f13.net

Get in on the latest craze before the first high-profile dev takes the money and runs or produces a complete pile of shit!

In case you somehow had no idea what Kickstarter is:

After Doublefine started a ridiculously successful project that raised about $3.3 million (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure?ref=live), a flood of video game projects have shown up hoping to get some of that filthy small-donation lucre to produce a game without some monolithic publisher lodged up their ass asking them why their game isn't another CoD. Or because no publisher would touch it. Either or.

Some projects of note that have not ended (mostly because of the licenses/names attached, not because of perceived awesomeness/quality):

The Banner Saga (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stoic/the-banner-saga?ref=category) - Status: Funded, ends on 4/20 (whoaaaa): Former Bioware members come together to make a hand-animated side-perspective role-playing turn-based strategy thing. Jesus.

Shadowrun Returns (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1613260297/shadowrun-returns?ref=category) - Status: Funded, ends on 4/29: Jordan Weisman, the original creator of Shadowrun has managed to get his own IP licensed back to him to make a new 2D Shadowrun game that pays homage to the SNES/Genesis versions.

Leisure Suit Larry Returns (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/leisuresuitlarry/make-leisure-suit-larry-come-again?ref=category) - Status: Funded, Ends on 5/4: Al Lowe, also the original owner/writer of his own series has the license and wants to remake the original game on more than just iOS like he planned.

Post any kickstarters that tickle your fancy. I put this in general since there's plenty of cool/interesting NON game related projects.

The board game and product design areas are almost universally more exciting than the video game ones.

In addition, they deliver more often. I've yet to get anything of value from any of the video game related ones. Hell, still waiting for the fucking Venus Patrol to launch.

Meh.

Here's one for you:

MTG: The Musical (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2042613788/magic-the-gathering-the-musical?ref=spotlight) - Status: Now Funded!, ends on 5/15: ...it's an MTG musical, with puppets. I don't even know what the fuck, but hey.

There have been a few projects on here which I felt might be worth my money, but I can't shake the feeling that it is a bad idea.

Note, if you missed it, the project does NOT get anything if they fail to meet their fundraising. No money changes hands until the time runs out and the checks clear.

Projects I have noticed or donated to because I am a sucker:

Takedown (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/355932838/crowdsourced-hardcore-tactical-shooter?ref=live) - Status: Funded, Over: A mess of people from Bungie, Monolith, etc. etc. including original Rainbow Six devs want to make a "strategic" FPS like the original Rainbow Six and SWAT games.

Grim Dawn (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crateentertainment/grim-dawn?ref=popular) - Status: Funded, ends on 5/18: Yep, the former Iron Lore guys (Titan Quest) are now asking for money to finish their long suffering post-apocalyptic/gothic ARPG.

I've (well, the wife) donated to this one and I know Spirit of the Century has gotten some love on the board before, so this may be of interest to folks -

Dinocalypse Now (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evilhat/spirit-of-the-century-presents-the-dinocalypse-tri?ref=live) - Status: Funded, 5 days left: This is our first fiction project at Evil Hat. We’ve published pen & paper roleplaying games before, and now we’ve set our sights on expanding into other media.

For our starting point, we’re diving into the wild and wooly world of our in-house 1930s-era pulp adventure setting called Spirit of the Century.

There have been (and are) some very, very good games being produced on Kickstarter.  I think I would avoid video games, particularly MMOs.   :awesome_for_real:

Zombies, RUN! (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sixtostart/zombies-run-a-running-game-and-audio-adventure-for) - Status: Funded, Over: In modern-day man's efforts to blend exercising with gaming, Zombies, RUN hopes to provide you with entertainment by making you believe to be on the run by zombies, as you go out to find food/supplies for your base camp.

It's out now for iOS, Android in the next month or so.

Now that I'm back home on my computer:

Things I've Already Backed (and Why) - in no particular order:

Dice Age (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1536325846/dice-age-the-new-era-of-dice?ref=users): I hate completely random games, but I love dice. I will probably find alternative uses for these, like including one in every game I own to decide who plays first. I have not yet received this.

Pen Type-A (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cwandt/pen-type-a-a-minimal-pen?ref=users): I needed a new pen. Hi-Tec-Cs happen to be my favorite mass made pen. Best of both worlds. Gorgeous and functional. I have not yet received this.

Glory to Rome - Black Box Edition (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cambridgegames/glory-to-rome-black-box-edition-rome-demands-beaut?ref=users): I've heard amazing things about the game. Unfortunately the only thing good about the company is the new graphic designer and the DESIGNS of the lead designer. The company is run worse than nearly any I've ever encountered (the worst has yet to come), and they do NOT have their shit together. They don't know how to interface with consumers, and remakes of good games of theirs with this sort of art are probably the only way they'll ever get a dime from me. I have not yet received this.

Lyssan (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/baudot/lyssan?ref=users): I'm a big fan of medium to heavy board games that support 2 players out of the box with no major futzing around with rules. Lyssan does that and I'm excited about it. I have not yet received this.

The MagBar (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1168713538/the-magbar-an-innovative-key-holder?ref=users): I only bought this because I got in super cheap. I will probably never receive it. This is a case of the guy running a campaign totally fucking it up. Whatever, it's the gamble you take. I have obviously not received it.

Eaten by Zombies (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maydaygames/eaten-by-zombies-deckbuilding-to-die-for-game?ref=users): Man, Mayday Games is fucking awful. Don't support their shit. They do not have it together, most of their games are shit. Just fucking awful across the board. They are my least favorite games publisher - even moreso than Games Workshop. At least GW has high production values. These folks have the quality control of a Greek Financial Institution. On the flip side, I've gotten the 3 things I've ordered from them (third time was the last straw, obviously). I will not be giving them money again, neither should you. I have received this.

Dig: The Card Game (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/392966477/dig-the-card-game?ref=users): Cute little game with some neat ideas with nearly no production value. Not the best thing ever, not the worst. Probably just about worth the money. I have received this.

Americana Playing Cards (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1017676492/americana-playing-card-deck?ref=users): Needed playing cards. There are playing cards on KS all the time. These were my favorite ones that had popped up thus far. Stoked. They should be arriving in a few weeks. I have not yet received this.

Star Command iOS (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/starcommand/star-command-sci-fi-meets-gamedev-story-for-ios-an?ref=users): Game Dev Story meets Star Trek. Whatevs. I put money into it. There was just a news story about them not guessing how much money they needed. Game will likely be out this fall. I'm half excited. Mostly because the bar for quality has gone up on mobile since it was announced. As a side-note, the developer of this project messaged me after I'd backed this - apparently he was/is a fan of f13. That was neat. It's happened two times since. I have not yet received this.

Miskatonic School for Girls (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1225737959/miskatonic-school-for-girls-deck-building-game?ref=users): Deck-building game Sitting on my Shelf that I haven't played #1,732. Seriously though, I bought this because of the theme. Everyone has said it's shit. Don't care, art is awesome. Box is awesome. I have received this.

Venus Patrol (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/774616737/venus-patrol-charting-a-new-course-for-videogame-c?ref=users): Snotty, high-brow bullshit gaming site. I gave them money because the dude is in Austin and one of my friends said he deserved it. Still hasn't launched. Don't really care all that much about the outcome. I think I have a neat shirt or some shit coming from them though. This has not yet launched.

Creatures! (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1975008436/creatures-the-card-game?ref=users): Loved the idea of this little card game. Still do. Unfortunately, Cryptozoic just came out with a version 9,000,000x cooler called Epic Spell Warz something something Super Fight Fist Punch Dragon Death Poison Snake Cocks or something. Anyway, buy the Cryptozoic game. I have received this.

