Jeeyon Shim carved a new path in crowdfunding for her keepsake games

theverge.com:

For Jeeyon Shim, making games wasn’t a hobby, but a necessity. After she was laid off from her outdoor education job due to the pandemic, the self-taught designer started doing full-time game design in 2020. She quickly amassed a loyal following for her work in narrative-driven “keepsake” games, an experimental offshoot of role-playing games that involve deeply personal, player-created artifacts.

In 2022, Shim is once again venturing into new territory. She decided to crowdfund her latest game, The Snow Queen, on a Squarespace website that she built herself — totally circumventing Kickstarter, which many see as the obvious choice for creative projects. The Snow Queen was fully funded in 90 minutes. It ended up raising over $30,000 (384 percent of its original $8,000 goal). “I wanted to see where I was with my own audience,” she says. “How many people could I attract to a project on that project’s merits, and on my merits?”

“I started in this niche of game design as a direct part of my last job,” Shim says of her previous career as a program designer / coordinator at a company that taught outdoor skills via live-action roleplay. During this time she also dabbled in games and established herself with small experimental projects. Shim’s first crowdfund was for Wait For Me, a journaling game with designer Kevin Kulp. They initially asked for $500 — a rookie lowball that Shim says she’ll never do again (Wait For Me ultimately received over $22,000).

When Shim began a long-term collaborative partnership with artist / designer Shing Yin Khor, she knew she’d found her footing. Starting with Field Guide to Memory, the pair defined keepsake games as both a genre and a useful shorthand for their work. (“Shing and I aren’t the