The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[matt]

I'm not sure if the Nintendo audience is big into indie or digital downloads, so I'm not sure if indies on WiiU is a good fit. First party games always make or break Nintendo platforms, but I feel like Nintendo hasn't released anything that is a "killer app" - at least to me.

I enjoyed Super Mario 3D World, but it wasn't amazing. A lot of the 3D aspect of it is frustrating because you fall off the edge of platforms and whatnot. Still, it was much more inspired than New Super Mario Bros. U, which is basically the same as the Wii one.

DKC: Tropical Freeze is just not exciting to me for some reason. I loved the SNES ones back in the day, but I felt like the 3DS one (which is same as the Wii one), and for whatever reason it didn't grab me. Apparently Tropical Freeze is more of the same...

Still, there aren't killer apps for PS4 or Xbone. Everyone seems to love Titanfall, but it is coming to Xbox 360 and PC, so it's not exactly an exclusive.

[ranger_lennier]

It does seem like Nintendo made the Wii U without really knowing what they wanted to do with the gamepad. Nintendo Land is fun enough, but I didn't feel the urge to keep coming back to it. And there's definitely not enough games that I could recommend it as someone's sole gaming device. That said, I think that at this time it has better exclusives than either the Xbox One or the PS4. If you don't mind getting third party games on PC, I'd say the Wii U is a good console choice.

[matt]

It definitely has better exclusives at this time, but for the first year of its life (which the PS4 and Xbox One are in), it had nothing. I am hopeful that things change on the exclusives front for PS4/Xbox One. Hopefully things get better for the WiiU too.

[ranger_lennier]

Well, we're scarcely past the 1-year mark for the Wii U (US release was November 18, 2012). But those first several months after launch was a serious drought. The first post-launch title I got is Pikmin 3, released Aug. 4, 2013.

[LobsterSundew]

Back in Fall 2013 Nintendo was trying to get dev kits for the Wii U into the hands of the teams of promising looking Kickstarter campaigns. It seems to have slowed down since and it looks like HTML5-based games using engines such as Construct 2 are developers they are now approaching.

Shrug Island is an adventure game with a strong art style that uses warm colours.

There really hasn't been many video game campaigns worth noting that launched recently. The quality just plummeted.

The Mini Museum is a mixed media project that caught my attention as potentially one of the strongest presented campaigns I've seen. It creates a sense of scarcity for the rewards, the video is well made and it builds up confidence in the skills of the project creator.

[matt]

Yeah, Nintendo is really trying to make indie development easy on the WiiU easy. We were applying to be licensed developers, but I'm not really sure what happened with that. I think they were supposed to get back, and I never followed up. I suspect they will have no shortage of indie games given that I think they announced they are giving free Unity licenses to Nintendo developers. (That doesn't help us because we don't use Unity...)

The mini-museum looks super cool! What a fun project. Kickstarter is so awesome!

[LobsterSundew]

The developers of the binaural horror game Papa Sangre have their new project Audio Defence: Zombie Arena. Years ago I remember watching the trailer (with headphones) for their first game. There is only 19 backers after 24 hours so I suspect something is not right with their marketing strategy. They also don't support any platform that I own.

Gunscape is a Quake-like FPS, Depth Test is an interesting submarine constructor concept that could be fleshed out more and Darkblood Chronicles is a JRPG-style game that has some disturbing pixel art. Those were ones at least worth a mention, but there hasn't really been a campaign launching this week that excited me. A lot of small "dead on arrival" campaigns are flooding the Recently Launched feed this time of the month. Even Darkest Dungeon is slowing down according to the Kicktraq data and my own graph.

[gagaplex]

The developers of the binaural horror game Papa Sangre have their new project Audio Defence: Zombie Arena. Years ago I remember watching the trailer (with headphones) for their first game. There is only 19 backers after 24 hours so I suspect something is not right with their marketing strategy. They also don't support any platform that I own.

I like the idea of an audio-based game, but I too don't have a product to run that on. I also notice they plan to put in features typically used in free-to-play games (diamonds that you can buy to speed up progress), which I always find disconcerting to see in games that are not f-2-p.

[matt]

I was really excited about Papa Sangre, but I found the game much too hard. While I am a huge believer in binaural audio, I don't think it's enough to determine positions.

Neverending Nightmares actually supports binaural audio but I haven't actually added an option for it. You can add -headphones to the command line settings in steam if you want to hear it. I think the game sounds way better with it if you are using headphones of course.

[RightClickSaveAs]

Oh wow, -headphones sounds great! The monster encounter is really noticeable. I'm gonna leave that on for sure, I use headphones pretty much all the time.

It seems like there are some really cool things that could be done with binaural audio (this video was my first introduction to the concept: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA ), are any other titles that are planning to use it? It seems like it'd be great for something like the Oculus Rift or even just a first person horror game like Outlast, but I have no idea how difficult that would be to pull off.