Exile Sun (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gameknightgames/exile-sun-multiplayer-conflict-redefined?ref=users): Space combat game! Recently did a second kickstarter to support the final goal which was actual space ship miniatures. It was successful. I'm stoked. I have not yet received this.

Terra Evolution (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maydaygames/terra-evolution-deck-building-game?ref=users): This was published by those chucklefuck bastards over at Mayday. They fucked up all sorts of things on this, BUT they did not design the game. I haven't played it but it looks fun. They didn't even do anything with it other than have a fucking caveman pack it and fuck up half the boxes. They had to ship me an extra copy because my numbered copy was all fucked up. Whatever, I'll play it, I'll probably like it. I hate Mayday. They don't deserve to continue operating in the board game publishing arena. They can't even get sleeves right. I have received this.

D-Day Dice (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1325766284/d-day-dice-board-game?ref=users): If you've heard of any Kickstarter board games, it's probably this one. It was a runaway success with amazing extras - so much so that I actually put money into it despite fucking hating dice-based games. The entire thing was run like a tight ship and I don't see them fucking up a single thing. If you're looking at putting something on Kickstarter - this is the project you need to look at. Fucking seriously. I have not yet received this.

Zong Shi (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/167427101/zong-shi-earn-the-right-to-be-named-grand-master-c?ref=users): A fantastic little worker placement game that I backed early. Thing got delivered faster than anything that had to be produced post the Kickstarter. It was run well, extras were a little dry, but I'm looking forward to more from these dudes. Keith Blume II has his shit together. I have received this.

Omen: Reign of War (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/smallboxgames/omen-a-reign-of-war-second-edition?ref=users): I gave these dudes a lot of money. Small Box Games makes very few copies of their shit. Omen showed up with fixes and a ton more cards and I couldn't help myself. Their initial goal was high, but they did a great job reaching it. After the funding ended, they actually offered backers a copy of ANOTHER reprint of theirs at like 30% off retail. They did a great job on Kickstarter and I'll likely be getting my copy soon. Also, I had a lot of back and forth via PM with them during the campaign due to my backing level and they were great to work with. Another company I would blindly support should they do it again. I have not yet received this.

CPU Wars Volume 1.0 (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/harrymylo/cpu-wars-volume-10-the-card-game?ref=users): I'll never play this dumb game, but I wanted a copy just for high quality pictures of CPUs that came out during my lifetime. Whatever, I haven't even opened it. The mailing list is fucking annoying though as it's for people to chat. Mark as spam. The guy who ran it did a great job with communication and such though.I have received this.

Realm Coins (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1095993227/realm-coins?ref=users): These came in super fast and are of super high quality and I use them for money in any game with paper money. Lords of Waterdeep comes to mind. This shit is just great. And cheap! I have received this.

Skittykitts! (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1029774118/skittykitts-an-addictively-fun-card-game?ref=users): Cute little card game, the 200% goal was hit and he sent everyone two decks. I haven't played it but it actually does look fun for such a tight little package. Came in super fast. I have received this.

Agents of S.M.E.R.S.H. (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1545517208/agents-of-smersh-a-spy-storytelling-board-game?ref=users): I like Tales of Arabian Nights. This is that, only in like a Bond-esque 70s world. Spies and shit. Dig it. Can't wait for it to come in. They did a great job with the campaign also - another one to look at like D-Day Dice. I have not yet received this.

On the horizon, there's only two games I'm looking forward to:
OGRE (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/847271320/ogre-designers-edition?ref=live) - I mean, come on. It's fucking Ogre. I haven't played this in YEARS. I'm stoked.

Tammany Hall (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/785868/tammany-hall-coming-soon-from-pandasaurus-games) - Not yet on Kickstarter, Pandasaurus somehow got the fucking rights to this bitch. I can't wait. Looks like it's going to start May 1st. Huzzah.

I do not back things on other Kickstarter-like sites. Indiegogo can eat my ass.

PFt, Kickstarter is old news.  The new hotness is buying a piece of the company thanks to the JOBS act. 

That's where all the real, hardcore fraud is going to happen.

I continue to try and figure out a good project to get funded myself.

Here is an idea.  Take Railways of the <insert region here> and make a derivative version about shipping instead.

This is either a joke or you don't know it's been done to death and continues being done to death.

Some projects I'm backing that haven't closed yet:

Pebble: E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android (http://kck.st/HumIV5) - Set the record for most backing received and it still has 31 days to go.

Sonastand (http://kck.st/wkrmDO) - A tiny stand for the iPhone 4(s) that supposedly makes the sound out of the speaker better. Video doesn't really demonstrate that so it's sort of a crap shoot. Worse case it's just cool little (expensive) stand. Ends in 64 hours.

RoboGames 2012 documentary (http://kck.st/HssBBN) - Probably not going to get funded as it's ending in 18 hours and it has a long way to go relatively speaking but I used to love to watch those robot battles so I figured I'd show them some support.

Some of those boardgame ones really interest me, I just don't have the money though to back $50-$100 per game for a pre-order I may or may not ever see.

I worry less about video games that I can back for $10 maybe $15 for a digital copy.

I am going to create a food category Kickstarter for my wife's bakery this week though.  Figure if it goes, yay, if it doesn't, so what.  :oh_i_see:  (re-reading that I thought I better elaborate that it is a real idea she wants to try at her bakery, and something she will actually do if she raised enough.  Kinda came across as was just going to make a fake one to try and get some quick cash, heh.)

Fuck me. I'm old enough to have played the original as a kid and played most of the Metagaming microgames of that era. I even won a Melee tournament at a convention once :awesome_for_real:

Wholly crap, $3.98M when they originally wanted $100k? Watch looks awesome though, but with that kinda cash why wouldn't they just walk?

This is the only one I've "invested" in: P1 by Premier Pen (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/steveblack/p1-by-premier-pen) (Funded), which is a machined case for the Pilot Hi-Tec-C / G-Tec pen insert.

If I pay enough does it come in a series of tiny plastic boxes?

I didn't know it has been done to death.  I just discovered the Railways games this year.

I have pretty much only funded video games thus far (Wasteland 2, Double Fine, FTL, Banner Saga, Valdis Story, Shadow Run, Grim Dawn) with the exception of Foldable.Me (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kzhu/foldableme?ref=live) as a cute present for nieces/nephews/Asian Friend.  I am hoping Grim Dawn takes off a bit better (even though still early) as it looks like the game that has the best chance to see the light of day and I loved Titan Quest.  I was tempted at Leisure Suit Larry, but they are just remaking the original by the looks of it - which I believe has already been done at least once.

There are some pretty bizarre projects on Kickstarter, such as "Help Us Build a Zeppelin (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clockworkcouture/lets-build-a-zeppelin?ref=live)"

I've only funded Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun because they were both dear childhood games to me and I'd like to see modern takes on them.  Short of another Wizardry, I don't think there is much else I would help with.

Come to think of it though, the original Lum subs were released in a similar fashion.

Funny- I was looking for a thread about this earlier in the week, then got distracted and never started it. I can't even remember where I got linked to the Shadowrun game (Twitter maybe), but I was in on the first leg of financing. I love the world, and hope this leads to bigger and better things. I have seen some pretty cool product design ideas there as well, but haven't invested in anything else yet.

Yeah, I threw in for the 2 boxes of Ogre.  It's going to be awesome.

I may kick into Grim Dawn just because the game is pretty much done; they're just being pretty honest and saying, "Yeah, we didn't get any artists or UI designers and both suck. We'd like to fix that."

They actually gave quite a long update on why they need the money and the status of the project:

Kickstart the exploitation of the Congo.... What can go wrong?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/817864170/new-species-expedition-to-congo (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/817864170/new-species-expedition-to-congo)

I eagerly await the Brad McQuaid comeback on Kickstarter.  That will mark the day Kickstarter started to die.

