I think pretty much everything has already been said about the flaws, but I'll touch on one more thing:
Unlike the construction of a building, if we don't reach our immediate financial goals, we will not be left with a building with no roof, open to destruction from the elements!
EVERY DOLLAR WE RAISE will make a HUGE difference. "The Alone" is being built in various phases of development - and each phase requires funding. Any portion of our target goal of $350,000 will move the game ahead.
This certainly sounds completely unrealistic, but giving him benefit of doubt that it's possible, he should elaborate on how they'd do that. What features would be missing? What kind of development phases do they have? How much to actually have a playable barebones model of what they want to do at the very minimum?
Anyway, setting up a successful crowd funding campaign isn't easy. If you want to get a few hundred thousand dollars, you really need to work for it. Do your research on how successful campaigns did it - the most successful ones generally have a big name behind them, but there are successful ones without such too. Look at how they organized their page and presented the info, what kind of things they concentrated on in their text, what kind of things they concentrated on in their video, what kind of things they brought up to the table at first (gameplay video, art, etc etc), what kind of perks they offered to backers etc etc. What kind of PR they did before the campaign started, what kind of PR did they do during the campaign?. What kind of budget did they have?
It's also important to look at kickstarters that failed. Why did they fail? What did they do wrong? What was different about them to more successful ones?
You also need to be prepared to take criticism well and be critical of yourself. Having some feedback from a good writer could've made the text on the page look a lot more professional already (though wouldn't have been nearly enough).
I can buy that he's passionate and even that he might have some good ideas, but it's just not nearly enough. I wish him well though.
[*]$350k on IndieGoGo from a first-time developer is extremely ambitious, and I'm not sure how the salary breaks down either. The $100 backer level implies that the game will be finished in June 2018 (so they expect to be developing for two years), but he mentions they have 16 developers on the team and there's $162k allocated for wages. Unless my maths is wonky, each member of staff is going to be averaging $10k over a two year period, which seems crazy low. Even if some of those employees won't be on the project for two whole years (which seems likely), I still don't see how the figures add up in order to have more than about five people on a reasonable salary.
To be fair, it says they would have only a few people on full time, and the rest are contractors.
The other disingenuous thing is that this woman is obviously related to him in some capacity so the over the top praise is just too much.
Yeah it's his mother according to the page.
I don't see anything wrong with taking your mother in to the project, but yeah you should be especially careful with too much praise in that case.
$19000 for "Software" is the only mention I can see of actual development costs? Nothing about hiring artists or animators as far as I can tell.
To be fair again, the software costs are for the development software. The salary contains the development costs - they present at least one animator at the page and I'd guess the 16 people mentioned contains some artists too (well I'd hope it does). But yeah, not very convincing either way.
If he is american he made a mistake to make it on indiegogo. Nobody visits indiegogo, and gives a lot of problems with the payments going through for some people. We were basically forced to use it some years ago (most european countries couldnt use kickstarter) and it was the worst decission ever.
Havent seen the project of hojr friend, but if it is good enough, tell him to try on kickstarter, mahbe he has more luck there.
Unfortunately, kickstarter wouldn't help at this stage at all. It's just not good enough. Not even near. I don't wanna be harsh, but that's the reality.
