The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[ranger_lennier]

And in addition to their last couple of games being poorly received, Silicon Knights lost a legal battle with Epic over how well their engine was supported.

Really, I think Precursor finally got it right with their last Kickstarter. They stopped promising future episodes, and just set a reasonable budget for finishing up a fleshed out version of what would previously have been the first episode. They still hoped to do sequels, but the funding for those would have been done separately after the game released. But when you've made a bad first impression, it's a struggle to get over it.

[evilkinggumby]

Sadly it looks like most of the projects I backed this month will end up failing. So in the end I'll end up successfully backing 1 MAYBE 2 projects by OCT 31st. Damn.

[LobsterSundew]

Kickstarter now supports Danish krones which has made more work for me so I can adjust.

Cole: A Game About Coal has a funny pitch.

I found the pitch video for the horror game One Final Breath to not fit a tone at all with the happy chords. This is surprising because there is a teaser on IndieDB that would have been more effective.

Voxel Quest has some interesting tech.

The Sixth Chaos is a stylized 2.5 platformer that is stalled out at just 11 backers.

The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça & Pizza Boy is an adventure game.

RED COBRA has some nice backgrounds to this shoot'em-up. The characters' art style sometimes contrasts a bit too much for my liking againts the backgrounds.

DICETINY had an interesting dark lined art style.

The Black Glove's graphs look very unhealthy. The $20 tier has only a Kickstarter exclusive wallpaper as an incentive above the game itself to pledge. The $35 tier adds only the art book as a reason beyond goodwill to upgrade. $50 for the soundtrack is a steep pricing. It is very obvious there the campaign is suffering from a problem with the rewards upselling backers. The steep drop off in backer count from the $20 to $35 tier is very visible. The per backer average pledge is $29.75 and it is 2nd in popularity for the category.

The Flame in the Flood's graph shows it is doing very well. I like how well their backer count decreases from the $20 to $50 tiers. It has good reward structure flow with multiple reasons provided to jump up to the next tier. It is 1st in popularity for the category. Its presentation is also one of the strongest of any active video game campaign right now.

Guns, Fore & Cannoli has great audio and an interesting 1920s setting.

InnerSpace is a flying exploration game.

Air Brawl is a flying combat game.

The Facility is a first-person 3D horror game set in a Nazi base.

Medusa's Labyrinth is another first-person horror game.

Youropa is a 3D puzzle platformer.

The Dark Throne is actually a cool visual idea. Only 3 backers right now.

Afterimage has a tech-noir art style. This campaign stands out to me. I am considering offering to help reboot it, but at the same time I see a massive overhaul in its project would be needed. Researching it shows a game I'd like to see made, but it is going to be hard to properly describe it. There is also the problem that it is using XNA which complicates things.

[evilkinggumby]

I pitched at The Black Glove but I agree it does look like they made some mistakes in their campaign.

I checked a few of the other ones you listed, some interesting stuff but nothing that outright grabbed me.

I will also say that I got an update from one of my long time ago kickstarter projects and despite taking really long for this game to finally release, I love that they gave estimates on % of completion for a lot of varied aspects of the game. At first it can be frustrating to see stuff not done at all, or still needing a lot of work, but at the same time the fact they're up front about it and trying to be more transparent really helps imbue me with trust and patience. I can see progress and so I am ok waiting. With projects that are late, long overdue or generally "unknown" it is a lot harder to remain patient when you are given little to no updates, or the few you get are sparse for any real detail. And telling me " just got back from blahblahcon in dublin and it was a blast" isn't helping. hehehe.

Also I am curious why the fact they are using XNA is a possible big problem? I admit I'm not familiar with XNA nowadays. I recall it's early origins as a way to pose and puppet already rigged models from other games, but I am not familiar with it being used for game creation.

[matt]

XNA is no longer supported by Microsoft, which complicates things. For example, you can't make a 64-bit app because Microsoft never had a 64-bit version. We use XNA in some of our tools, but Dan is switching to MonoGame, so we can "future proof" it so to speak. MonoGame should hopefully be supported for a long while. MonoGame has even been ported to PS4, which is kind of interesting because PS4 supports XNA whereas Xbox One does not?!?! I'm not sure why Microsoft abandoned it because developers really liked it.. :-/

The Black Glove is weird... I backed it because I'd like to see it exist, but the pitch is a little confusing. If I'm understanding it correctly, there is a world, and then you go and play classic arcade games to get black glove "points" or whatever, and then you can change the back story of a character. While changing the back story of a character is a super cool idea, they have to script every permutation basically. That means either there aren't going to be many permutations (ie. a lot of variables don't REALLY affect things) or it's going to be really short because they basically have to script everything for a ton of different permutations. It's quite possible I'm not understanding their pitch, but that is a bit of a problem.

I have a theory - the retro kickstarters are so successful not JUST because they play on nostalgia, but also because you know what you are going to get. When I saw the Shovel Knight pitch, I thought it was going to be megaman + DuckTales. I think they delivered on that and quite well. For Double Fine Adventures, they had no details on the game, but you could expect that it would be like Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. Personally, I was super satisfied with Broken Age with the exception of I wanna see the end!!!!

