A general video games Kickstarter thread

Kickstarter got me again. This time for Unwritten and Starbase Orion. So I'm up to 14 projects backed so far, all game related.

Interestingly, I've started to use Kickstarter as it was originally intended. In the early days of Double Fine and Wasteland I treated Kickstarter as a cheap pre-order system with a little risk attached. But now that I've seen projects like (the very excellent) FTL get released, and I can buy them for pretty much the same price as backing, I now treat Kickstarter more like art patronage rather than a pre-order. I'm still very glad it exists.

Aww thought Unwritten was based on the comic.

The first thing I thought of with Unwritten was King of Dragon Pass, but they claim in the RPS interview they'd never played it until it was brought up.

This is the first I've heard of Unwritten. It seems fantastic. Thanks for the link!

The Dreamfall Chapters KS is up.

Interestingly, it seems to be divorced from FunCom but _with_ Ragnar and the gang.

$850k goal seems reasonable. Planned release Nov 2014.

Some top quality Norwegian beardage in the pitch video as well

Delver's Drop - ARPG/Rogue-Like. It looks like A Link to The Past, except if you made A Link to the Past with our superior third millennium technologies. Feature list includes RPg stuffs, looting, loot customization, puzzles, destruction of monsters, more looting, and of course death. There's a little commentary in the video about a permadeath system where some progress by the previous character can be retained, but I didn't pick up on the details of what that means yet.

Coming to PC and tablet type devices if it makes it's 75k (the project just got started).

The Unwritten Kickstarter finishes in 3 days and is going to be a close finish. It features distinctive shadow puppet art and a tribal "oral-history" storytelling style. Its a turn based strategy game about a nomad tribe.

First video of Wasteland 2

That's looking really promising.

Awesome. Got a really good Wasteland/Fallout 1 vibe going on. I'm really excited by the apparent large amount of text descriptions and interaction.

Yep, very excited by what I saw in that update. I think we need a dedicated thread for this game as well.

So hey. Wildman got cancelled.

Please to be linking the link.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gaspoweredgames/wildman-an-evolutionary-action-rpg/posts/403739

Chris Taylor implies that he acquired some ther funding from people impressed by the Kickstarter pledges, even though they fell short of the goal. We'll see what comes out of that.

Interesting. Hopefully that's a good sign for GPG, even if they're stuff never hit it off with me.

I know last minute Kickstarter miracles can happen, but Unwritten looks like it will be , uh, unwritten. I was really excited by the concept. Hopefully something else will come along and make it work out.

The Kickstarter for ASYLUM looks pretty good.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/agustincordes/asylum-kickstart-the-horror

In an RPS interview he said publishers were interested in funding Wildman on top of the Kickstarter money:

Apparently obsidian got similar calls from publishers wanting to piggy back on all the kick starter pledges too. It seems like crossing the streams to me - you could readily end up with none of the benefits of kick starter re creative freedoms and all of the downsides of publisher deals (No IP rights, no talking externally during development, diverting time and resources to meeting milestones, publisher interference/restrictions on game content etc)

The difference with Wildman is that it wasn't going to be funded. So it's a case of taking what you can get, I think.

People (in the broadest sense - not looking at anyone in particular) need to really understand that despite all the wankery that Kickstarter would 'democratise' game development, it's just a market for funding games. It's not the only source of funds (and if you look carefully, a number of titles that get funded by Kickstarter also have other investors that are paying in more than the crowdsourced money) and once you've gotten that cash, nothing stops any developer from signing on with a publisher / other source of funding.

The success or failure of a Kickstarter is also being used by investors to gauge the popularity of a title when looking at further investment. Wildman got ridiculous levels of press coverage and didn't get anywhere near their target, which can be taken as a sign that gamers don't want that title.

No worries, a last-minute Kickstarter miracle happened. $78k/$75k.

So, uh, good news, Heavy Gear Assault was announced today.

Bad news:

1. It's not using kickstarter, but pledging via it's own site.
2. It has zero in game footage or screenshots.
3. They don't have anything that describes basic gameplay
4. Nowhere does it mention who's working on the title or their credentials (if you dig you see it will bring you to MekTek, but who the heck are they other than guys who repackaged MW4 for a free release?)
5. Their stretch goals all look like they have an extra zero on them.

So my wallets just leaping into my hands for this one.


It annoys the heck outta me because I love Heavy Gear, and it really should NOT be that hard to get me to pledge for the damned thing, but somehow these guys have the crappiest two-bit launch I've ever seen. And if you can't get a Heavy Gear enthusiast to pledge, you've screwed up.

Yeah, I saw that. I love, love, love Heavy Gear as well, but I am not pledging for this at all, not until a lot more is put on the table.

Oh, update, press release:
http://www.stompybot.com/?p=176

Still vague, and sounds even more ambitious than what they had previously, while not really telling us some of the most basic things, like is it an FPS or a TPS?

Who cares, just give them ten million dollars lololol

So it's only gladiatorial combat? Fuck that noise.

That's basically what MWO is. =)

Oh, oddly, I found some more info hidden in: http://www.heavygear.com/about

which was under "What is Heavy Gear", but also contains info about the team and some scope of the game.

Which is why I don't play that either.

Yeah, I would've preferred something larger, but any type of Massively in the message would've turned me off anyway, just because they are already unproven.

Yeah, the first HG had a dynamic war thingy that, while dodgy, was awesome when it worked. Why can't they do that again here? Ugh.

I liked it too, though it seemed rather one sided. I don't know if its because the default was one side, or because that same default was also the side you played in the campaign, but the other side was very behind when it came to number of players.

It does sound like they are trying some different stuff, like sponsoring other players, I'm assuming that's sort of like gambling on another player's success. That could be kind of neat. If WoT had that, I'd toss some money down on Tman and let it ride =)


Also, it looks like the lead designer is Jack Mamais judging from the top pledge, who was the lead designer on Heavy Gear 2 and Farcry. Which is something they really ought to be more prominent about.

I wish someone would start a Kickstarter to remake Chaos Overlords. I doubt that anyone else even knows what I'm talking about, but man that was a fun little game.

I never played Chaos Overlords, but I've only heard good things about it. Apparently it's eminently replayable.

Yes, both SP and MP. The units in the game are a riot.

Castle Story UPDATE

Looks like everyone who pledged will soon be getting the prototype since beta is taking longer than they originally said.

That game sucked up a lot my time back in school. Really good fun and highly replayable IIRC.

Is there any easy way of searching the Kickstarter page for pledger account names? I've tried the default search, but that doesn't seem to do it.

There is a sequel in the works... Google it! They have a facebook page, but that's it.

EDIT: Days later, I figure I should post an actual link.

Oh man, that is awesome news! I'd buy the sequel if it shipped out. Just like Jam, I sunk a ton of time into that game. What pleasant nights those were!