The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[LobsterSundew]

Exploding Kittens has done extremely well.

The director of Ju-on and the artist behind Pryramid Head are working with the creator of Clock Tower on a new game called Project Scissors: NightCry.

Orphan is visually like Limbo but with a cool dusk effect during an alien invasion and glow effects for things like blaster bolts. I find this project very weird because some parts are better executed than many other campaigns like the timing and having cool moments to show, but the value in the rewards is poor. There are just 5 reward tiers spanning $1 to $50.

[evilkinggumby]

ok project scissors loosk really promising. They have a hefty goal to shoot for though. I snagged the physical copy, one of the few times I'll likely do that this year. I hope they pull this off, there is some CRAZY nice talent on this one.

[matt]

I have been sucking on keeping up on the forum lately, but I am really excited for Project Scissors! I included it in my update today. As much as I love Ju-On, I was a bit disappointed with the short film. It doesn't really reveal anything about the game, and maybe I just suck at English, but I have a lot of trouble understanding what the mom is saying... :-/ $300k is a lot of money though, and judging from the current momentum, it doesn't seem like they'll make it. Why did they launch on a Saturday?!?!

Strafe has a hilarious video that really sells the campaign. I'm envious we didn't have anything as clever for Neverending Nightmares.

Exploding Kittens is running an AMAZING campaign and has just set a backer record for all kickstarter (over 100k) and is the second most funded game project right behind OUYA. It'll be interesting if they can beat OUYA since OUYA charged $99 for the hardware. Also, I think it's awesome that they are running their campaign with only 4 tiers and 93% are at the NSFW deck. That'll make fulfillment a lot easier! I'm kind of regretting doing the physical add ons for our campaign since I think it only added a few hundred bucks and made fulfillment a lot more complicated. I was very desperate when we launched them. hahah

[Grabthehoopka]

Strafe has a hilarious video that really sells the campaign. I'm envious we didn't have anything as clever for Neverending Nightmares.

Mmm. Shoulda gone with Hypersmell(tm).

Seriously though, Strafe looks awesome. I thought it looked neat, but when the hallway was full of the corrosive orange goo and he shot a ragdoll across it to make a trail of blood that he could safely cross, I was sold.

[LobsterSundew]

Neptune, Have Mercy has a submersible fighting aquatic monsters.

Judo is a martial arts game.

Orion Trail is Oregan Trail in space.

Underworld Ascendant and Windwalkers launched. Both are ambitious.

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Exploding Kittens keeps exploding past $5,378,934 with 14 days to go. Ouya had $8,596,474.

STRAFE added a cheaper $15 tier that introducing a copy of the game because people were complaining about the $25 price. It is now cannibalizing the old $25 tier, but not as fast as Taxi Journey experienced. This campaign is not in a good state right now. A problem now is that even with the lower priced tier, the existence of the $15 tier now has to be promoted.

I'm thinking Project Scissors should lock down that $20 tier with 1,892 slots still remaining. There are other parts of the reward structure harming its chances. The $40 tier just adds a download of the soundtrack and is the first tier after the non-earlybird $25 tier that introduces the game. It also ends around noon on a Sunday. The new thumbnail is much better.

It is starting to become more apparent from watching graphs that Friday is not just a poor day to launch, but like Saturday it too can be a death sentence for projects. Kickstarter panels at GDC should almost open with "Do not launch on Friday or Saturday!". It is like throwing away a big chunk of the first 48 hours of momentum. Then people stay on the fence about backing because it doesn't look like a sure success.

I was surpised that Identity was funded. An MMO like that seems too ambitious. The graphs showed a big surge near the end.

Sunless Sea now has an impressive Steam launch trailer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhIk2PqPU3o

Darkest Dungeon went onto Steam early-access this week. It is creating good impressions.

Campaigns launching this week with a standard length are facing some of the potentially worst times to end in the first half of 2015. In the period of March 2nd to 8th there is GDC, IGF and PAX East happening. March 2015 may also be a tough month to run a Kickstarter campaign for a video game. Bloodborne releases on March 24th, a PC port of GTA V is scheduled to hit Steam and Pillars of Eternity launching if it doesn't get delayed.

I updated the graphs for Neverending Nightmares to show how the percentage of backers changed at each reward tier over time. Watching how those percentages changed was something I wanted to do every since Neverending Nightmares launched. I originally thought of using an animated pie chart.

[RightClickSaveAs]

Darkest Dungeon is amazing already, the most polished Early Access title I've seen, and looks to be a massive success. The Kickstarter seemed to be really well run, and the game is following up on that. It's one of those titles where Early Access actually makes a lot of sense, the core game is pretty much done, now there's just minor tweaking/bug fixing and additional dungeons to add.

[matt]

It definitely seems like Project Scissors is in bad shape. The launch date seems like it was an extremely poor choice - as is the end date.

I know Tyler Sigman, and it seems like he and the team really hit a home run with Darkest Dungeon. The kickstarter was excellently run, the art style is awesome, and the premise is really clever.

Early Access is great for rogue-likes or other procedural game - especially if you have a really strong core gamelay loop.

[LobsterSundew]

Underworld Ascendant is from the team behind one of the oldest Ultima games.

The Miskatonic is a sidescrolling "horror" comedy.

Seaworthy is FTL with sea pirates instead of space pirates.

WarRab: Veteran is an odd game with a rabbit and war.

Strength Of The Sword ULTIMATE is a rare example of using infographs as the main body of a project page.

Steve, The Alright Knight had a funny pitch about its protagonist.

[evilkinggumby]

Snagged a cheap copy of The Underworld game (not willing to drop $100 for a physical copy when there is only early production are to show for it). Also grabbed a physical copy of the Ultimate knight game as there is a lot of creativity and good sense of humor to their sales pitch, and a physical copy is only $40 shipped.

Miskatonic seems really kool, i Love the art style, but I am not keen on visual novels so for now I'll take a pass. It is too bad, if it was a side scrolling run-n-gun with cut scenes between levels or sprinkled throughout (or a run and gun with adventure game elements) I'd totally back the hell out of it. The others don't really interest me but I with them all the best of luck!

[matt]

Dan (our other programmer) is super excited about Underworld, so we backed it on the company account. I had a Mac long before it was cool, so I missed out on the joy of Ultima Underworld. haha

Miskatonic is weird. The pitch says "sidescroller visual novel" but then if you read about it and look at the footage, it sounds like it is more of an adventure game... I'm not really into visual novels either, so that is a bit of a turn off, but I wonder if their definition of visual novel is different from mine...