On reading that it makes me sound like I want KS to die.  I don't.  I love the idea.  But it will die in a glorious, flaming fraud bonfire.

I remember these guys asking for money "pre-sale" about 2 years ago. Hell, I even posted it on here. I'd love to see some product from them, but I'm not willing to give them any money till they have a product.

Squad Wars (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1065318294/squad-wars) - Status: Not Funded, ends on 5/19: The founders of Net Devil not happy with Gazillion support of Jumpgate form new company and are looking to fund a space shooter.

I can not confidently say those people deserve any dollars for their continued efforts.

I can say with certainty that NetDevil devs do not deserve one red fucking cent to fund any games, especially not if they are in charge.

The two I funded were:

Musopen (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/record-and-release-free-music-without-copyrights) - Record pro classical music from a bunch of the greats and release it into the public domain. Two years later and apparently the guy is now processing it for release within a few weeks.

and

TPB AKF (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tpbafk/tpb-afk-the-pirate-bay-away-from-keyboard) - Documentary on the pirate bay. Two years later and the court case is finally closed I think which is what the guy was claiming he was waiting for. Suppose to be released this year.

---

One thing I noticed is that the owners and employees of Kickstarter kick into a lot of projects. I'm thinking that some of the projects are getting $1k and $10k donations just from them.

After seeing what has gone on with the video game industry for the past 5 years or so, I can safely say that not one of them is going to get any of my money prior to actually having a semi-working product on the shelf at Target or on Steam.   :oh_i_see:

But END Games Entertainment look so legit.

(http://static.endgames.net/squadwars/TeamOvalFinal.jpg)

At least 2 of those guys have their O-face on. Now that I've seen them, I can't unsee them.

Ah, but these are people from 25-30 years ago, so it's okay!

That's awesome. The website seems like it already has quite a bit of music up. Wish I knew enough about classical to appreciate this.

Nuka Break: Season Two (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/waysidecreations/fallout-nuka-break-season-2-0?ref=live) - Status: Funded, ends on 6/17: If you saw the Nuka Break series, this is to fund season two. They got all of the ancillary actors back on as well.

Or at least a semi-working product you can actually see and/or play with.  These designdoc beggars we see now can diaf.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/JoshuaACNewman/mobile-frame-zero-rapid-attack?ref=live

Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack

Giant robots! LEGO®! Strategy and tactics!

Not quite take the money and run, though not for lack of trying -

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2990064/fake-kickstarter-project-mythic-forced-to-shut-down

One such attempt appears to have been the game Mythic: The Story of Gods and Men. Ostensibly the work of Little Monster Productions, the game was described as an action and strategy-based RPG that was being created by a team of 12 "industry veterans," some of them allegedly former Blizzard and Activision employees. The project had raised almost $5,000 of its $80,000 goal before users from a number of different online communities, including Rock, Paper, Shotgun and Reddit, noticed several problems: the artwork had been cribbed from outside sources, the photos of the company's purported offices had been lifted from another site, and even the game's poster art was a mash-up.

Tomorrow Tammany Hall goes live on KS from Pandasaurus Games!

Some of the much smaller scale gamesdev projects actually have gone that way -- showing off a plan, a gameplay video, and a downloadable prototype to see what they've done so far.  Which seems like a much saner point to fund something at (though certainly not entirely without risk).

The number of  iprojects on Kickstarter is astounding. 

My bad. I remember reading Slayerik's post and schild's but somehow missed JWIV's.

The pebble watch thing is at $8 million and 16 days still to go.

I sure hope that isn't a scam, I want one!

Scroll up 4 posts from your original post.

This seemed interesting: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crateentertainment/grim-dawn

That's in my OP.

Funding kinda slowed down for it. I hope they meet their goal.

oops. wrong thread.

Carmageddon:  Reincarnation Kickstarter page is up (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stainlessgames/carmageddon-reincarnation).  Hopefully they're able to deliver, since I derived many hours of fun out of Carma 1 and 2.

If the pebble was android based or even had it's own on board music player I would be all over it.  I wonder how epaper works with a stop watch, guessing you don't get to see those hundredths of a second fly by in real time.

Right, I didn't remember that this thread was created, thanks :)

And by the way, watch the promotional video on the Carmageddon kickstarter page...Brilliant!!

I'll just toss this in: Starlight Inception has six hours to go and still needs $25k (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/732317316/starlight-inceptiontm).

So if we can all kick in a grand each...

I was wondering when Two Guys from Andromeda would show up.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spaceventure/two-guys-spaceventure-by-the-creators-of-space-que

Oops!

Funded now.  Going to be a good year for ARPGs (D3, PoE, this, TL2, etc).

Already funded : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1005365109/jane-jensens-pinkerton-road-2012-2013-csg  (ends Saturday, May 19th)

Oh wow, if the Two Guys from Andromeda make it this is going to be a good couple of years for people who dig adventure games.

From the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall):

I'm more interested in this vetting process than anything else.  The fact that 70k+ projects were backlogged is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser, especially since the site is more and more going on reputation rather than production to see who's worth their time.  And when you've got $10m projects popping up with a 5% fee, I'd say it's perhaps time to hire more staff?

Btw, pebble is sold out.  /sadface (I missed it)  

Pebble is cool, but the having to have my phone anchored to me was a bit of a killer for me. 

Well, they're manufacturing it to sell.  It'll cost a bit more in retail, but the plus side is real hardware will be in peoples' hands by then and you'll know much better if the actual product lives up to the design.  These guys definitely seem to know what they're doing (and have shipped consumer electronics before), so I'm pretty confident that people will actually get their pre-ordered devices, but things like fit, finish, battery life, stability, etc, are things you never know about for sure until it's all done and shipping...

The Wall Street journal article is fucking horrible.


Kickstarter does not directly accept any credit card information or otherwise from customers. That is all done through an external service (Amazon Payments). I hate it when writers can't be asked to do even the smallest amount of research. If credit card details had been exposed, the headline would've been "Amazon has done fucked up." Bleh.

I've randomly read the wall street journal for a long time now.  It has been going further and further into straight shit at a very steady pace over the last several years.  Murdoch buying it really just fucked the whole thing over.

Research and facts are for news organizations, not the newest propaganda wing of the empire.

EA offering 3 months of free distribution on Origin to Kickstarter games. (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/170621/EAs_Origin_attracting_crowdfunded_projects_with_free_distribution.php)

Yeeeeeeah. I'd pass.

Heh.

lol ok

Two Kickstarter projects that seem awesome.

1) Phil Tippett's "MAD GOD" (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/madgod/phil-tippetts-mad-god)
2) Red Beans & Splice: Daft Punk tribute by way of New Orleans Brass (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Samplefreq/brassft-punk-daft-punk-tribute-via-new-orleans-bra)

Funded: Carmaggedon: Reincarnation
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stainlessgames/carmageddon-reincarnation

Great news ! Original team is all on board: they promised (we'll see) modding and a game absolutely true to its roots. And, like someone posted in the GoG thread, they're going to release the first two games throughout that service soon!  :heart:

Kind of an interesting short film based on the 14th century 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' poem. Looks very Bravehearty.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brandonstcyr/the-green-knight

Don't think I've seen thins one -

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1327678769/the-future-of-table-top-role-playing-games?ref=users (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1327678769/the-future-of-table-top-role-playing-games?ref=users)

Portable, foldout boards and storage for table top RPG games.  Wish I had a little disposable income right now, it's one of the first Kickstarters I've actually been interested in the higher tier ($100+) bonuses.

It seems like an ok idea as an alternative to say a Gamechic table, but I couldn't see using it myself. Our regular game, we use a modified table top one of our guys made himself with one inch graph and an iron on surface. It's like 3 x 5 feet of graph, and that's often just barely big enough. I wouldn't know what to do with a little 2' x 2' graph board, seems like you'd spend all your time erasing it.

