Infinitap Games

Well i swapped and tried using my visa credit card and it worked so I backed Hollow Knight and the relaunch of Ashen Rift. Ashen will be one of the few recent kickstarters I am grabbing physical, most I've seen haven't been available or worth it.

sadly it looks like Gliese is not going to make it. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ti ... lab/gliese

I liked the idea and the examples they did but the tiers and stretch goals are pretty lofty.

There are not really any campaigns other than Kriophobia (A survival horror game with a demo that has a classic Resident Evil perspective) launching so far this month that are worth noting.

Gliese was unsuccessful. There was a strange $18.5K boom just on November 17th that came from unallocated backers.
http://i.imgur.com/UoHLUPX.png

I am a €15 backer on Scorn. It is going to need to aim for more than 6,000 backers overall. For comparison, Neverending Nightmares had 3,608 backers overall. It's graphs are not good.
http://i.imgur.com/Zhz966E.png
The rewards structure has a range from €15 to €200 which is too limited for a project trying to cover a large funding distance. It doesn't have the lower tiers for small backers or the large tiers for large backers. That alone can really harm a campaign. There is a notable drop in backer counts from the €15 to €20 tier which just adds a wallpaper. The €30 tier adds a digital art-book. The €50 tier adds the soundtrack. The tier that introduces the soundtrack is more than $62 USD. I like to see a soundtrack tier below $30 USD. The rewards simply don't flow well enough that this alone could doom the campaign.

Kickstarter had a very big layout overhaul to its layout on Tuesday. So far many comments are negative. I miss things like displaying the start date, pages to help navigate many comments and how the page doesn't jump to anchors because I tried to skim the page before it fully loaded. I'm going to have to reorganize parts of my guide.

The project thumbnail images on Kickstarter now support a much larger size. I find overall project pages are loading much slower for me.

Yes, Your Grace could be an interesting take on the ideas that I remember one of the Fable games had.

A confusing thing happened with Sellsword losing 19 backers in a sudden burst.

Kicktraq appears to not be able to identify when campaigns have cancelled anymore. I'm trying to deal with reward tiers of the same demonomitions having wildly flipped around. Formicarium is an example of a campaign with multiple $20 tiers.

A bunch more campaigns cancelled this week. November was a metaphorical meatgrinder for European projects.

Scorn cancelled itself.
http://i.imgur.com/cHpE4wa.png
An update has the project creator identify his thoughts about its failure. It appears the was the intentional decision to starve backers of details about what the game would be like. The idea is to create curiosity, but this is an incredibly risky strategy. How this strategy works with films is to provide a large amount of material without explanations/context beyond carefully crafted hints to get people speculating. A lack of teaser material means speculation eventually stagnates. The project page is about a third the normal height that I'd plan a project to have. There could have still been more information that wasn't spoilers for the game like the process behind the game creation and its team. I find it puzzling that there was so much effort put into the concept art, but not into banners or other presentation images. After October Kickstarter gets really tough every year. November 2014 was harder than normal. The cold launch did not help for a project with a goal that large. The project creator seemed pessimistic from the beginning which creates team and backer morale problems. The 3D art assets are still very impressive to me. It could have been a unique experience.

Looks like Innerspace hit it's goal but is still in its last 48 hour sso they're storming on through. I backed it, though only at the base tier for a digital copy as the higher tiers didn't intrigue me. Still I like seeing a game that uses some familiar controls but has a totally strange and delightfully creative concept about it.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/20 ... innerspace

Ashen Rift is still going for another month but hasnt' seemed to budged much, last I looked at about 18k CAD of the 85k they need. They have a ton of press on major sites, the main guy is hitting the social media daily (or so it seems to me) with updates and press and he seems to have a lot of support from folk but.. I'm wondering if that'll be enough this time. I'd hate to see him fail, he mentioned on facebook to me if this fails he likely won't try again.. kinda sad for such a nifty game.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/17 ... ashen-rift

Also, I re-upped my Indiebox subscript today. Cause so far it's been solid and fun to see what they do for games.

