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Eat Poop You Cat for iOS and Android!

Eat Poop You Cat is a social game with no winners or losers, just hilarious phrases and drawings!

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Eat Poop You Cat for iOS and Android!

Eat Poop You Cat for iOS and Android!

Eat Poop You Cat for iOS and Android!

Eat Poop You Cat for iOS and Android!

Eat Poop You Cat for iOS and Android!

Eat Poop You Cat is a social game with no winners or losers, just hilarious phrases and drawings!

Eat Poop You Cat is a social game with no winners or losers, just hilarious phrases and drawings!

Eat Poop You Cat is a social game with no winners or losers, just hilarious phrases and drawings!

Eat Poop You Cat is a social game with no winners or losers, just hilarious phrases and drawings!

Steve McClellan
Steve McClellan
Steve McClellan
Steve McClellan
1 Campaign |
Oakland, United States
$341 USD 7 backers
1% of $20,000 Flexible Goal Flexible Goal

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"I’m genuinely excited at the idea of trying this" - Gamezebo

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ARE YOU MAKING CATS EAT POOP???

No. (They do that all on their own.)

Eat Poop You Cat is a mobile game, inspired by the parlour games of the French Surrealist movement, that involves bizarre drawings, word play, and perhaps more insight into your friends' heads than you bargained for! And with so many of today's games focusing on competition and high scores, Eat Poop You Cat instead focuses on fun, creativity, and collaboration.


The Game

Eat Poop You Cat originated as a party game played with pencil and paper. We want to make it into a mobile game, so you can play wherever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want!

Here's how it'll work:

  • You sign into the app with your Facebook account, and then pick a handful of Facebook friends that you want to play with.
  • When the game begins, everyone starts by writing a sentence or phrase for the next player to try to draw. This phrase can be anything you think up! 

  • Once you've done that, the text you wrote will be sent to another player in the game, and someone else's text will be sent to you! When this happens, it'll be your turn to draw something that describes what they wrote!

  • When you send your drawing off, it's then the next player's turn to write something that describes your drawing, but without knowing what the text was that inspired it!

  • Then the next player has to make a drawing based on that text, and so on and so on. Write, draw, write, draw, etc. At each stage, the initial sentence gets more and more confused, and the drawings get more and more ridiculous!

  • Once your initial phrase has gone through 10 iterations of this, the game ends, and everyone gets to see the entire sequence of phrases and pictures from start to finish! At that point, you can share your favorite drawings on social media!

And that's the whole game! There are no winners or losers, just surreal drawings and funny phrases!


The History

The history of Eat Poop You Cat is shrouded myths and legends, but Eat Poop You Cat, LLC's resident amateur historian (myself), believes that it probably has its roots in the surrealist parlour games of the early 20th century, such as Consequences and Exquisite Corpse. And like "Exquisite Corpse", the name "Eat Poop You Cat" probably arose from the game itself. Exquisite Corpse got its name from the first time the game was played, in Paris, c. 1925, wherefrom arose the phrase, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau." ("The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.") Simone Collinet described the scene in 1968:

It was during one of those idle and tedious evenings, frequent at that time - contrary to subsequent descriptions which benefit from hindsight - that the Exquisite Corpse was invented.

Someone said: 'How about playing Consequences? That's entertaining.' So we played the traditional game of Consequences. Monsieur meets Madame, he says to her, and so on. But not for long. The game rapidly became something else. 'Just write down anything at all', Prévert suggested.

In the next round, the Exquisite Corpse was born. From Prévert's pen, as a matter of fact, for he wrote the first words, so perfectly complemented by those following; one wrote: 'shall drink the new'; the next: 'wine'.

Once their imagination was let loose, it couldn't be stopped. André exclaimed with delight and immediately saw in it one of those wellsprings or natural outpourings of inspiration he so loved to discover. A torrent was unleashed.