3' x 5' not big enough?  Even at 1" squares that would be 180' x 300' with a 5' step system.   What kind of epic battles are you recreating that it's not enough room?

Mostly its about being able to map out multiple rooms of a keep or dungeon, without having to keep erasing things (people like to retreat at times). Also, outdoor encounters are frequently set in 200' areas, especially in the Pathfinder Adventure paths. Half of Runelords is fights against creatures with 15 and 20' bases - things that big need room to have any sort of tactics to the fight.

CLANG (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang)

"These things... they take time."

I like Neal Stephensen, but that sounds like an epic facepalm of an idea.

Thank god for The Onion.

http://www.theonion.com/video/internet-scam-alert-most-kickstarter-projects-just,28655/

You have about 30 minutes to get in on something at a decent price that might actually be pretty cool:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console

Think you misread it - 29 days to go still.

No, he meant the $95 price point that gave you the whole console. Its sold out now though.

They added a $99 dollar level with the same things as the 95 one....

$99 is still reasonable. They were actually going to run out of the $99 one one and they added 5,000 more. I think they want to massively overshoot their goal, which is fine.

Good lord, that things already over it's goal.

The $99 ones are going quickly too.

I pondered signing up for it, since the tech looks cool, but I think the odds of it being successful are really low. Consoles that don't come from companies that also provide actual content for them are pretty much in snowball's chance territory I think.

I wish they'd bump the specs up to 2GB ram and 16+GB flash.  I think they're going to wish they had that headroom later.

The Ouya looks to be the same basic platform as Nexus 7 (what NVIDIA calls "Kai"), which definitely rocks at 720p.  Games probably will do okay at 1080p, but I think some extra headroom for texture/vertex data and local storage would be valuable.  

I'm really excited to see them committing to keep the device open and hobbyist-friendly.  A $100-150 price-point seems reasonable for box + controller, and not running on battery and having room for a heatsink and/or fan means they can keep all four cores and the GPU running flat-out if necessary.  Hopefully they'll execute well.

Looks like they doubled the limit on the $99 units from 5000 to 10000.

I think it has a lot of potential to be a really nice little box for the living room.  If nothing else it's got enough horsepower to run classic console emulation really well.  Will they manage to launch a successful small/indie console platform?  That's a lot less certain.

*snort* an android based gaming system. Yeeeeaahhh. I think I'll save my $99 for something more solid like magic beans.

The more you eat, the more you magically toot.

Getting this thread moving again:

Donate to Penny Arcade's kickstarter to remove ads from their website for a year. For everyone. (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/575109064/penny-arcade-sells-out)

I get the idea, but I don't see ads anyway on the rare occasion I view PA because I use adblock+. Thanks, but no thanks. You are literally the most wildly successful webcomic of all time and I'm guessing you pull easily 200k a month. Nevermind that you're making an animated kids movie possibly (based on "The New Kid", which was part of their "vote for 3 random concept comics" thing, and lost to a presumably scifi/supernatural western thing they have yet to draw) and selling the Lookouts comic (which is the literal two time loser of the first "vote for 3 random concepts" thing, but since they had a raging boner for it they just did it anyway and ignored the vote tallies). You do not need the money and I bet at this point like 90% of your viewers could block all your ads and none of your advertisers would notice.

Unless this makes the worthless fat dipshit who does PVP kill himself out of jealousy because PA got people to just give them money for literally nothing I see no reason to bother.

edit: Especially if it goes towards the really, really bad sideprojects like that PA report thing or Lookouts.

Taktik iPhone case (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/taktik-premium-protection-system-for-the-iphone)

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/038/011/cff8767dbe02f8869e470b2857bc29ee_large.png?1340230311)

*drops phone*
*case gets scraped to shit and looks terrible*

Might as well have one of these, once you get all that shit on the phone. 

(http://community.acstechnologies.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/bagphone-300x208.jpg)

This isn't even selling out.

This is them using Kickstarter wrong. The first true example of fucking up kickstarter.

Even were it for a project, they're amazingly successful.  Maybe if they turn around and donate all of the money to charity I won't be annoyed at this.

They won't. They "sold out" years ago. I'm not really sure what this campaign is about unless Tycho is trying to prove Kickstarter was bullshit. But I think we all already knew that, but we just like owning new things.

The stupid "paint the line" card/dice game thing they have on their front page would be something that would make sense to kickstart. If you have no idea what it's it about, it's based on a series of wildly unfunny strips that sprang from this thing where they were obsessed with playing ping pong with game devs for like 5 minutes.

Watch the video for paint the line. It's Magic with retarded changes. Seriously, it's just Magic. With a tacked on Ping Pong theme.

This makes me a little sad that I bought the Penny Arcade deck building games.   :oh_i_see:

Yeah, "pay us so we can operate without advertising" is not something that's terribly exciting.  I guess it's low risk -- there's not a lot of opportunity for them to fuck up something as simple as "cash the check and stop showing the ads for a year", but it's pretty low impact.

The Ouya thing is pretty high risk -- very little detail about the team -- ignoring any (perfectly valid) questions about how to make a low volume, mid-spec android-based console successful, there's just the question of can they actually manufacture something that works and get it to their 10k+ backers (not *impossible* but $99/unit, assuming that covers their BOM, almost certainly can't cover all the tooling and upfront work too, and getting decent quality consumer electronics through manufacture and into customer hands is not cheap).

Some of the kickstarter projects I've enjoyed the most are "fund this book of this webcomic".  They've consistently resulted in me getting some very nice books of works I've enjoyed, often signed, with postcards, posters, or other goodies.

The stuff from Cryptozoic is pretty good. I was actually looking forward to The Lookouts, but it looks like it was shelved.

Yeah, Lookouts looked interesting.  I have to be careful now though, as I've moved from being a "gamer" into being a "game collector".   :awesome_for_real:

I fail to see what OUYA can offer me that I can't already do by just plugging a controller into my HTPC. 

But then again, I might just not be the target audience I guess.

I'm not buying an OUYA.  Seems more than "high risk". 

I hope CMoN doesn't partner with any more studios the way they did with Studio McVey. Luckily, I was able to ignore Zombicide, but they're doing a pretty good job of being awesome kickstarts. Has someone linked the Wired article (http://www.wired.com/design/2012/06/coolminiornot-success-kickstarter/) about their methodology? Getting a gazillion minis of decent quality, especially when they're throwing in a ton of knockoffs from Aliens, Riddick, Firefly, BSG, etc; the project really gained momentum at the end because the stretch goals were so tangible and awesome.

And CMoN is creating a tool for post-KS funding, allowing folks to kick in more money post-KS to get in on the awesomeness. It cost me 50% more, and I'm contemplating dumping even more because it's a pretty nice way to get a ton of decent minis on the cheap. And the game looks decent, too :) They'll make over a million on Sedition Wars after the CMoN tool bids go through.

Here (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/11800/designer-diary-everything-you-always-wanted-to-kno)'s a nice little blurb about a Kickstarter project called "Dice Age" in which a guy attempts to create an interesting sounding dice game but falls a bit short in his initial endeavors.  It sounds as though he really wants to get it done, however, so maybe it will come out to be a success.  It makes me a little wary of some of the projects on Kickstarter though.  I was already a little wary and have tried to stay with projects that were backed by known entities if they were expensive, e.g. Ogre, Sedition Wars, Defenders of the Realm offshoot game, Flash Point expansions, etc.  

Good luck getting paid back.  Hilarious naivete.

Yeah, I guess people think that since Apple can do it that everyone is Steve Jobs and every factory over there is Foxcon.