Ashen Rift is a weird campaign - it is for more money than their previous unsuccessful campaign - and it's 43 days long, which kickstarter doesn't recommend because it's tough to keep the momentum up, AND it is through the Christmas/New Years season. I don't know about you, but I certainly won't be checking kickstarter/kicktraq then... However, for the past 3 day it made $1.5k a day, so if they can keep that up, they'll be able to pull it off... The end date is pretty rough though - January 3rd - the Saturday after New Years... I suspect most people will still be on vacation. Still, I wish them the best of luck!

Ashen Rift's reward tiers aren't performing well enough. There are jumps in the pricing creating noticeable gaps. This makes the campaign much less efficient at covering funding distances.

Aviary Attorney is a lawyer sim where all the characters are birds drawn in an art style inspired by J. J. Grandville.

Daydreamer has a very eye catching creepy project thumbnail. I had high hopes for it when the warped suburban road started to play in the pitch, but then I saw the platformer and shooting parts which look like they have an average level of execution. It still has a lot of interesting looking creepy monster designs. Maybe if the jumping looked more natural I would have backed it. The rewards quickly ramp up going from $12 to $40 to $80 and also $100 to $800 to $5,000. This is something I strongly try to avoid when planning a rewards structure.

Absent II is a sequel to a free point and click game on Desura. I liked the pitch. With such a low goal is should be able to survive running in December.

Steam Battle is an multiplayer vehicular combat game. It feels too ambitious to run this time of year. I do like how much gameplay footage they showed.

Windwalkers has a "Coming soon on Kickstarter" message at the end of a teaser video. Such an ambitious campaign should probably hold back launching until February or March. A project like this could easily implode if executed poorly. It appears to based of a book that won an award in 2006 and then in 2011 an animated film was announced.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxNYsbN4518

Not much else worth noting has been launching on Kickstarter this month. I've been use the slowdown to catch up on backlog. I also put a bit of time each day into my Kickstarter guide. The table of contents has now doubled in length. The guide itself is now over 81,000 words. A lot still needs to go into the graphs analysis sections.
http://i.imgur.com/GajReCJ.png

Thanks for the links to the projects! Windwalkers looks super cool, but I suspect Forge Animation doesn't have a team for the video game, which is always worrisome. Hiring a team or contracting out all development can be really challenging.

Your guide is amazing! Maybe we should start a betting pool about how many words it'll end up.

It is now 2015. Kickstarter should start to see new campaigns this week.

A few campaigns have been announced for January already.

A 3D car racing game called Drift Stage released a demo ahead of its launch. The visual style is an interesting choice with lots of blues, purples and oranges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjOp6wGaeTY

Steel Assault was inspired by Shatterhand. It is an 8-bit homage to the late games in the lifecycle of the NES that pushed the system to its limits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MROl2nG3KM8

Igneos: The Last Phoenix is also in pre-launch preparations. It is a aerial melee game with bird combat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow7icn_xBJQ

Another Shadowrun campaign has been announced. That could be the biggest campaign January will see.

This week saw Kickstarter start to become more busy with good projects launching.

STRAFE has an entertaining pitch video that I won't spoil here. It is getting it some good press. I liked the "third party safety department" joke on the official site. The devblog has some interesting write up about its tech.

Children of Morta has some very strong art direction for this action RPG.

Steel Assault launched.

Goetia is a ghostly adventure game.

Drift Stage has done well.

Moonman has a cool eerie feel to a Terraria-like game thanks to the odd visuals and music.

Starr Mazer is an ambitious pixel art adventure game with sidescrolling shooter sections.

Children of Morta has some very strong art direction for its action RPG.

I'll also note The Lady's Thunderclap campaign is only at 38%.

Totally love the nano arcade project. I marked for an early backer onyx edition, but I suggested they consider alternate backer tiers with larger storage capacities so if they actually implement it I will upgrade most likely.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/10 ... ade-gaming

Pretty kool either way.

Also backed exploding kittens for the NSFW tier early and that campaign has EXPLODED.. like..kittens.. lol but since it is a card game and not a video game I won't link it.

those games look interesting, but I won't back any of them as none scream to me just yet. I also tallied the total funds I've thrown at kickstarter and indiegogo and seeing that total for the past 2 or so years was a sobering moment of " ok.. def need to try to hold back on increasing the total for a while".