Infinitap Games

I've seen discussions where developers have talked about using OpenAL Soft to get binaural audio for Unity-based games and there is a post to /r/oculus about how to get it working in Minecraft.

Saga Heroes for Ouya related to 2008 Saga MMORTS. I was a backer of Saga: The Shadow Cabal film that is also related to that universe.

Koe is a JRPG that teaches the player the Japanese language.

Playing History - Vikings reminds me of Cornerstone: The Song of Tyrim. I like the graphics, but the way that the work they've already completed is presented could have been done better. It feels like there is too much of people just talking to camera when there should be gameplay footage spliced in while they continue talking.

We actually maintain a port of OpenAL-Soft that is better for binaural audio as well as we added support for iOS and Android:
https://github.com/Jawbone/OpenAL-MOB

The main advantage over OpenAL-Soft for binaural is that it is application controlled rather than requiring setting a value in some configuration file. I'd recommend it over OpenAL-Soft, but I'm biased. The changes are relatively minimal.

Anyone is welcome (and encouraged) to use OpenAL-MOB, but I think the main barrier is none of the big middleware packages support binaural. Unity, FMOD, Miles, and WWise all lack binaural support. I talked to Miles a bit about it, and they had it but took it out?!?!

We actually have a very gracious sponsor for OpenAL-MOB (Jawbone) Jawbone is a super cool company and have been really great to work with, and I am hopeful they will fund more work along those lines. That wouldhelp offset some costs on Neverending Nightmares dev as well as make our game sound better. It's win win win!

I'm not feeling optimistic about Nevermind guys.

It definitely seems like a really long shot at this point, but like all things kickstarter, you never know. Stranger things have happened! Kickstarter success seems to be largely impacted by momentum, and the momentum isn't in place to make the project a success, so I suspect that may scare prospective backers off.

I talked to Erin, and it sounds like she has some cool things up her sleeves still, but I don't know if they'll happen in time to save the project...

I would be very surprised if Nevermind made it. The missing momentum is huge. They did get streamer Day9 to play the game which helped. There wasn't some big calamity when I look at the graphs. They were able to get double-digits of backers each day with a few days that had triple-digits of backers. If this was a $50,000 goal campaign I would have said they had done well, but their real goal is $250,000. As posted above, momentum is important and they don't have enough momentum right now to be a $250,000 campaign. It is hard to surpass $100,000 in pledges without being famous. They could try again in the future.

The Land of Eyas has a pitch video with an impressive narration and animated text. I'm watching this one to see if its great presentation can compensate for it looking a bit unoriginal.

Oscar is a game about a girl and her stuffed elephant. I'm divided about if it the game looks good or not. It has some good art, then some rougher parts. One minute into the pitch is when one can first start to see gameplay. That felt too long to wait, which is why I often advise against not starting with gameplay or a cinematic to keep it interesting.

A funded comic project has stirred up some drama when backer rewards may have been intentionally combusted.

That's insane about burning the kickstarter rewards... I find it strange when project organizers feel they have no obligation to deliver on what they promised.

I also was floored by Clang's statement: " Kickstarter is amazing, but one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people’s money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime." THAT IS A HIDDEN CATCH!??! I thought that was the POINT of kickstarter....

*grumble grumble* I will deliver all the rewards I promised if it kills me!

It sounds like the stress got to much for the guy? He probably realized he undersold those books he'd deliver to the donors (he mentions that the shipping costs make him lose money on the lower backers) and kind of cracked when he realized he's going to burn all the money he made for his project by delivering... so instead he burns the books!?!

It's pretty disconcerting to hear him say that he feels no obligation whatsoever to his backers, because as matt said there, the entire concept of Kickstarter is based around the backers, the reward system and some trust in the people the backers invest it in.

I also find it curious that he seems to think people who paid him shouldn't get to expect anything back. That's fine and all if you are working based on donations, but I view the Kickstarter-system more as a commission-based thing. Sure, the artist may not be able to deliver a painting, a book, a movie, a game that actually satisfies the customer; that is how it often goes with commission-based work. But the customer can absolutely expect to receive something back for their investment.