Addendum-  in the guy's defense he really does sound like he's trying to get everything running well.  I hope he can pull it off, even if the game does sound a little loopy.

And this is why going to a "local" supplier is ALWAYS better.

Dice Age was the second thing I ever Kickstarted! If I get my dice, I'll take pictures of their raw, handmade, hippy-tastic likely unbalanced gaming glory.

Edit: Before you ask, I kickstarted that silly shit to use the dice as counters while playing other games. Specifically, Magic.

Well you're in luck, schild.  You can buy a set now off of their website for $75 (http://dice.bigcartel.com/).   :awesome_for_real:

I guess a positive is that it seems as if the dude has worked out some of the kinks on the dice.

Paid up front without seeing a sample/ Sure who do I write a check to?!

Stories like this only reinforce the idea that the reason Kickstarters need the site in the first place is they're just bad at business.

The number of succesful, well-produced things I've gotten from Kickstarter completely outstrips the one utter failure I've encountered.

I think that if you use common sense on it you're probably fine.  For instance, it's probably a really good chance that Steve Jackson is going to put out a nice Ogre game.  That's safe.  So are games that are already attached to a publishing company (except for Glory to Rome Black Box.  Good job, Cambridge). The dice guy, probably not as much. 

Indeed. Fuck Cambridge.

What are they telling you guys that Kickstarted is the release date?  I have a copy ordered from Coolstuff, but may just cancel it at this point.  I have the regular edition and it doesn't really bother me that much. 

Sometime maybe soon possibly.

Another angle to how CMoN is running kickstarters, they have a proprietary Pledge Manager they run after the kickstarter closes. Sedition Wars goes to the Pledge Manager (CKPM) in about a week. You can use the pledge manager to sort out what optional stuff you want, so if you bid $170 (for examples not at all based on reality) for the $100 Biohazard pledge level + $40 for extra minis and $30 for the terrain pack, you can select the extra minis and terrain pack in the CKPM to sort that out.

But the EVIL part is you can then add to your pledge...weeks after the fact, when you've had time to think "y'know, maybe I should've thrown in that extra THI carapace".

Pure evil.

I know.  I can't wait.   :grin:

It's also kind of nice because you might not have understood exactly what all the options were and I feel like they'll be explained better with the CMON system. 

I'm kind of becoming obsessed with it. When they add in the Firebrand (officially), it will add nice three-way combat without getting too bogged down in rules. And the Strain concept is really great, incorporating the Alien concept with zombies and cyborgs. Looking at some of the early casts, the detail is so far beyond what I'm used to with my old minis, I have maybe a half-dozen (maybe) that are that detailed.

I mentioned in the mini thread that they're running an informal SW paint competition at the studio mcvey forum; I bought a couple vanguard grunts and a resin Kara's Last Stand. But for the CKPM...I'm thinking of a second Biohazard pledge....it's just such a phenomenal deal.

I ordered three.   :grin:

Do it! 

I'm sure I'm going to piss the wife off when the CMON dealie comes in. 

Well, I already prepared her for that. It's the extra couple of minis coming from SMV....and I just caved and bought two more from CMoN, because I decided I wanted to paint the Drone they posted a tutorial for, rather than start a Vanguard....and if I'm getting flat shipping I may as well throw in a Vokker, too...even if they're metal vs resin from the UK store.

And then there's the new brushes and matte medium coming from Blick....

Awesome, man!  I have to get some photos on here for you guys to critique.  I find that my painting has pretty much blown away any time I have for gaming.  I was considering getting the Secret World but said fuck it and bought some Warhammer Dwarves. 

What's happening f13 wise?  Should I do the paypal or not?

Castle Story is certainly a thing.

I'll be putting up the f13 donation drive in a week or so. It won't be on Kickstarter. Frankly, I don't want to give them 20% of the money.

They take 20%?  Fuck that.  You should come up with a competing service that does it for 10%. 

How Kickstarter Works (http://www.kickstarter.com/start) says they take 5%, and Amazon takes another 3-5% for credit card processing.

That seems a lot more reasonable. 

Don't know where I got 20% from. Huh.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game

John Carmack has been talking about VR at QuakeCon this week and is working with this.  For 300 bucks you can get a dev kit.  The thing isn't anywhere near consumer ready, but damned if it isn't tempting to spend 300 bucks to dig into this thing.

640x480 screens tells me it's not worth spending a penny one.

Where'd you get that from? "Resolution: 1280x800 (640x800 per eye)"

That's still not amazing going off of Carmack's QuakeCon keynote though.

Kind of a cool retro arcade hack and slash game.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1829034266/volgarr-the-viking

The guys behind Zombicide started a new game:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/coolminiornot/relic-knights

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/101/728/b1102754aa57bb3c0b37e6621084983f_large.jpg?1344279141)

Dear god.

Some REALLY nice minis in that KS and they've not even begun stretch stuff. I wonder if CMoN is underestimating KS fatigue, though. ZC, SW, Red Box, Reaper, Mantic; that's a lot of mini KS in a pretty short period.

Even though I'm not huge into anime, if this KS happened a year from now, I'd be all over it. As it is, I just have to pass because I've got something like 300 minis on the way and no funds in the wallet.

Oh good, I was hoping for a minis game that makes me feel even more immature for playing it.

I agree with your thoughts here - too much too soon saps the wallet and will. They should space these out more. Have they even delivered on their first KS?

Yeah, this is what we needed, TERA art that people will see you playing with. /shudder

"They" (CMoN) are just the publishers (afaik). All three CMoN kickstarters are being produced by different companies, so it's not really an accurate question.

However, I believe Zombicide is shipping currently, about to, or something like that. International customers are bitching because US customers are being fulfilled first.

Yeah I'm on the early list for Zombicide, but haven't received anything yet.. soon, I'm told.

The Kickback Machine (http://www.thekickbackmachine.com/), a website that reports on which kickstarter projects succeed and which ones failed.  Decent look at what is working vs. what isn't.

This one is legit sad.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/akaworf/through-the-fire-life-after-star-trek

Got my Zombicide box this weekend - I don't normally play these types of tabletop games (usually a Steve Jackson-type of gamer), but I think the quality is top notch. Good quality boards, and the figures aren't rough around the edges. Anyone that knows tabletop gaming get one of these? Be curious to see a more experienced opinion..

I missed that KS :(

Red Box minis closes on Wednesday and is about to unlock some of the best zombie scultps I've seen.

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/108/709/5b3d75af3c05dd214f941a4be397856b_large.JPG?1344643999)

 ooooh!    :heart:

I'm thinking of kickstarting the Redbox twice, the stuff is so awesome.

I think all of us going in on Red Box's KS are in, but there are two hours left and Tre is still pumping out concept art, four cavalry units + free hero unit (wait and warp forms) unlocked, and picking up speed to unlock a helsmaiden. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1103158358/red-box-games-helsvakt-horde

Reaper just had a big unlock and also revealed a 7" high CLOCKWORK DRAGON. So awesome.

Woo hoo! Funded my first kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/digistump/digispark-the-tiny-arduino-enabled-usb-dev-board) (not that they needed it).  For a tiny USB enabled arduino board, $12 isn't bad for someone who doesn't want to build their own board and just wants to get started with arduino.

I'm not even going to pretend to know what the fuck that is. 

If I'm reading it right, we're talking about a cheap board for interfacing USB to...just about anything that uses electronic controls, assuming a fairly high level of comfort with circuit diagrams and component-level electronics tinkering.

--Dave

Yes a cheap solution for interfacing with analog electronics via USB.

It's cute, but I think they should have gone with an actual USB micro-B connector instead of using the PCB as the insert part of a full-sized USB A connector.   Would have increased cost by a dollar or so, but would be much more robust.

