Hello, everyone! My name is Jason and I am an indie game developer working on a game called New Fire. It's a fantasy RPG set in a world inspired by Precolumbian Mesoamerica and the cultures and myths of the Aztecs, Mayas, and other people from that region. You can check out the game website http://www.newfirerpg.com/ and/or the Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/New.Fire.Rpg.

The game finished, but I do not have the budget for artwork, so I was hoping to run a Kickstarter event or some other sort of crowd funding to raise the money for some really good artwork and layout. Does anybody have any advice on how to go about this? I would be particularly interested in any examples--are there other indie game designers who have run successful crowd funding drives who I might be able to check out and learn from?

I know Kickstarter is kind of the standard for crowd funding, but there are several others as well--does anybody have any thoughts or experiences to share from sites other than Kickstarter? Also, what are peoples' thoughts on running crowd funding drives on multiple websites? For example, would it be a good idea to run a drive on Kickstarter and on Rockethub? Or is this just asking for trouble?

Finally, I am trying to determine what my expectations should be for a project such as mine. I've been in contact with several artists, and there is one company of artists who do very good work that are interested in doing all the artwork and layout for around $4,000-$5,000 (I'm still waiting on final quotes, but it should be in that range). Is it reasonable to expect to raise an amount like that for an indie game with a decent following online, or is that too much to expect?

Thank you very much!

If your game has a very healthy community of people online who're excited about it, you can do that. A better move, though, in the absence of that community or any track record, is to modify your art budget downward (this shouldn't be hard - you obviously have some design sense, that and a few shrewd buys at a stock-photo site can take you a long way), and save the lavish stuff for the second edition. Making your game look good on the cheap takes longer, but you can take that time to make inroads in the online community and build interest in what you're doing.

Multiple drives on different sites is probably considered a no-no by the sites themselves.

Why not search Kickstarter for the phrase "rpg," find some successfully funded projects, and contact the people who ran them?