The Kickstarter Thread

[gandalf.nho]

Some projects:

Antharion: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/879484120/antharion-an-old-school-rpg, isometric RPG

Legends of Dawn: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/522716131/legends-of-dawn, isometric RPG

Predestination: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nyphur/predestination-a-turn-based-space-4x-strategy-game, estrategy 4X

Limit Theory: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theory-an-infinite-procedural-space-game, sandbox space exploration

Meriwether: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/meriwether/meriwether-an-american-epic, american history-based RPG

[Deadly_Nightshade]

Mummy: The Curse is being Kickstarted

[Oerwinde]

I'd like to point out 2 games that might interest you guys (well i hope lol).

 

http://www.kickstart...rsaken-fortress

 

It's a survival-RPG.

 

Creating a base, finding raws materials, hunting, defend your base, interact with the characters..you can be betrayed etc..the game offer a lot of possiblity.

Their inspiration is Fallout (post apocalyptic background)/Fallout Tactics and Jagged Alliance for the fight.

Btw i am boohhing Obsidian for not backing a game that says that their direct inspiration is one of your game.

 

They are only 40% funded with..like no media coverage at all..(one article..) and there only 13 days left.

 

Second game a direct successor to Dungeon Keeper !

http://www.kickstart...r-the-overworld

 

I think it doesn't need explanation for anyone who have played DK and miss it

 

Forsaken Fortress sounds awfully like what BISINO is trying to raise money to put up a forum for.

[LadyCrimson]

Peter Molyneux made a video voicing his support of War of the Overworld. He's not part of the team/game or anything, just saying he supports it.

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/subterraneangames/war-for-the-overworld/posts/374173

[Malcador]

Peter Molyneux made a video voicing his support of War of the Overworld. He's not part of the team/game or anything, just saying he supports it.

 

http://www.kickstart...ld/posts/374173

 

Kiss of death for it.

[melkathi]

I backed another kickstarter:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1065983707/the-red-queen-of-oz-two-fates-an-adventure-game

 

The Red Queen of Oz: Two Fates - An Adventure Game

 

The Red Queen is gone mad. Or even more mad than she has always been. And after rampaging through Wonderland, she leads her card soldiers down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City. It is up to Alice and Dorothy to stop her.

[AwesomeOcelot]

Gas Powered Games has layoffs, Chris Taylor asks backers whether to continue the campaign. I think it's pretty much over, it's sad to see the developer go.

 

There's not that much love for Gas Powered Games, I think what happened with Supreme Commander 2 probably soured the relationship PC gamers had with GPG. Apart from Supreme Commander I don't think there was ever much appreciation for the other games GPG has developed. Action RPG fans aren't going to get excited by the company that made Dungeon Siege and Space Siege, impressive engine (way before and better than the competition), great interlace and control, but very shallow and generic in other respects. There's competition in Action RPG, they're still getting publisher funding, and there's a few on Kickstarter, some running now. "Caveman" theme, I wonder how popular it is, didn't seem like a strong new IP, which has been a problem with all GPG games.

[gandalf.nho]

Wildman, Gas Powered Games new project

Fortis Rex, RPG with army management and mounted combat

Inherit the Earth 2, sequel for Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb

Freedom Planet, platform/action Sonic-style

[TSBasilisk]

Unwritten: That Which Happened (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1599677835/unwritten-that-which-happened?ref=live)

 

A strategyic rogue-like with an emphasis on story-telling is the best way I can describe it, but it looks very interesting. I'd love to watch the story of a completed game.

[Llyranor]

Someone should start a Kickstarter to get Sawyer to shave that beard.

[TSBasilisk]

That was the 5 million stretch goal.

[NOK222]

Gas Powered Games has layoffs, Chris Taylor asks backers whether to continue the campaign. I think it's pretty much over, it's sad to see the developer go.