Nice looking RTS from Total Annihilation guys.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts/

Kind of a TA injected into a spore-like multiple worlds thing. $20 for the game alone.

Attention: captured.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/596618838/the-art-of-brom

I friggin heart Brom. Even if you're not going to grab the book, watch the video it's amazing. I had no idea he worked so huge, now I want some full sized Brom art.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zombieorpheus/the-gamers-hands-of-fate?ref=live

If any of you have seen and loved The Gamers Dorkness rising they are doing a kick starter to fund the next in the series. They have already shot part of it at Gen Con this year.

Whoah.  Backed this.  Loved the hell out of TA back in the day.

Not a Kickstarter, but a fund raiser for a Tesla museum started by The Oatmeal:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_museum
http://www.indiegogo.com/teslamuseum?a=1087945

Kickstart a new Broken Sword game!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/165500047/broken-sword-the-serpents-curse-adventure

That little Reaper KS I've been going on about? 3rd best funded KS of all time. Only that crappy console and stupid watch beat it out. I blame fucking hipsters.

 :why_so_serious:

What do hipsters want with plastic figurines of cliché fantasy characters?

I'd be blaming the nerds if I were you.

 :why_so_serious:

I thought hipsters were nerds.  Or at least wanted to be nerds.

I'm talking about the lolconsole and ewatch.

For the three of you who missed out on the most amazing miniatures deal in history, Reaper is opening up the post-KS pledge manager for the unwarshed masses. There will be a slight increase over legit pledges, but it will still be around 30-40% off the optionals, which really adds up for the big minis. The Vampire megadeal is still insanely good, and the paints and case are all solid deals, too.

https://www.reapermini.com/ks/

Hipsters are too wrapped-up in willful ignorance and derision of actual intelligence over being snarky and elitism for elitism's own sake to EVER be nerds.

That's beneath you, Merusk. 

Not a dig, but I guess I don't get the Reaper KS.  How wasn't it just marketing?  I thought KS was supposed to be about bridge financing.  But wasn't the Reaper KS more like just taking orders?   I liked some of it, but I'm confused what they were really KS'ing for.  No dig intended.

They're transitioning from metal molds to the "Bones" molds for PVC.  This requires capital to create the new molds, whcih they were doing on their own at a rate of 3-4 per year.   However, demand was high and they kept getting asked to release new "Bones" models instead of metals,  so they had a KS to gather-up funds to do it so they could roll out about two-dozen at once.   The initial goal was only $30,000, which would cover the creation of new molds and the release of the new sculpts.

Instead, shit blew-up and they hit $3.45 million.  Each stretch goal was setup to create new molds and release new models, which is what rolled it in to the Vampire level.

(Note, I took all this from the vid on the KS link. It may be bullshit but I doubt it.)


It's really not.  I'm very judgy about cliques.

I skipped the Kickstarter because those prices were still nowhere near wholesale pricing. But trust me, I was tempted to just get it all at once. That said, all I wanted was the familiars and elder things for Cave Evil, didn't care about the rest.

That's fairly accurate, Merusk. Not really a transition so much as adding it as a value line, with less than 20 models it's become 1/3 of their sales volume, which makes sense given it's a value line.

Metal molds are cheap and flexible, plastic molds are made of steel because of the pressure needed to cast plastic at that level of detail, so they're expensive. I'm excited to see how stuff like Nethrymaul works out in a medium that's not brittle like metal and resin. There will be issues getting it into the proper form, as a memory type plastic you can heat it and bend it into a shape it should bounce back to. So those crazy long wing bones should work, even if they get a bit fiddly.

Also, I was off, post-KS vampire is $150 with a 20% premium on the optionals and extras. Still a great deal for everyone who isn't schild.

I would have let you just tag on to my order and get the things you wanted.  You live close enough that it wouldn't have been a problem.

No worries. I have connections. I shall get what I wanted.

The Cthulu playing cards (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1460165270/cthulhu-playing-cards?ref=city) look pretty cool.

The price on those is outrageous.

But it gets better the more you order.  For 9 bucks you get just one, but for 18 you get two decks. 

The fun goes up exponentially though.  Still IMHO this beats paying Jeff Dee to recreate some of his D&D artwork (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jeffdee/re-creating-my-nonhuman-art-from-deities-and-demig?ref=city) that looks like it came out of an 8th graders notebook.

What are you talking about?  That cover of Dieties and Demigods is badass.   :why_so_serious:

I think I sold my copy a long time ago.  Sad. 

The cover was Erol Otus.  :-P

Maybe the masters of his pen & inks were in far greater detail than what ended up getting printed  but somehow i think that a scan from the book + a live trace in illustrator would fix things up about as nice as the originals.

But then he wouldn't get all the kickstarter money.

 :oh_i_see:

Watch the vid or Google his images.  The cover is not his style, he did a lot of the nifty black & white drawings inside the books not that shite on the cover - as Ingmar pointed out.   If you thought one of the B&W images was goofy or had derpy people, it was probably Otus - who also did Ingmar and Sky's avatars.

Fuck you, man.

To be fair, Otus's style works out pretty well if you want to depict something lower-plane-ish, or an elder being from beyond space and time.

It's when he draws something that you would otherwise recognize from real life (i.e. a human or an animal) that things get all squicky.

Dee's style works best as comic book art.

Speaking of bad art, here's your awful Kickstarter project of the week.

Action Packed Cyperpunk Stock Photo Set (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/94425152/action-packed-cyberpunk-stock-photo-set?ref=home_popular)

Wow.  This is amazing.  Look at some of the examples:





Very cyperpunky.   :awesome_for_real:

Jeezuz fucking christ.   :ye_gods:

I think that Tidal Wave minis KS is pretty lousy, too.


While Bombshell is a decent deal, I wish they'd add more freebies. The structure is all about unlocking things you're paying for with pledges and then stuff you're paying for with option money.

I don't think we've mentioned Low Life minis outside the mini thread. It's not a crazy Reaper deal where you get a gazillion vinyl minis; but you won't find minis like these anywhere else.

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/150/920/070a99b5363c8229ec53e688212d85e5_large.jpg?1347134905)

It's a post-apocalyptic setting, that's a sentient twinkie (with another sentient (http://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/149/375/12ec349dfa1ca01b7725b81b04de0139_large.jpg?1347037049) stuffed into his hammer). I'm a bit nuts for the Cremefillians, though.

(http://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/145/442/75b7162c80944bc15fd342c23ff0335d_large.jpg?1346846254)

That's been my problem with the Numenera kickstarter.  I'm already a bit iffy about the system, and everything being unlocked is either simply a PDF (seriously, print out a DM screen? WTF) or a pay option (Oh hey, dice you can buy  :oh_i_see: )

I thought about backing the Bombshell one and then figured I'd just watch some porn instead.   :awesome_for_real:

 :cry:

Wasn't a criticism of your Avatar, Sky.  Back off the caffeine.   I think he did monsters pretty well.  It's the people who look derpy. When I say goofy I mean it. They had a much more whimsical air to them, like this one.
(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/704172/general%20art/ErolOtus-RoguesGallery-02.jpg)

Or, yes, your avatar. There's whimsy and goofy good-natured stuff there man.

It wasn't a serious statement  :grin:

I happen to love his iconic humanoids, especially his paintings.

Note: a few people backed out or upgraded from the early bird $15 for this game. I just went in for $15.

40 minutes left!

Obsidian is making a new M-Rated game.  Um yes plz.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity

Race....elf
Class........druid
Alignment.........chaotic neutral
Position..........doggy style

 :awesome_for_real:

Fuck. I should have done a fundraiser drive for the $1,000 level of this so we could get Bat Country items into the game.

