The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[evilkinggumby]

I backed the Slain game, and also tossed money at SpookeyPoo's Happy Hell https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/59 ... happy-hell

I also backed Con Man on indiegogo, the project that Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk (which after a day is well past the initial goal and nailed every stretch they had concieved.. lol) https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/con-man/x/3205804

Not much else. Am glad to see a few things progressing though. After Reset has an alpha out on steam (barely playable, sadly) and A Hat in Time finally started Beta Testing on steam as well.

[matt]

Con Man is pretty amazing especially since they launched on IndieGogo. I guess IndieGogo offers flexible funding, but given that they destroyed their original goal, they didn't have to worry about that. Kickstarter has a much larger community, and I imagine many people (including myself) are less inclined to back on IndieGogo. Perhaps their star power overcame that.

I'm glad to hear about A Hat in Time's alpha. I feel like I've been waiting forever for that game, but I suppose it's only a year late, which in kickstarter terms, isn't SO bad. It seems like Asylum has something playable now and is only 1.25 years late.

[RightClickSaveAs]

Bear Simulator finally posted an update, breaking a 6 month long period of silence. People were assuming the game had been abandoned or was a scam, so I don't know if the people in the backer comments who were digging up the creator's contact information, or Kickstarter themselves, finally prodded the guy into doing an update or what. I'm glad I didn't back the project, because he sounds like he's way in over his head at this point, on top of still not seeming to take the project very seriously.

[evilkinggumby]

Not sure if this was mentioned but Edge of Eternity is sitting backed and on 5 days left. Tribute to classic Jrpg's (or..well.. final fantasy more or less) and done by 4 people though with some really nice alpha results so far. Not the most original execution, but I have high hopes.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mi ... ?ref=email

I snagged the steelbook edition, likely for pc since i don't have the other systems.

[RightClickSaveAs]

I posted this in the NextNightmare suggestions thread, but figured it might be interesting to share here as well. I've been putting together a spreadsheet of projects that have been fully released, and comparing their estimated release dates to the actual: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... KY/pubhtml

This will be a work in progress, I've gotten pretty much all the major games that have been released at this point, but am always adding more. I'm ignoring early access and episodic stuff so far. It makes it a bit trickier because so many projects out there have gone that route, maybe I'll start a separate sheet for those games.

[LobsterSundew]

Pythetron is a 2.5D shoot'em-up that has a weird cold feeling to its pitch.

FrightShow Fighter has a creepy art atyle. The Iron Moose character uses a monochrome art style. At 2 minutes into the pledge I went "Nope" when I saw the controls.

Mulaka - Origin Tribes has some interesting monsters based upon the mythology of a culture found in Northern Mexico. It needs to show more about the actual game.

Nephil's Fall has $16,592 (71% of its funding) unallocated. It has 132 backers pledging $23,050 for an average of $174.62 per backer. The graphs have the $1,000 and $2,500 tiers contributing a lot of funding. It went from 11 unallocated backers up to 48 and then back down to 26. This campaign is not normal.

Descent: Undergrounds campaign has been a weird roller-coaster ride so far.
http://i.imgur.com/YZs0jrN.png
http://i.imgur.com/jbgSOgR.png

The hardcore fan community around Descent was angered about the lack of ship designs and music they hold dear. The iconic ship from the Descent series is the Pyro-GX. The problem is that Interplay doesn't have the rights to that specific ship. The Pyro rights may have stayed with Parallax Software which then split into Outrage and Volition. Then Volition went through THQ's bankruptcy process and was acquired by Deep Silver. Outrage was closed by THQ back in 2004. Even using a name like "Pyro-R2" or some other set of letters would risk infringement so whoever does hold the rights could come after the project. The rights to iconic music tracks also appear to be a messy situation.

Interplay does have the rights to the game. Another problem is Interplay sent a cease and desist against the Descent homage Sol Contingency. This angered the Descent community and when Descent: Underground launched they blamed the Kickstarter project as a potential reason for the cease and desist. Wingman's team hadn't even started on the game back then. The next problem is that Sol Contigency is viewed as more of what the Descent community wants than what Descent: Underground is offering with a different look to the ships and different atmosphere. There was the backlash for Descent: Undergound building the multiplayer game first. This is because of scope reasons. It requires less budget to build the multiplayer mode first because it avoids needing to create good AI and the amount of asset creation a singleplayer mode would demand. A full singleplayer mode would have raised the Kickstarter campaigns budget above a realistic amount to ask for. A singleplayer mode was always planned to be made if the team could find the finances to do it. A short singleplayer mode was even planned and they would build upon that using revenue from the multiplayer game.

Then there were the misconceptions. Some people thought the game would be 3rd person only when there was a first-person example in a separate video on the project page. A lot of people mistook the game as a MOBA like League of Legends because Eurogamer read a LinkedIn post that the developer was looking into creating a 6DoF MOBA. There are then gamers confused about what 6DoF controls are because many gamers have become familiar with a 4DoF of maybe 5Dof if you give a supersoldier a jetpack. The subscription mentioned in the rewards is for a pay walled part of the forums and video chats, but people accidentally assumed it was like a MMO subscription for the game itself. Then there were people confused about the team having left Star Citizen when it was explained long ago that they couldn't relocate with the rest of Star Citizen's staff because they had families they didn't want to force to move too.