 

There's not that much love for Gas Powered Games, I think what happened with Supreme Commander 2 probably soured the relationship PC gamers had with GPG. Apart from Supreme Commander I don't think there was ever much appreciation for the other games GPG has developed. Action RPG fans aren't going to get excited by the company that made Dungeon Siege and Space Siege, impressive engine (way before and better than the competition), great interlace and control, but very shallow and generic in other respects. There's competition in Action RPG, they're still getting publisher funding, and there's a few on Kickstarter, some running now. "Caveman" theme, I wonder how popular it is, didn't seem like a strong new IP, which has been a problem with all GPG games.

It's picked up a bit since his tear jerker, it's being predicted it'll succeed now. 

[Tigranes]

I have no problem with GPG except I haven't ever liked any of their games. Which is a little unfair, since I never tried SupCom for some reason, but given that there's a strong ARPG element in WIldman...

[AwesomeOcelot]

I backed it as soon as I heard they may be cancelling the campaign, but I probably would have backed it by the end, so the spike in pledges that day might not mean much. Looking at kicktraq I didn't really see much of a problem with the level of pledges, it was always going to be close and still is. Many projects make more in the last 3 days than the first 3 days, and even without the spike I think it was likely to make its total. Even if it hits 1.1m I think GPG would have had to have had lay offs.

 

It's strange how GPG got into this situation, Dungeon Siege got way more mileage than it should have, 3 games and a movie from that franchise is a bit ridiculous. Supreme Commander 1 & 2 did not do well on Xbox 360, PC sales figures are hard to come by, but Supreme Commander was top of the sales charts on release and its still selling now. At that point you'd have to say that GPG was a great success. They did move from a game + expansion release every 2 years, to a game release every year, that had to involve expanding the team, 3 out of the 4 releases after that required major work in a patch to fix large issues with the games.

[Zoraptor]

No really big recent successes, no guarantee of them getting royalties from continuing sales and I'd guess a fair bit was spent shopping Kings.. around to publishers as well. If the discontinuation of support for AOEO came as a surprise and at the wrong time it's easy to see how they could get caught short.

[TSBasilisk]

There's also the fact that the industry is pretty cut-throat, with publishers likely eating up a lot of their profits. I'm also not sure, but they may not have had rights to the Dungeon Siege IP, and so didn't get anything from the movie. AoEO getting the axe and the loss of a publisher for Kings is likely what left them in a do-or-die situation.

 

From the interviews, Taylor was hoping for a strong reaction as proof that the campaign could go the distance and they'd have funds coming in at the end. When the campaign started slow, he decided to use the studio's funds to cover severance packages for his employees now rather than dry up the funds and leave them in the lurch if the campaign and studio failed. Even if this does kill the campaign, the employees have their due and are free to look for new positions now rather than being stuck in a holding pattern.

 

This doesn't end speculation that this was a publicity stunt, of course. He might have planned this in the event of a slow start as a last ditch effort to garner interest, but that doesn't change the fact that doing this was a lot more than some failing developers do for their employees.

Edited January 22, 2013 by TSBasilisk

[Tigranes]

Like Obsidian and New Vegas, creating a best-selling game really doesn't do much to help you survive. 

[Hurlshort]

I have no problem with GPG except I haven't ever liked any of their games. Which is a little unfair, since I never tried SupCom for some reason, but given that there's a strong ARPG element in WIldman...

 

Kind of the way I feel as well, I heard SupCom was fantastic, but I'm not an RTS fan.  The action RPG's they've done did little for me.  This isn't really a storied developer like the folks from Black Isle and Sierra.

[AwesomeOcelot]

They are storied developers... just in RTS, which is probably a problem, if they had launched a RTS KickStarter  "...from the creator of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander ". They may have got over double their funding goal, because RTS isn't getting publisher funded as much and the ones that do aren't like TA or SC.

[AwesomeOcelot]

After 11 days of the campaign Chris Taylor has finally explained what Wildman is, I think it sounds good and something new.

