The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[matt]

Pathologic looks really good and a well put together campaign. I must admit the >70 hours of game length is a big turn off, but I backed anyway because it seems like it should be interesting. Also, I think "rather hard" in gamer speak translates to "completely impossible" for me...

[RightClickSaveAs]

Pathologic looks really good and a well put together campaign. I must admit the >70 hours of game length is a big turn off, but I backed anyway because it seems like it should be interesting. Also, I think "rather hard" in gamer speak translates to "completely impossible" for me...

Whoah, I did not catch the <70 hours part. That's really intimidating. I don't know how long the original Pathologic is to compare, because I haven't even gotten close to cracking that game open, but if it's anything at all like the original, I'd imagine a lot of the time is going to be just figuring out what's going on.

[matt]

I guess if you read carefully it's that long if you play all 3 character's completely unique narrative missions, so it's not QUITE that bad, but it seems like the game is still longer than I'd like. hahah

[matt]

The brilliant Rob Jagnow (and creator of my favorite part of Bioshock: Infinite - the amazing Industrial Revolution preorder game) is kickstarting a second season if his cloud rendered ARG Extrasolar. If you are interested in new and innovative games, it's definitely worth checking out.

[LobsterSundew]

Paradigm is a surreal adventure game with a sloth as an antagonist. There is an entertaining demo. I've mentioned this game before because I saw the developer talking on Twitter with the developer of Dropsy.

Super Pretentious Underground Dungeon looks like a joke campaign. 3 backers were pledging a total of $10,005. Then it dropped down to what it currenlty has.

Kraden's Crypt is a co-op rogue-like.

Exit Humanity is a 2D sidescrolling horror game.

Death to Spies 3 is an ambitious 3D steal action game.

Heroes Never Lose: Professor Puzzler's Perplexing Ploy is a puzzle game with pixel art superheros.

Kickstarter did some cosmetic changes to the platform. There is now a congratulations animation with bouncing colour balls on the funded message. I prefer it when backer avatars were large enough to distinguish what they were pictures of.

Pathologic has a good looking graph. I'll have to post it some other time. Its $55 tier is doing very well.

Like many other backers of Planetary Annihilation, I haven't received a Steam key even after going through the support ticket system.

The Kicktraq page shows that The Dark Phantom stalled out hard with just 41 backers. Its Greenlight campaign had over 600 comments, but the great majority of those were before the Kickstarter campaign was live. It was covered on Cliqist and someone from Destructoid mentioned it, but there hasn't really been coverage. I didn't find any Reddit posts during the campaign.

There are other decent looking games with campaigns I'm not finding any significant marketing attempts for.

My new Kickstarter guide is approaching 42,000 words as I cram more examples of past Kickstarter campaigns into it.

[matt]

Maybe all the game press are too busy trying to be the first to review Destiny to cover kickstarter campaigns? Some websites are spacing out their PAX coverage as well, so that may be keeping them busy.

We just announced our release date (September 26th), and I was hoping to get a few more of my press contacts to mention it, but I didn't get a reply from some... All things considered though, we got quite a few press mentions about the release date and the new trailer.

That's insane that you haven't gotten your key for Planetary Annihilation. I'm going to start the ball rolling on backer fulfillment early, so I can make sure backers can play the game at the same time or before everyone else... I was a bit miffed when I backed Among the Sleep and it was released on Steam before I got my key... It's tough doing fulfillment, and selling on Steam makes everything so easy, but I think backers should be the first thought when you run a campaign.

Thanks for all the links! I'll have to check out the projects more when I get a chance.

[LobsterSundew]

September 19th had new visual updates to Kickstarter itself again and a new terms of service.

I received my Steam key for Planetary Annihilation a few days after my previous post in this thread.

Reflex launched late on Friday. It is a 3D arena shooter with a custom map creation system in-game for players. It looks like it would need over 10,000 backers. Very interesting using large PNGs as the entire body of the project page. I saw this used in the Film category before.

Lost Homeland has stiff combat animations,

Retro-Pixel Castles is a RTS with a retro art style.

Blossom Tales is from people who worked on Rex Rocket.