I've generated a lot more backlog of notes for my guide over the last month. Last week I began using my third template for tracking campaigns with Descent: Underground as the first test. I had been using the second version for about a year. The first was actually created to test with Neverending Nightmates. Now from what I've learned in just a week I already have template 4 being worked on so the formulas are simpler. Template 2 was starting to cause chugging on my FX-8320 8-core CPU when opening a spreadsheet file to screenshot the graphs. Even scrolling was not smooth. I noticed am using much less of my 8GB of RAM now since I did a reinstall of my operating system drive. I was getting a lot of memory leaks. Kicktraq changed something about its site. I would now have to manually go screenshot the Kicktraq graphs in a process that would take more time, so I am not bothering with adding Kicktraq graphs to my recent graph uploads.

I saw Jagged Alliance: Flashback on the Google Doc in RightClickSaveAs's post. I backed that project. I think it was during a last 48-hours rush to 100% funded because I wasn't too excited about it. In a very recent backers-only update the developer told backers that the development team has all quit leaving only the main project creator who will try hard to fix bugs. It looks like the game's development will not be making further progress beyond what the modders who are trying to help can do. The state of the game has generated a lot of mixed reviews which is probably very bad for its sales.

[RightClickSaveAs]

Interesting, so is Jagged Alliance: Flashback a game that released in an unfinished state, basically? Sounds like they released a "full" version with the plan to keep patching so they could make their release date and not be an Early Access title.

[evilkinggumby]

Well it looks like Tahira: Echoes of the Astral Empire managed to just squeak by their minimum to get funded (by only about $755) so thats a small blessing. So did Spookey Poo, lol.

Meanwhile Unraveled: Tale of a Shipwrecker's Daughter is still sitting at about 50% with 20 hours to go.. ouch. thats with a demo and kickstarter's favor.. bummer. this looked really kool.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/69 ... and-platfo

Also still going is Dungeons of Aledorn, what they're calling an old school hardcore dungeon explorer rpg thing.. lol.. not sure it'll be something I can enjoy (i'm not hardcore, not at all) but I backed it a little. Looks promising, if all else for the hope they can make it fairly open to experimentation and creatively dealing with situations.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/11 ... rdcore-rpg

I originally backed Happymart for more but this is one of the rare times i backed off my bid and reduced it significantly.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ha ... lationship

The concept sounds good but the game releasing for free, and the cost for even a print of the poster (and not very big) is kind of crazy. It started to feel like they might be gaming the system to pu this out and that worried me. Might just be my paranoia though. I mean $35 for a poster, which also needs another $15 to ship in the US just didn't feel right.

[LobsterSundew]

FreezeME is a Mario 64 clone.

Holobunnies has relaunched.

There probably won't be another wave of high quality projects launching until April.

Pillars of Eternity is gettting good reviews. Dyscourse has hidden flash drives across the USA.

There is a pre-alpha for Jotun coming soon.

The Double Fine Adventure documentary has a re-cut version on YouTube. I had only watched the first 3 episodes before because Vimeo did not play well with the version of Flash I had on Linux back then. Part of the enjoyment I get from watching the documentary is identify the various twisty puzzle cubes on Tim Schafer's desk. Broken Age part 2 now has a April 28th release date.

I now have a Neverending Nightmares postcard on my wall.
http://i.imgur.com/rs4oemp.png

Kickspy is shutting down after being contacted by Kickstarter. I have not heard anything about Kicktraq being contacted. Kickspy was different from Kicktraq by tracking what projects people were backing. Kickstarter removed the "Backers" tab from project pages so maybe it was about the data collection about backers. Kickstarter has introduced a new spotlight feature. I hope Kickstarter isn't going crazy like SEGA that was allegedly trying to improve its SEO.

Its looks like the Jagged Alliance: Flashback has come to a full stop.

I was a backer on Roam which might be imploding. I don't know the full story because I didn't hang around its forums which now produce broken links for me. I did make an account on that forum before the campaign ended. I heard from someone else who heard that basically one team member is suing another team member. I've been trying to dig up more information since then. There was previously the 505 Games issue.

[evilkinggumby]

haha nice wall of pics and pistcards! Only thing I have on mine is a series of canvas prints I ordered last year of screenshots of the Ghost of A Tale game that's still in development. And since they'r enot "official" products I'm not about to show pics of them.. hehehe (they also photograph terrible so not worth bothering)

I am sorry to see trouble on a few projects, especially a few you invested in Lobstah. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of my backed projects eventually peter out or run into similar problems. So far only 1 had completely crapped the bed, and a couple others went quiet and slowed progress due to various health/logistical issues, but seem to be back on track. I looked at that one database of major kickstarter projects and which have fallen to "abandoned" and which are just late and only a couple of mine were in there, late.

I did back Deadwood so I could get the Indiebox when it is released, and I also backed ToeJam And Earl with the Indiebox addon so I have a copy of that as well. Because of having 2 fairly close together though, I am likely going to step back from Kickstarter for a while and be very very selective abotu what I back as I'm throwing way too much money at it in the past 30 days LOL.