Launched today, almost at 700k with 31 days to go.  I think they might make their goal.  :oh_i_see:

Wow.  They have a dude named Feargus.  I'm backing this one.   :awesome_for_real:

Feargus Urquhart was the invisible hand behind Fallout and Planescape. I feel like everyone knew this already or at least should have.

Here: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,13496/

Yeah, I've never really been into the "whos" and "whats", but then again I'm not in the industry. 

HALT!  OUR PATH, 'TIS BLOCKED WITH BROCCOLI!

QUICKLY, FETCH THE VEGAN. HE CAN EAT OUR WAY OUT.

I'd kickstart where this is going.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1990654819/judge-dredd-miniatures-game-block-war

Yeah, yeah another mini KS. I'm not even really backing it much, but you can nab a Judge Dredd mini for $5 free shipping. So there's that.

Kickstarter Is Not a Store (http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/kickstarter-is-not-a-store)

New rules for project submissions. Creators will now need to fill out a "Risks and Challenges" section and Hardware and Product Design projects can not show simulations or renderings -- they must show an actual prototype. Offering multiple quantities of a product is also prohibited (e.g. no more "store display pack" reward levels), with some exceptions.

Shouldn't affect most/all of the ones we tend to be interested in here, it looks like.

This sucks.

Yeah, thankfully as "no multiples" is a pretty dumb rule to have in general I think.

On reading more I'm not sure if the no multiples is restricted to just Hardware and Product Design the same way the simulation/rendering thing is.

I think the post that Trippy linked is pretty clear?

What do they mean about multiples? Is there a game example?

Like this (for a product design):

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kcmachine/sonastand

Pretty sure that this is aimed at the reseller rewards like the 100 pebble watches for $10k.  Not so clear how it affects the 3 pack of digisparks i ordered.

So they can't give away more than 1 product at each tier?

That seems pretty lame if it will prevent retailers from pre-ordering multiple copies of something to sell. 

I think that is the point of the "kickstarter is not a store" thing. Kickstarter is there to get investment to get a product created, not to be a sales channel. Once the product is created (or under development) they can solicit retailers to buy in bulk - but not through kickstarter.

Yes, but sizable investments by stores leads to much better overall intake on the Kickstarter, better rewards levels and a better overall product. 

I just don't see how it's a good idea to move this off the site, especially since it involves KS not getting a take.

One way it makes sense is if KS wants to avoid some form of liability with doubling down on "not a store" but that's a total shot in the dark.

Before we get too up in arms about things, let's remember there's rules around retailers and as of 2 months ago there's rules about micro-financing.  This may be a reaction to one or both of those.

 

 :mob:

I think they're going a bit overboard here -- I think a requirement that simulations or renderings (both of which can be useful to at least understand the goal of the creators) be clearly indicated as such would be sufficient, alongside a requirement to clearly show the state of the project as it exists today.  I appreciate the spirit of the changes, though.

EDIT: Derp, I should explain. The question was about whether games - specifically in this case a board game - would be allowed to post mock-up box art, or if they'd need to produce an actual box.

John Romero wants to make you his bitch again.   

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lootdrop/an-old-school-rpg-by-brenda-brathwaite-and-tom-hal

Kind of hilarious that they keep his name out of it until the end.

Haha no.

Really?

Why would they lie?

Daikatana 2: Electric Boogaloo?

Cross between DAoC and CoD?

Hailan Rising (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reloadedprod/hailan-rising?ref=live) is being produced by Adam Smith, former Producer of Knight Online, and Jess Mulligan, formerly Executive Producer of Asheron's Call and Executive Director of Ultima Online as well as dozens of other games.

Random picks off the Kickstarter page:

Target: create the most intense PvP-focused MMO possible, with free-form character builds, territory control and random loot, while letting you jump into the fun right away!

**No more levels, no more grind.

**Think of this as a "Class-less" and “Character-level-less” game.

**Free form builds

**Strategic territory control

**Random loot


I did not see a pony in there anywhere.

They pulled this early when it looked pretty clear they weren't going to hit their target.

Folks including Mark Pesce (1990s virtual reality pioneer) have invented a lamp with LAMP and taken it to Kickstarter.

He's a friend of a friend. I'm not sure I get this, but it has the local geeks talking.


http://moorescloud.com/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloudlight/light-1

Why in the world would I want a web server on a light fixture?

The same reason you want Twitter on your refrigerator, of course.

Pun fail. Try again.

The same reason you want a Java-based coffee maker.

I'm struggling to see why too. I can see it's a platform for applications, it's on wifi and it can do two million colours. For example, you wake up and your lamp is glowing blue to indicate that the weather forecast is rain, or yellow for a sunny forecast. Or it knows when you pick up your ebook at night and switches itself on. Annoying shit like that :) No doubt someone will invent something for it to do that calms rage in mental patients or makes bees produce better tasting honey and it will become indispensible.  :awesome_for_real:

To be fair, his joke is an actual thing: http://mashable.com/2011/01/09/samsung-tweeting-refrigerator/

I think it would be funny to tweet from your fridge during a party, "Who the fuck took the last beer?"

Elite: Dangerous (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous)

Yes, this is what it sounds like, a new Elite game by one of the original developers.

Edit: game discussion here:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22736.0

Dangerous is an apt description of putting money into that.

From the same circle of friends from "Americana Dawn"

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/967946252/rainfall-the-sojourn

Did their first thing ever even get finished? Was it any good?

Different developer, the other game is still being worked on. 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brotherwise/boss-monster-the-dungeon-building-card-game (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brotherwise/boss-monster-the-dungeon-building-card-game)

I want to like this, I think the style of the game is great, the idea is great and as a whole it looks very interesting. But I just can't get myself to pledge because I don't see any replay value. You are mostly just having 2-4 people playing games of solitare and the person with the best draws wins. Once you have seen most of the cards the game will have no variation and get boring quickly I would think.

Pretty rad looking art book from Larry Elmore.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1488741362/larry-elmore-art-the-complete-elmore-artbook

I will only give money to Elmore if it hits $100k because I want the Dragonlance prints because that's basically 1 year of my childhood.

He should hit 100k easily, for the reason you listed. I'd be surprised if he doesn't outpace Brom rather handily, being much more mainstream and how nuts kids went for dragonlance.

I already have an older book with a lot of Elmore in it. He's got some decent stuff but it doesn't do much for me. Brom, now that dude can paint. Wish I had been able to afford the special binding edition of his.

So I have a Kickstarter problem.

The latest fruit of that came in the mail yesterday.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/123227834/1q-natural-sound-for-your-mobile-life (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/123227834/1q-natural-sound-for-your-mobile-life)

All I can say, this is the fastest anyone has delivered after funding. This guy was constantly keeping us up to date and got this from funded to delivered in 3 months.
Works wonderfully, pumped out tunes for 6ish hour last night with no issues with maybe an hours charging out of the box. Sounds great too.

Should be nice this summer when the bag beer park parties startup.

edit: Oh, and Elmore broke 100k

Those look sweet, I'm bummed I missed the kickstarter but retail price isn't much more.

I'm really loving it, started using it as a speaker replacement for my laptop. I only have one, so not stereo, but I guess I can't tell, because it sounds great to me. Clean and loud.
Girlfriend notices the lack of stereo used this way, but she is also hypersensitive to sound at the moment. If you have two you can hook them up (not wirelessly unfortunately, damn) and they will auto setup for stereo. Seems a 2Q version is also in the works which comes as a single unit.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1969365167/bluetube-audio-vacuum-tube-amplifier-with-built-in
 (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1969365167/bluetube-audio-vacuum-tube-amplifier-with-built-in)This kickstarter just popped up but I'm not 100% convinced by the makers just yet, and whooooo buddy. The price. Oh god. I guess I'm not a big enough audiofile to justify the price on this mammoth. It is oh so pretty. And old school vacuum tubes always look spiffy. But I'm better you can easily find a simular solution for what this is meant for at a saner price point. Just might not be as pretty.

