Woah. Seems like inXile Entertainment is on a roll. Today the developer of Kickstarted game Wasteland 2 has decided to have another bite at the apple by launching the Kickstarter campaign for Torment: Tides of Numenera. The question becomes, can they get that whole apple without catching the worm?
(Checks Torment Kickstarter page.) Okay, yeah, they’re still good to go.
GameSalad had better watch out…it’s getting competition. The Tile Team of Walker, Warden, & Walker is rolling out Build A Game…if you help out. The team of Chad Walker, Eric Walker, and Nathan Warden have turned to the crowdfunding method of Kickstarter to jumpstart their latest endeavor, an application designed to enable the creation, playing, sharing and selling of interactive media such as games. With 3 weeks left to go, the Build A Game Kickstarter is almost 25% of the way there.
Evolve-Pr has an excellent article about kicking off your Kickstarter, point by point. The article is backed up by interviews with notables in the industry, including American McGee, who just finished off his successful Kickstarter with Spicy Horse’s Akaneiro: Demon Hunters.
The article goes into how to plan out your Kickstarter (including how much Ramen you need), talking to the press, how to care and feed your Kickstarter properly, and tips at the end. The press portion is incredibly important to me, as I get tons of email from everyone and their brother/sister running the next greatest Kickstarter, but I only have so much time on my hands to cover stuff. The article does a great job of covering the details that most press need from you if you want us to slap your Kickstarter onto our front page. Especially important is that we want to know the details of a game that has realistic expectations. Your Halo-like FPS that you’re trying to fund for $10,000 doesn’t sound very realistic to me; nor does your $1million casual iPhone game.
The tips in the article from developers and press about how to plan the Kickstarter out and how to talk to the press are really good. For example “Mass emails to general games media are not always as helpful as finding one opinion shaper with a decent audience (or Twitter following) and convincing him/her that your game is worthy of attention.” is a great tip. More importantly, if you send out a mass email, try to avoid “Dear (Insert name here)”. That’ll get you into the Trash bin the quickest.
Have you done a Kickstarter of your project? What were your experiences? Post below about your Mac or iOS game project on Kickstarter!
With less than a day to go, even the kickstarter for a AAA-style ARPG like Akaneiro: Demon Hunters still needs an extra boot to make it over the hump.
If you’ve considered dropping a few bucks into a Kickstarter project, you might want to give American McGee’s game project Akaneiro: Demon Hunters some scrutiny. This ARPG mixes Japanese folklore and story into a lot of fast-paced fighting, aka Torchlight/Diablo style. And the best part is that you can actually start playing the game right now.
A Mac client is available in an open beta right now. It does require you register an account on the Spicy Horse game site, but that is relatively painless and quick. Once completed you can jump right into gameplay. I’m running an early 2006 model Mac Pro with Snow Leopard and a recently installed ATI Radeon 5770 card, and with the graphics up to best I get no lag in single-player mode. And those graphics are GORGEOUS!
Spicy Horse, the development house for American McGee, has pumped the game site full of screens and game art, including a fan kit that is easily downloadable. The game can be played right now with an fast download and run on even old machines. The gameplay that I’ve seen so far is great and the graphics beautiful. The game has already been greenlit on Steam, even. And the developer has a long history of releasing interesting games that make your mind bend in fun ways. And yet, despite these facts, Akaneiro: Demon Hunters is still lacking over $14,000 (as of this post) to reach its non-stretch goals. It definitely leads one to wonder whether we, as a game community, have started down the other side of the kickstarter hill. Will every project be harder to fund from here on out?
Spicy Horse is looking to add co-op multiplayer, an Android and iOS-tablet version, an equipment crafting system, and improved community support among other things with the additional funding from the kickstarter. Check the game out and make your decision soon, though, because the Akaneiro kickstarter is winding down in less than 30 hours. And, really, you WANT multiplayer with this thing.
If you’re a big fan of Half-Life 2 and all of its mods, then you will be happy to hear that a group of guys have formed a Kickstarter to put together Insurgency 2, the successor to the extremely popular Half-Life 2 mod released five years ago. That mod introduced the concept that allowed players to fight on either side of the conflict. Insurgency 2 is taking things a step further by defining a new sub-genre…high-speed tactical.
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The Kickstarter campaign for Jack Houston and the Necronauts by Warbird Games is almost complete. But we Mac gamers may not see the game on the Mac after all…at least not in the beginning.
Jack Houston and the Necronauts is an old-school adventure game which uses stop-motion animation to create a unique aesthetic true to the retro sci-fi movies that inspired it. The game is a point-and-click adventure placed in an alternate universe exploring Venus. Warbird Games was originally bringing the game just to a Windows platform to start, with Linux and Mac support sometime afterwards. After a tremendous response to their Kickstarter campaign, they added in stretch goals that included the hiring of a full time Unity programmer to develop the game on the Unity 4 engine if the campaign hit $90k, and include iPad, Mac, Linux and Android Tablet platforms support as well.
However, as of today they are just shy of their original goal of $56,000. And with only three days left to go it seems unlikely that they will hit the $90k mark. New tiers have been added, including additional tiers specifically adding new rewards for everyone pledging at higher amounts (since apparently for Kickstarter, once a tier has been added, it can’t be updated). So if you haven’t pledged but this sounds like an interesting project, now is the time to plunk your money down.
There’s a lot of talk about whether or not Kickstarter will prove to be a giant bubble that will pop with sticky yuck over all of us who contributed to projects, requiring us to extricate ourselves without anything for the money we donated. And with that delightful image in mind, it’s good to see a company that not only has successfully hit their stretch goals in their Kickstarter project, but has taken steps forward to completing their goals. Phoenix Online Studios, developing Cognition, recently announced a partnership with Reverb Publishing to publish their point-and-click adventure title. This after starting a developer diary and releasing an MP3 of the theme song.
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Pulp Sci-Fi action? Check! Intelligent, romantic, beefy space-dude in bubble helmet? Check! Crash-landing on Venus with tons of weird creatures to deal with? Check! Mac version of the game? Almost…there… Only a few days into their Kickstarter campaign for Jack Houston and the Necronauts, Warbird Games has already hit the 67% funding mark. While a Mac port of the game was always on their radar, they have upped the ante and added stretch goals which include a Mac and iPad client upon launch of the game.
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