The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[matt]

Thanks for the links to the cool projects! I haven't been keeping up on kickstarter since I am still working on unpacking everything. That sucks to hear about Roam.

That is really weird about kickspy. I hope they don't shut down Kicktraq. I love that website! We actually advertised on kicktraq as a last ditch effort at the end of our campaign. I'm not sure it was worth it, but it wasn't too expensive and we were desperate.

[LobsterSundew]

Descent: Underground was funded. That was a tough campaign that had to do a lot of public relations. A lot of the project page was remade over time. The updated trailer (The 30 seconds mark is cool) would have likely made the campaign's run easier if it has been ready before the final few days. In hindsight it was much too rushed to get the project live. Many problems stemmed from that.

Little Devil Inside doesn't have much of a project page and it launched going into a Saturday, but that moment after the first minute mark in the pitch was impressive to me. There seems to be a lot of potential, but the communication and timing are really bad.

Inside Pete is another retro VHS 90s pitch.

Rabbit Run is a bad project, but its execution is strange enough to warrant linking to as an example of an odd project. It only has a $20 reward tier.

Solar Crusaders is FTL: Faster Than Light, but with an online 4X strategy game added onto it. I actually only pledged $1 even though I thought I would be pledging for a pre-order. I didn't realize it would be a subsription before it launched.

Bowbariam was a good pun its name. The minimum goal is huge.

HUSH has a horror game with a child stuck in a nightmarish basement. The pitch video just drags too long in the middle.

Violent Little Things is a 2D sidescroller with some good action in its trailer video.

Solar Crusaders is FTL: Faster Than Light, but with an online 4X strategy game added onto it. I actually only pledged $1 even though I thought I would be pledging for a pre-order. I didn't realize it would be a subsription before it launched.

Wildfire is a 2D stealth game with a fire manipulation mechanic.

April 2015 really has had a bunch of very poorly run campaigns that were pretty much dead-on-arrival due to execution.

[RightClickSaveAs]

Rabbit Run is a bad project, but its execution is strange enough to warrant linking to as an example of an odd project. It only has a $20 reward tier.

This one is bizarre! At $20 a pledge, they'd need something like 800,000 backers to reach the funding goal. They have to realize there's no way. It doesn't seem like a joke project, very weird.

[matt]

They only need 80,000. Totally doable! It is also strange that it is PS4 only...

[RightClickSaveAs]

Whoops, I got an extra 0 in there!

Yeah I believe the highest amount of backers for a video game project at this point is still around 87k, for Double Fine, and that was an exception that probably won't ever happen again.

[evilkinggumby]

I am psyched to see the NanoArcade units are arriving. I backed it for just the base Onyx cabinet, didn't get the sticker packs to decorate it yet.



it works ok, runs on batteries (3xAA) and has a micro USB port to load j2me games on it. it comes with i think 6 games to get started. The speaker sounds good and can be pretty loud if you leave it set on high. buttons work well, joystick works but feels a lil loose (i'd like it to snap back to center better personally) and overall runs pretty quickly. It only has 16MB storage built in with no way to expand it, and so you are fairly limited on how many games you could tryand load. But still.. it's a nifty desktop toy to fire up and there's a lot of small details I like about the overall look and design.

[matt]

Besides requiring a ridiculous amount of backers, I was implying that non-PC games have traditionally had a lot of trouble. Republique had to announce a PC version, and Amplitude had something like over $100k in donations MORE than if you added up all the tiers, which suggest that some rich person (or people?) pushed it over the edge.

In reading my message, it didn't seem clear that I was trying to illustrate how silly of a campaign it was. hahaha

The nano-Arcade looks really cool! Is there a MAME for it? I remember I had Mame that ran Donkey Kong on my Windows CE Pocket PC waaaaayyyy back when before Smart phones were a thing. I imagine you could run some cool things with that hardware even though j2me is pretty bad if I recall correctly....

[evilkinggumby]

it will let you run any j2me type game, or so it seems, that matches the rez and layout of the console. I guess if there is a MAME for this environment it maybe could? i'm not really sure. i will say it is decent but not at all powerful, capable of something along the lines of a sega genesis with a lot more color. For retro gaming, like playing donkey kong or a galaga clone, that is perfectly OK. For modern gaming and anything vaguely 3d, not so much.

I have a few other java games to try and run through it people have done, so I'll follow up here if you like to say if i find anything more about it.

[RightClickSaveAs]

Besides requiring a ridiculous amount of backers, I was implying that non-PC games have traditionally had a lot of trouble. Republique had to announce a PC version, and Amplitude had something like over $100k in donations MORE than if you added up all the tiers, which suggest that some rich person (or people?) pushed it over the edge.

In reading my message, it didn't seem clear that I was trying to illustrate how silly of a campaign it was. hahaha

Oh no, I got where you were coming from, I think my reply was the one that wasn't very clear ONLY 80k, hah! Yeah I don't know of any Ps4 projects that have funded at all.

[matt]

Amplitude was PS3 and PS4 because Sony owned the rights to the franchise. I'm not sure why Harmonix didn't just make a spiritual successor called wavelength (since the original was called Frequency) that supports Windows, Mac, Linux, and PlayStation if they wanted... Perhaps Sony is kicking some money in or giving out free keys? Who knows...

I'm a console gamer myself, and I like developing on consoles because I can guarantee exactly how the game will look and don't have to worry about drivers, but I'm not sure how much it makes sense for kickstarter. Doing a console port is not cheap! It takes man months of development time to meet the technical requirements of the platform. Even if you get a free Unity license for that console, that doesn't get you very far with respect to technical requirements because a lot of it is about displaying appropriate messages, using the right controls, etc. Plus optimizations can be a challenge if you want your game to actually look good

That combined with the fact that you most likely have to pay for keys on consoles (unless you only need < 200 or something) seems like it adds a huge amount of costs. If you already have people pledging for the PC version, I'm not sure how much new blood you'll attract by supporting more platforms.

That being said, I'm a total hypocrite and want a console key if offered. I ended up not backing for a copy of Shovel Knight because I think you had to pledge like $20 for the console key when the game is only $15 retail, and I couldn't decide if it was worth paying a console tax.