them will be saved.

“It feels really fun to make something so directly drawn from fairytales and folktales, but not a direct, Eurocentric interpretation,” Shim said.

As the game proceeds, each player records prompts and keeps track of their progress in a journal. The players must take chess pieces, much like in actual chess, but following different rules to save one world — the player with the most pieces on the board wins. The match ends and the players complete the keepake journal, which includes art and stories. All players Are playing against each other, but they’re also creating something together, the story they’re building out as they play.

“While it’s not using chess the way that we understand it, the way the pieces move on the board and the tension that’s created over the course of the game is the momentum that’s built around the characters you create before playing the chess match,” Shim said.

Part of that gameplay is embedded in the keepsake model that Shim and frequent collaborator Shing Yin Khor perfected with last year’s Memory: Field GuideA live narrative game called. It combined creative writing with role-playing in character. The Snow Queen isn’t a live game, but players will be creating a keepsake over the three-act story: a handmade anthology journal with original fiction, art, and poetry based on what happens during the chess-like game. Shim showed a game of The Snow Queen on the Party of One podcast earlier in February, and said it’s a quick but thorough peek at the game’s character creation, worldbuilding, and gameplay.

Find out more The Snow QueenShim creates two products The Snow QueenBook and The Snow Queen zine. These can be purchased as PDFs or as physical products. Each includes both the core ruleset as well as 30 NPC playbooks. (All supporters will receive a Quick Start manual, too, for players that don’t want to wait for the full copy.) However, the book will contain additional materials such as original artwork and illustrations, plus full text. Cold MirrorFull text available at. The Snow Queen’s keepsake demo created during the crowdfunding process.

Shim can complete their text and create rewards such as digital products and physical goods by using a crowdfunding campaign. Without the help of a platform like Kickstarter, Shim has designed their own website and storefront to fund the project — something they call a “different kind of crowdfund.”

Shim told Polygon they’d been looking to move off Kickstarter for a while now, but that the platform’s recent decision to move to blockchain technology provided the push to do it now. Aziz Hasan (Kiwi) announced the shift in December. It was met with anger by creators. The announcement was a huge surprise for the community, especially tabletop game creators which have accounted for more than one third of Kickstarter’s total revenue from crowdfunding in the past. Soon after the announcement, creators took to social media to lambast Kickstarter for many reasons.

Kickstarter, for its part, maintains that any changes made to the now decade-old crowdfunding platform will be done in a sustainable way, including the implementation of what it calls a “carbon negative blockchain.” Celo says it “offsets” its carbon footprint by planting trees with Project Wren. Carbon offsetting is “a way of balancing the scales on pollution,” according to Vox, though it’s not the most effective way to slow the climate crisis; that’s minimizing emissions. Some organizations, like Greenpeace, call carbon offsetting “a distraction from the real solutions to climate change.” Shim also pointed to Kickstarter’s response to the backlash; it felt like the company simply ignored creator concerns.

“It went against the way I thought of them as a company, because I loved Kickstarter,” Shim said. “I’ve never been treated poorly by them. They are a big reason why I’m able to make creative work for a living, but seeing that response, it felt like something fundamental has shifted.”

Image: Jeeyon Shim Games

And so, Shim’s built out their own website designed specifically to crowdfund for The Snow Queen, in addition to the Patreon that helps provide a “sustainable financial foundation” for their work. Shim is still using systems from SquareSpace and payment processing from Stripe, but they’ve taken time to research those options and find something they’re comfortable with.

Since Kickstarter’s announcement, creators have started building a playbook for moving off the platform. Spike Trotman, an independent comics creator, is one person that’s moved away from Kickstarter — and it worked. Trotman moved crowdfunding for The Poorcraft Cookbook off Kickstarter and has already surpassed the cookbook’s crowdfunding goal by 300%. Ex-Zine Quest founders started a new project and are slowly moving away form Kickstarter. Zine Month, which is ongoing now, is phasing out Kickstarter — next year, crowdfunding will happen offsite. Others are also looking at different crowdfunding platforms. like Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast moving to IndieGoGo.

“I think that people forget that a lot of these truisms for the platform, that are specific to the platform, weren’t made because they’re in Kickstarter’s manual,” Shim said. “They became de facto practice because someone tried it and it worked. Diversifying crowdfunding projects, diversifying independent creatives in their respective fields is also going to be someone trying it and it works.”

Shim hopes that The Snow Queen’s potential success will encourage other creators to do things in ways that work for them. For Shim, that’s testing out a crowdfund that works at a “human pace,” no real-time progress tracker or campaign timeline “that maintains a pace of rigorous urgency.” It means a better work life balance for Shim, with the same stability that crowdfunding ensures.

“If the project is good and compelling to people, I really strongly believe that independent creators can do this on their own terms, including if they want to work with a platform,” Shim said. “They can do that on their own terms as well, because they will have an option to walk away and do it a different way.”