The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[LobsterSundew]

I was surprised to receive a Blu-ray for Valiant in the mail because I had not backed for a physical copy. I had only pledged $5 to watch the stream of the film.

Shenmue 3 has more than half a million dollars coming from just its $500 tier. Its graphs show a big build up of backers at the $300 and $500 tiers. There is a gap in reward tier pricing from $500 to $3,000 where new reward tiers could be inserted into. There actually isn't many large tier backers. There are only four $10,000 tier backers. It is impressive to raise so much without big backers.

In contrast Voxelnauts had 712 backers pledging $120,274 of a $200,000 goal. The average pledge amount was $168.92 per backer. The graphs have 49.89% of its funding just at the $10,000 reward tier.

[matt]

That is really cool about Valiant.

Shenmue 3 had an update with a survey to choose your favorite character, but it has a second page about how much you'd pay for various rewards. I suspect they are going to try to insert some rewards in the big gap. One of them that is mentioned is to be an NPC in Shenmue 3... Oh man! If I still had my AAA developer salary, I would totally pay to get in the game a an NPC!!! Unfortunately, my salary is much worse as an indie, so I don't think I can afford it. haha Maybe I can run a crowdfunding campaign to put me in Shenmue 3?

[evilkinggumby]

haha Maybe I can run a crowdfunding campaign to put me in Shenmue 3?

hmm.. you have a kickstarter campaign coming up. if you were the unscrupulous type you'd have a tier for backers to be added as custom npc's or something in the game at the same cost as shenmue III's tier and then just shuffle the funds and add the backer into NeN2 in your spare time.. heheheh

[matt]

hahah, we are already looking at a goal of like $130-150k based on the rest of the budget coming from my Neverending Nightmares sales projections. Anything else we can earn would probably best spent on the game rather than indulging my Shenmue obsession. I *think* my projections are relatively conservative, but extra funding could make me sleep easier. haha Either way, we'll kick in our share even if it means we have to pick up extra consulting, which we are actually trying to ramp up a bit on that front.

[LobsterSundew]

Kickstarter still autoplays pitch videos, but now project pages have the videos muted until clicked. This is better than having a bunch of tabs all blaring music when Chrome starts up with the tabs open from the last session.

Renoir is detective game with platforming and a monochrome noir art style. It was one of the few good projects to launch this week so far.

EGGBIRD is weird project from a creator with one unsucessful campaign and two sucessful campaigns. The pitch video is loud so lower your volume if you try to watch it. Christoper Lee voices Thanatos the Stealthy Snake.

Charlotte's Dream has sometimes done up to 3 project updates per day. It has slowed down with updates, but it was tempting to unsubscribe to it.

[matt]

In Firefox, it autoplays with the audio on. For a while, they had a Firefox bug where the kickstarter pitch video would play in a super tiny window (something like 16x16). I'm glad they fixed it although maybe I'm the only one left who uses FireFox...

Edit: it just did the 16x16 for me again, so I don't know what the bug is. Weird.

[LobsterSundew]

Pitch videos no longer autoplay for me. Kickstarter appears to have reverted to how the player was before. Anyone else finding that large animated GIFs don't begin to load until after positioning the mouse cursor over them? Three grey circles appear over the GIF.

Boma Naraka Sura reminded me of Muramasa for Wii.

Red Ash is another example of a Japanese developer launching their project for a weekend. They keep doing this for some reason. It may have to do with workweeks in Japan. It has raised over $100,000 so far. At the same time there is also a related animation campaign.

Examples of projects that ended on the 4th of July are Crisential, We Happy Few and The Lost Pisces. It is a bad idea to both end on a Starday and on the 4th of July.

[LobsterSundew]

One Dreamer is 2D pixel art horror game.

SphereFACE is a twist of the classic Asteroids formula.

July continues to not have very many good projects launching.

Shenmue 3 continues to dominate. Apparently a non-profit school in China backed it because the founders were inspired by the game. There was also a teaser for a Shenmue documentary. That $10 million stretch goal is going to be tough with its current momentum. It was really a massive surge at the start.

[evilkinggumby]

ugh.. i really am gettin tired of this pixel art style everyone is jumping on. drawing the body as a solid mass and a head with details and then reducing the legs to simple sticks just..*facepalm* as an artist it is making me grit my teeth...

i have my doubts for hitting the 10 million mark with Shenmue, but I hope it does well either way. They stated when you shoot for a tier, you are only going to get THAT copy of the game and won't have access to buy multiples. This..struck me as odd. Seems like it might hurt them as anyone wanting a sealed copy for posterity, and a copy to play, is screwed. That on top of some of the questionable press at the start makes me think they're losing that initial steam as it goes on. Most of what they're adding now is really high priced limited tiers.

[matt]

I am very sad that Shenmue won't reach $10 million but I am very happy the game is getting made! I am a HUGE Shenmue fan, so hopefully this doesn't sound like blasphemy, but I'm not sure warring Chinese factions or whatever new feature they are talking about is really what I am looking for in the game. I will be very pleased just to have the story advanced.

Comcept launched two kickstarters for a Mega Man Legends spiritual sequel Red As, as both an animation and the game. I'm usually a bit hesitant to back new kickstarters when they haven't shipped the last ones. In addition, Comcept seems spread pretty thin since they are ALSO doing the Xbox One exclusive ReCore. I guess Keiji Inafune probably supervised several projects at Capcom simultaneously, but I am also less eager about pitches with nothing but concepts...