If it's supposed to work on a donation-basis like he seems to imply (people shouldn't want anything back for their money, as he puts it), then he has to clearly mark it as such and absolutely not use Kickstarter, where people expect results of some sort! Maybe he didn't understand that from the very start? Maybe he got into Kickstarter not realizing that concept?

I feel like it is pretty clear what the responsibilities for project creators... There are websites that are more for supporting creators like http://www.patreon.com/ or http://www.gofundme.com/

I think the benefit of kickstarter for backers is that they have lots of rules to ensure projects are serious and projects actually have to be approved. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop people from no taking their commitments to their backers seriously. I guess there are some projects where they don't know the costs and screw up because of that. I guess that is more for hardware projects, but I guess people who are making their first video game or don't do their due-dilligence with cost of reward fulfillment.

To some extent, I screwed up in that regard a bit because I assumed the backer portraits would be easier to do. We are having to redo them to fit better with the style of the game. In addition, we'll probably have to redraw everything at print resolution. haha It's not going to break our budget or anything, but we are going to push the hi-rez print version off until after ship because we are a bit behind on art. Actually we are going to push all the reward stuff (t-shirts, postcards, etc, etc) until after ship. We just don't have the time to do the art right now... :-/

Still, I think we are going to be pretty close to meeting all of our promises, which it sounds like most kickstarters are way late, so I think we are still doing pretty well.

I actually used to read John Campbell's web-comic on the regular, and even met him and bought a tote bag from him from a comic artist expo back in maybe 2009 or so.

While I agree that it really sucks that people funded him and he folded, John Campbell is kind of an interesting character. His web-comic is called "Pictures for Sad Children", and basically every single strip has to deal with either the characters being depressed, or some depressing/cynical observation about life.

John Campbell started a pretty big controversy amongst his fans with a Kickstarter update when he "admitted' that he was "faking depression to make money."

http://www.dailydot.com/society/picture ... epression/

On top of all this, John Campbell recently admitted he's going through a gender identity crises, and apparently after admitting this he started getting harassed by an internet hate mob.

So what I'm getting at is, I think John Campbell unfortunately is just not really in a mental place where he can fulfill the obligation of Kickstarter. One of my friends backed the project (and is one of the lucky few to receive their rewards), and he told me Campbell also said in an update that he just has flat run out of money, and that he has $750 in his savings account and that's it.

I think that he really is just sort of over-whelmed with depression (it seems to me his "admission" seems a sarcastic trolling), and I think he is struggling to manage it.

matt wrote:I feel like it is pretty clear what the responsibilities for project creators... There are websites that are more for supporting creators like http://www.patreon.com/ or http://www.gofundme.com/

I've liked what I've seen with how Patreon works for maintaining projects. I learned about the existence of that site when a channel I've subscribed to talked about doing a project there.

One thing to look at before backing a project is if their is a team in place that could finish the project through sweat equity. Art and music assets can be expensive, so I like to see an artist or composer on the team. If they are incorporated, something I've done is to look at their filings through government sites. Then there is common sense, like a budget being suspiciously low to support a lot of different spec platforms. Then there is having experience to be cautious like avoiding any wristwatch project on Kickstarter without serious checking into it.

Haunts was a video game campaign I backed that failed. It was trying to be the first commercial game that used the young programming language Go. Eventually even compiling the game from its sourcecode became a challenge.

Kickstarter celebrated $1 billion pledged today. There is someone who has backed 1546 projects since 2009. I remember a French backer who had a higher count, but he was spamming pledges minutes before a campaign was about to fail. There was a breakdown by weekday for pledges that placed Wednesday as the leader. As expected, Saturday and Sunday are slow which is why they are bad days to launch. There is also a graph that supports launching at the start or middle of a month, but not in the last fourth of a month.

Horror game Spectre's campaign is now live.

Red Goddess is a colourful 2.5D platformer. Visually it reminds me of Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams.

Toby's Island is a small RPG project that shows off some significant effort has gone into it.

Axe Princess is a slightly NSFW 2D beat'em up starring a top-heavy female protagonist.