I have no idea what to expect with The Black Glove, which is kind of exciting but also makes me reluctant to throw down money.

[evilkinggumby]

I backed Black Glove but I do see there being issues, like you pointed out. For one, I never put all the pieces together to grasp the overal gameplay like you just explained. I'm also still confused if it is a classic adventure game with fmv-like movement (i.e. you click where you want to move or what to do and pre-rendered cutscenes animate said movement) or if it is a totally 360 degree first person explorable environment (rendered like most FPS and 3d games). The video they show feels like FMV's. but the explanation hints vaguely at being either.

I also have a theory (and this is just a theory) that some gamers looking at kickstarters are going to end up with a bias if the backing team is a small or indie group that is trying to make a game or get into gaming development on a shoestring budget and taking a serious chance/pay cut to make the game they always wanted to make vs ex employee's from a studio making a game with a fairly large budget that seems like the team is expecting " for us to make this game, we all need to maintain our current/last salary level and lifestyles, no exceptions". I.e. "for our team of 10 we need to get a minimum of $40k each times 3 years" (i'm making numbers up, not trying to be exact).

If you see a group that is clearly not asking for much more then the core cost to make the game (cost of licences, tech, voice actors, hiring a composer, etc etc) and they have a stretch goal of " ok if we make it to $100k we can quit our regular jobs and dedicate ourselves to the game and turn it out faster" there is a better chance that it'll hit and exceed the mark. If you see a team of ex AAA game designers just shooting for half a million to make a game.. not quite so much. in the past I've seen it not matter, but over the last year or so, with some of those old projects hitting the market, it seems backers are getting wise and a bit more careful about what they back, and who.

With my 'theory' it works for NeN because you fall onto the side of the equation where you are not demanding a crap ton of money to maintain your healthy salaries and thats it. there was a drive to make a game you always wanted to make. plus you hads the added bonus of having a not entirely successful game already out there (the pity vote) and stating your own troubles with mental health and how it will be applied to the game (and so imbuing a sense of real world passion for the game's design). This says you weren't just looking to make a buck and perpetuate the current industry fascination with churning out games to make more money to churn out more games to make more money. Nowadays, I think people like that kind of sincerity.

[matt]

I think sincerity is really important on kickstarter. Your passion can sell a project. I think backers are getting a bit wiser with how they fund projects. A lot of the big budget kickstarters have ran into delays or trouble, so I think people are more cautious. A lot of people are saying that fewer game kickstarters are being funded in 2014, but I think it's just that less of the big budget ones are succeeding. At least I hope so, since we'll probably do another kickstarter. I think we've done a good job of keeping our backers happy, so hopefully that'll help us do a project a little bigger in scope.

Also, in the surprise news of the day, Shadow of the Eternals is back on. With their very lofty company goals, I wonder if they are just trying to get VC funding, and the game may fall through yet again if they don't. All this transmedia convergence nonsense reeks of a VC pitch - at least to me anyway.

[evilkinggumby]

Sorry to sound stupid but what is "VC credit" ?

Yeah in the last 24 hours I was joyous to see Black the Fall hit their mark + 1 stretch goal but then saddened to see The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward fail miserably and go into limbo for the forseeable future.

[matt]

VC = venture capital. It sounds like they are trying to create a company with a lot of buzzwords to get investment. Venture capital is a weird thing. They don't like betting on low risk reasonable reward. They like to bet on high risk - high reward. So if you said, I'm going to create a game, there's pretty much no way you could get VC investment. If you say, I'm going to revolutionize the way we approach entertainment, then they start listening.

[LobsterSundew]

Battle Chef Brigade was funded.
http://i.imgur.com/7Na2tNL.png

I joined BackerClub relaunched. It is a phpBB forum just like Infinitap uses. Each day there is a wheel spin minigame to get entries into drawings for dollar amounts that can be pledged to the campaign of the winner's choice. People have to have pledged to more than 25 Kickstarter projects to get in. I'm treating it like an experiment. Hopefully it becomes a useful place for pre-launch marketing. The initial launch was aborted because people refused to provide their Kickstarter account login details so BackerClub could verify the person was the account owner. It is now verified by copying text into one's Kickstarter profile.

There is a thread on /r/IndieGaming where I'm discussing graphs. There is the question of Is Kickstarter dying? being discussed.

There are some good projects launching.

Flamberge is a tactics RPG. This is another example of a project with a playable demo, but a lack of game footage. The first 33 seconds of its 2 minute 45 second pitch video is devoted to gameplay. I've played through the demo 3 times because I liked it so much.

Laser Fury with 4 player co-op action brawler. The effects on magic attacks look cool.

Protocol E is a real-time strategy game with a focus on avoiding the need for heavy micromanagement.

Stowaway is a survival horror game set on a ship. The modelling of the environments is good.

Super Sea Star has a bunch of lobsters.

Aerannis is a 2D game where the player can take a human shield.

Convoy describes itself as combining Mad Max and FTL. This could be a cool game.

INGONGA is a 3D horror game. The stick forests look cool in the dark. The enemies feel a bit off to me. I wonder if it is the animations or modelling.