Even more reliably than with automatic writing, one was sure of jarring amalgams. Violent surprises prompted admiration, laughter, and stirred an unquenchable craving for new images - images inconceivable to one brain alone - born from the involuntary, unconscious and unpredictable mixing of three or four heterogeneous minds. Some sentences took on an aggressively subversive existence. Others veered into an excessive absurdity. The wastepaper basket played its part. One tends to forget that.

The fact remains that the suggestive power of these arbitrary juxtapositions of words was so startling and dazzling and validated Surrealist theories and inclinations in such a striking way that the game became a system, a method of research, a means of exaltation and stimulus, a mine, a treasure-trove and finally, perhaps, a drug.

[From Surrealist Games, Alastair Brotchie, 1995]

The exquisite corpses of Simone Collinet, André Breton, and Jacques Prévert have declined our request for comments, but we believe they would favor what we undertake here: to bring that craving for inconceivable images and subversive juxtapositions of words to new, even more heterogeneous minds.


The Money

Perhaps the most important questions in crowdfunding are, "why are you asking for our money?" and, "what will you do with it?" Here're my answers. I'm asking for your money because, while I happen to be an experienced programmer, I'm not qualified to make a robust, polished mobile app.

I initially attempted to create this game all on my own. I spent a few weeks coding a prototype backend in Scala and ran it on Heroku. But then I got stuck. I'm a pretty competent backend engineer, but user interfaces and graphic design are complete mysteries to me, as the months I spent banging my head on the wall trying to create a serviceable android frontend can attest.

Now, with more time and effort, I might have been able to eek out something functional. But in the marketplace for mobile games, functional just doesn't cut it. If I want anyone to actually give this game a second glance, it has to work great, and look spiffy. And the best way for me to make that happen, is to pay some real professionals with proven track records.

That's where Zapporoo comes in. I contacted a few freelancers and several companies who were in the business of building mobile apps, and Zappooroo is the company I settled on. Their services include programming the full application stack, for iOS and Android, and covering the costs and responsibilities of hosting the app's backend for the first full year.

Having never built something quite like this before, I felt it was important to get this high level of professional help. If I overestimate my abilities, if I bite off more than I can chew, and the app turns into an unreliable mess, it will never take off. I've seen too many apps fail that way.

So I talked with the people at Zaporoo about my idea, and they loved it! I spent a few thousand dollars of my own money on the initial design phase, and everything they've shown me looks great, and has convinced me that they understand the game itself, and how best to bring it to market.

Eat Poop You Cat - Blueprint Diagram
Eat Poop You Cat - Blueprint Diagram

Now it's time to move forward with actually building the app, but the $20,000 price tag is out of reach for me to fund personally.  So that's why I'm turning to the crowdfunding community for help!

I've been a fan of crowdfunding for years, and I've personally pledged more than $8,500 to hundreds of different projects. I've seen the power crowdfunding has to build communities, to help creators connect to their patrons, to and bring fabulous new ideas to life. I can't tell you how excited I am to see that magic happen with a project of my very own!

Cheers, friends! And thank you so much for your help!


Risks and challenges

The first and most obvious risk is that we fail to raise enough money.  I might be able to bring the price down by cutting corners or scrapping features, but I don't want to do that.  I want to bring you the best possible version of the game.  So any money I can't raise here will have to be raised either from my personal savings or through loans.  I'm pretty relentless and I have no intention of abandoning this project before it's even had the chance to thrive, so I plan to make the money happen one way or another. But depending on how much money remains to be raised after the campaign, it may cause delays to my expected delivery dates.