 

It's primarily a RTS with light RPG elements, you've got a campaign map linking battle maps, you carry over items, levelling, and captured unit type production from the battle map to the campaign map where you can then use them in subsequent battle maps. The gameplay, think RTS sub-genre, think tower defence (Defense Grid, Orcs Must Die), tower attack (Gratuitous Tank Battles), and MOBA (League of Legends, Defense of the Ancients) but you build structures for attacking units, you've got a powerful hero like Warcraft 3 or DOTA but even more like an ARPG character in Dungeon Siege or Torchlight.

 

It's not about cavemen, they're aiming for prehistory to the middle of the medieval period. I don't think this decision is completely unrelated to working on Age of Empires Online. I don't think they've done much work on this kind of progression, they've only shown assets and concept art for the "caveman" period. This could produce a lot of variety and depth into the game.

 

Video Update #4: How to Fit an RTS Into an Action-RPG

 

The funding has completely stalled on this, for a few hours on Wednesday Kicktraq said the pledges were -$125. They've added new tiers for boxed collectors addition. I don't think they'll get to the total, they've taken too long to explain what the game is, they had massive lay offs (which should have happened before the campaign), and Chris Taylor publicly gave up on the campaign. So yeah, you probably couldn't run a worse Kickstarter campaign, but the people involved are game dev veterans, the concept is good. If you complain about the industry not producing new IP, new concepts, publishers, or DRM pitch in with trivial non-reward amounts.

Edited January 26, 2013 by AwesomeOcelot

[WorstUsernameEver]

No really big recent successes, no guarantee of them getting royalties from continuing sales and I'd guess a fair bit was spent shopping Kings.. around to publishers as well. If the discontinuation of support for AOEO came as a surprise and at the wrong time it's easy to see how they could get caught short.

They also apparently had a bunch of projects in development that got canceled very recently.

[AwesomeOcelot]

 

No really big recent successes, no guarantee of them getting royalties from continuing sales and I'd guess a fair bit was spent shopping Kings.. around to publishers as well. If the discontinuation of support for AOEO came as a surprise and at the wrong time it's easy to see how they could get caught short.

They also apparently had a bunch of projects in development that got canceled very recently.

Yeah, they said a project got cancelled a month away from beta that they had been working on for years. It's almost becoming impossible to be an independent developer without also being your own publisher, they'll manage to sink any developer given enough time.

[LadyCrimson]

Poor Chris Taylor. I always liked him. Only played Dungeon Siege's tho, none of their RTS.

 

That said, the mixture of genres sounds a bit weird to me. I like both action-rpg and some RTS, but mixing the two I'd have some reservations. I generally haven't liked games that mix genres too much, so it would depend on exactly what level of that they're really doing. I'm having a hard time picturing it.

[AwesomeOcelot]

From the prototype video, it's currently looking exactly like a MOBA game like DOTA or LoL, RTS controls of a hero like in Warcraft 3, but your units spawn and are AI controlled. Unlike MOBA games, you place your own structures to spawn AI allies. If you've played a MOBA game you should be able to understand this game, and if you've played Warcraft 3 it's not a big leap to understand a MOBA game. The RPG element is basically just that your hero behaves like a character in Torchlight or Diablo in terms of equipment, items, skills, and progression, where as Warcraft 3 or DOTA there's a lot less of that.  There are quite a few high quality free MOBA games (League of Legends, Super Monday Night Combat), another one is coming out 2nd of Feb by the people who made Tribes: Ascend, it's called SMITE.

 

Chris Taylor doesn't want to say this game is like a MOBA game, because there's so many of them about, and he wants to play up the differences, which there are quite a few large ones. MOBA and Tower defence/attack games are a sub genre of RTS, so a lot of their elements are RTS. This is the natural progression of MOBA and RTS games, Dawn of War II had stronger RPG elements than Warcraft 3, I think this takes it further. It seems like every game out has RPG elements now whether that's RTS, FPS, or Action Adventure, and I'm fine with that.

[Oerwinde]

After 11 days of the campaign Chris Taylor has finally explained what Wildman is, I think it sounds good and something new.

 

I knew what it was when I backed it a week ago. I thought it was pretty clear. Guess I was in the minority?