No Pineapple Left Behind is a funny pitch and bizarre school simulation game where children become pineapples.

Mutiny is 3D pirate brawler.

GAME LOADING is trying to fund the finishing of a documentary about indie games.

The New 8-bit Heroes is a new NES compatible game and its documentary.

Beep is a documentary about music in video games.

Urbance is a very stylish animation project that is making a big splash, but its $1 tier may get it suspended raffles aren't allowed.

BEDLAM has a post-apocalyptic band of adventurers in a legendary dozer. This one might be a campaign that gets some attention. It has some great art assets.

Stardale is a 2D sidescrolling procedural game. 00:29 in the pitch video has a kind of cool spaceship crashing scene.

Ray's The Dead was funded. Battle Chef Brigade is the next campaign I've been helping on.

Crowdfunded Tiny Keep is about to release on Steam.

[matt]

My good friends at Dejobaan and Popcannibal have launched the kickstarter for their very exciting creative writing game Elegy for a Dead World. I strongly recommend checking it out!

[LobsterSundew]

Human Resources is the next game from the Planetary Annihilation developers. I am stuck between wanting to back it and remembering the fulfilment problems I had with them.

Black The Fall has a dark atmosphere with an art style based on greys, blacks, whites and reds.

I found the music for Combo Queen was a bit catchy.

Beyond-Human has some interesting pixel art.

Very bizarre graph for Lost Homeland. The unallocated backers number is spiking. At first I thought it was an error. It has continued to have weird unallocated numbers since then. A lot of these unallocated backers are just first names with no previous projects pledged to.
http://i.imgur.com/LCGzxeG.png

H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward started its pitch in a comical horror way.

GORGE has some really good art for a RPGMaker game. It launched on a Saturday night and so far only has 4 backers.

The Outpost 13 made a poorly planned reboot this Saturday. I'm writing my Kickstarter guide hoping to prevent project creators from rough reboots like this. They are often timed even worse and don't fix the core problems holding the campaign back.

It is interesting to compare the first Coolest Cooler campaign to the second one.

Kickstarter project creators spamming their own link in other projects' comment sections can get his or her project suspended. I saw an IndieGoGo project creator spamming his link around. The Kickstarter staff don't have the power to suspend an IndieGoGo campaign.

Battle Chef Brigade had to deal with some backlash because of their stretch goals not including any console ports. A lot of thought went into these stretch goals. How backers would received the stretch goal news was a bit worrying before the project update was made. The strategic decision was made to prioritize the game's content like voice acting and localization so that when it does hopefully get ported to consoles it will be of a higher quality. It boiled down to either better content or more platforms since projections weren't good enough for both being able to be afforded. Time was a very important cost. The tradeoffs of not receiving a press boost from console-only blogs was weighed in that decision. Some of those blogs were already watching to see what the stretch goals were. Some backers were very vocal that they wanted Vita and Wii U ports when they found out. I feel that the backers demanding console ports didn't understand how lean this project's budget is intended to be. Just because the game is using Unity3D doesn't mean costs like QA for a new platform disappear. Hand drawn animations are a big cost to adding a new playable characters. A pixel art game can go a lot farther with the same funding amount because of how much less those retro looking sprites cost. The comments section became very negative for a bit. Other very experienced backers noted that something like this hasn't really happened before. I am going to have to add a lot to my guide after this. There were PR people pushing growth for the sake of growth, backers demanding things be done their way because they didn't care about the other things and backers defending the developer's decision.

[matt]

What do you think of Agustín Cordes launching the Dexter Ward kickstarter before finishing Asylum, which has been delayed by quite a bit as they rewrote the game in Unity... :-/ Dexter Ward seems like the type of game I'd like to back, but I kind of want to see them deliver on Asylum first - especially since it's 10 months late... He acknowledged that people may feel that way in the Asylum update but didn't explain if they were doubling the team size or how that was all going to work.

That's weird about Battle Chef. Console development is VERY expensive. Worse still, you usually have to pay for the keys to fulfill the game's orders on each console, so everyone that wants a console key, is taking away money from the development. It seems strange that people assume that console ports are a given with stretch goals. If I ran another kickstarter, I think they'd be very high if we even had them at all...