Another risk for this project is that, once the game is complete, it will fail to find a significant audience. If we raise the money, Zapporoo will cover the cost of server time, disk space, and bandwidth for the first year. After that, the hope is that the costs can be covered with advertisements and in-app purchases. However, if the game doesn't acquire a large enough audience, and loses money at a rate greater than what I can personally cover, I will have to shut it down. I truly believe that Eat Poop You Cat has the potential to become wildly popular, and I'm willing to put my money on the line for that.  I plan to promote the game with ads on Google and Facebook, through social media such as Twitter and Instagram, and on any gaming blogs or reviews sites that will listen to me. However, because of the social nature of the game itself, I'm hoping that our biggest source of promotion will be word-of-mouth: friends inviting their friends to play!

The other potential risk is that Zapporoo will fail to produce a satisfactory game. Since I'm not producing the game myself, I don't have complete control over the outcome. However, Zapporoo has a strong portfolio of successful past projects. (https://zapporoo.com/portfolio.html) And working with them on the initial design phase has me convinced that they share my vision for the game, and are capable to take direction when necessary. So I don't believe there is a significant risk of them producing an unacceptable product.

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Choose your Perk

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A Nibble of Poop

$20 USD
Get exclusive digital content + BE ONE OF THE FIRST TO PLAY THE GAME! You'll get an early beta version to try out before the game goes to market! (Plus, I will sing your name to my cat over and over to the tune of "Row, row, row your boat.")
Estimated Shipping
September 2016
3 claimed

A Whiff of Poop

$1 USD
YOU GET OUR ETERNAL GRATITUDE! (Plus, I will whisper your name into my cat's ear as he sleeps.)
Estimated Shipping
June 2016
0 claimed

A Taste of Poop

$5 USD
GET EXCLUSIVE DIGITAL CONTENT, including the hilarious outtakes from our Kickstarter video and digital renderings of our favorite Eat Poop You Cat drawings! (Plus, I will shout your name at my cat the next time he claws the couch or vomits on the floor.)
Estimated Shipping
June 2016
0 claimed

A Bite of Poop

$50 USD
Get exclusive content + the beta version of the game + A DRUNKENLY SCRAWLED POSTCARD THANKING YOU PERSONALLY FOR YOUR HELP! (Plus, I will spell your name with cat turds in my cat's litter box.)
Estimated Shipping
September 2016
0 claimed
Ships worldwide.

A Mouthful of Poop

$100 USD
Get exclusive content + the beta version of the game + A THANK YOU IN THE APP'S CREDITS SCREEN + A SIGNED SHEET FROM THE PAPER VERSION OF THE GAME PLAYED BY ME AND MY HILARIOUS FRIENDS + A PERSONALIZED EAT POOP YOU CAT COFFEE MUG! (Plus, I will call my cat by your name for a week.)
Estimated Shipping
September 2016
1 out of 100 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

A Bowlful of Poop

$500 USD
Get exclusive content + the beta version of the game + a thank you in the app's credits screen + a personalized coffee mug + AN INVITATION TO OUR PRIVATE LAUNCH PARTY IN OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA! (Plus, I will write your name in permanent marker on my cat's favorite toys. He plays fetch with them, and it's adorable.)
Estimated Shipping
October 2016
0 out of 20 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

A Banquet of Poop

$1,000 USD
Get exclusive content + the beta version of the game + a personalized coffee mug + an invitation to our private launch party + A PRODUCER CREDIT IN THE APP'S CREDITS SCREEN! (Plus, I will write a song about you on the ukulele and/or piano, and I will sing it to my cat until he learns to sing it himself or my fingers get tired, whichever comes first.)
Estimated Shipping
October 2016
0 out of 10 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

A World of Poop

$10,000 USD
Get exclusive content + the beta version of the game + an invitation to our private launch party + an executive producer credit in the app's credits screen + a personalized coffee mug + I WILL GET A SMALL PHRASE OR DRAWING OF YOUR DESIGN TATTOOED ON MY BODY! (Plus, should my cat ever, god forbid, shuffle off his mortal coil, I will make sure that your name will be the last words he hears before he leaves this Earth.)
Estimated Shipping
October 2016
0 out of 1 of claimed
Ships worldwide.

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