Kingdom Death is doing a game: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/poots/kingdom-death-monster

Basically, you awaken in the darkness in a horror world, with a lamp and a basic weapon. You build up a settlement which you tech up, this give you armor/weapons/etc. You face monsters that use an AI deck. It's mini-based and the minis for the survivors (players) are interchangable. So when you tech up rawhide armor and craft a helmet, you can put the rawhide helmet head on your dude.

Sounds interesting to me, and KD are some of the highest quality minis in sculpt and concept.

Apparently Paizo is doing a Pathfinder mmo. Looks like some CCP/Cryptic folks behind it.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1675907842/pathfinder-online-a-fantasy-sandbox-mmo

Yes - this is the result of the kickstarter they did - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1675907842/pathfinder-online-technology-demo?ref=live

So they have successfully kickstarted a kickstarter (http://xkcd.com/1055/) and are now going back to the same fanbase for more money.  I wonder just how many times the fanbase is going to buy this stupid game.

Agreed. Especially since the point of the investor demo was to attract investors so they could finish the project, but now they're back for crowdmoney to finish the project. Perhaps investors weren't that thrilled by the tech demo.

Watching that footage gave me a Shadowbane vibe. And my pay-for-beta sense is tingling.

Pay for beta for a free to play game, and at more than the going rate for a game.  I expect the tears of outrage to be epic when this game ultimately craters before launch by all the people who were stupid enough to get bilked more than once.  This unfortunately includes a few of my friends who I've tried to talk down away from this.  It just bugs me that people can't even do 5 minutes of due diligence on this before throwing in money.  It's not like they don't outright list the names of everyone involved in this mess.

I'll be shocked if this isn't pulled in a few weeks when they get no where near their million dollar goal.

edit:
Okay, part of me just got a real tin foil hatty vibe.  I'm almost wondering if they're asking for a million so that when they don't make it, they can go to their original kickstarter investors, and whoever they were able to bilk out of additional funding and go "whoops, sorry, not enough demand or money, going to have to stop", and just walk away with the money they did make.   :tinfoil:

Kickstarting video games is still ridiculous to me.

I backed FTL, got a great game a few months later.  Very happy with it.

I think the problem is most people can't read past hype and marketing so Kickstarters for games that are all flash and no substance get huge backing amounts and are likely to flop.  But then again I guess that's all of Kickstarter...look at the Ouya.  :oh_i_see:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/talesofgames/barkley-2-an-rpg-sequel-to-barkley-shut-up-and-jam

No words.

Barkley was awesome so this makes sense.

FTL is an example of the perfect title to back in a Kickstarter though. The development team had been working on it for a long time and entering it in contests. The money was to finish the game and polish it, not to start it. It was a closed concept game, not pipe dreams. There are very few Kickstarted video games like that.

I spent a long time doing analysis on Kickstarter delivery rates and from 2009 to 2011 the answer is about 1 in 3 Kickstarter titles actually get released. Only 5 have cancelled themselves; the rest exist as vapourware that the devs still insist they are working on. High Strangeness is the best example of this - it was the very first Kickstarted video game ever, back in 2009, and it still hasn't some out. The dev insists he's still planning to release it though.

I've backed four video games.

FTL, Double Fine Adventure , Zombie Playground and Project Eternity

100% confident on three of those releasing, one of which already did. Zombie Playground may very well never see the light of day. Heard literally nothing from them since funded.

I backed Project Eternity, Takedown (my worst choice honestly), Shadowrun Returns, and The Banner Saga. I don't particularly regret it.

Wasteland 2, Shadow Run Returns, and RSI.  I regret none of them.  There's little else I'm likely to back.

Here's a great example of what kickstarter can do:
(http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_me7ng0nCt61rugltbo1_1280.png)

~1 year later~

(http://i.imgur.com/PKnlr.png)

I've heard of that idea before, and even had a mac & cheese cupcake.  It's decent party or event food but there's no way in hell I can see anyone eating it on a regular basis. 

More shocking than the 'failure' is the "Never been used!" on the oven.  Wtf?

Looks like a one-year investment of $12k at 0% interest to me - of other people's money, mind.  :why_so_serious:

Seems like it.

(http://i.imgur.com/pWSMB.jpg)

Grats contributors. You paid for a cart that did nothing then was sold by the owner for $12,000.

Not to mention it's that modern 'glue some cogs on shit' that passes for steampunk these days. Lazy steampunk really irritates me for some reason.

I still can't believe this Kickstarter thing attracts people. You risk your money on magic beans that you don't own.

Depends on the beans and who is making them.

It really doesn't. If they want money, they need to either get a loan or give up equity. If they want to sell product, they should just make it and sell it. This is some bizarre in between that seems rife for misuse and abuse of the people fronting the cash.

In fact, Kickstarter went as far to post THIS (http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/accountability-on-kickstarter) after NPR raised serious questions about this issue. Kickstarter, in so many words, says that you're firing your money into the dark and hoping for the best. You get no refunds and no guarantees. Nowhere is the creator legally required by Kickstarter to do anything with your money once they get it, short of "damaging your reputation or possible legal action from your backers." Kickstarter will take no action, nor will they assist the backers. They don't do anything. It's the dumbest type of buyer beware out there.

Ok. So don't back things on KS?

Like I said, it depends on the beans and who's making them. Don't back shady projects.

I agree with you generally, but there is also some great stuff on there. Small business ideas are hard to fund via loans, and by the time they are good enough to get on kickstarter they usually have a lot of personal funds/loans in the project already. If they don't, I wouldn't "pledge to purchase one of the first run products".  Its not an investment, it is a commitment to buy one of the first items they produce, using my pre-order dollars to make sure the product is created at consumer-quality levels.

So far, I've gotten everything I've expected from Kickstarter (4 finished projects so far). No projects have gone "bankrupt" on me.

Why would you back a kickstarter so someone can make a wagon for themselves? That's stupid.

I do agree with you though - I would like to see a kickstarter-like site that lets me invest in small businesses in $100 increments. Though I don't think the SEC allows that.

It seems to work best (and be least risky) for projects that have already been designed and prototyped, but need a chunk of upfront funding to make manufacturing feasible.  Books, miniatures, board games, etc, assuming the folks running the project are competent and have correctly scoped costs, tend to work out pretty well.  Hardware/manufacturing projects can be a lot hairier due to complexity -- I strongly suspect the Pebble guys will ship, but they're running way behind their original estimated schedules and from the photos, I don't think the tooling and material quality is going to blow anybody away.

Extremely open-ended work like complex software projects is a much bigger roll of the dice.  I've seen well-funded, generally competent professional software teams completely blow their schedule over and over again.  Expecting that a random kickstarter "backer" can hope to make an informed decision about the ability of a software team to deliver a product that's barely a prototype, or possibly just a presentation at the point of the kickstarter is kinda nuts.

I've been looking at the "Risks" section they're now requiring and most of what I'm seeing is pretty laughable as far as realistic risk assessments...

My problem is not with the idea, it's the hands-off copout of Kickstarter to even make an attempt at policing the process, or vetting out potential submissions, even though they get a cut from the fundings. Essentially, Kickstarter is taking 5% for running a website and saying GOOD LUCK!

Ah, Fab, you're a better internet detective than I was.  I had a snarky thought after reading the closing announcement on KS that she'd just become "bored" with the project and decided to let it go.  I wasn't able to find anything to back it up other than the "Never been used" on the craigslist ad, but it looks like I was pretty damn close if she never even opened.

"Oh hell, you mean I have to actually RUN a business and can't just open up and sell? Booriiing."


You aren't the only one. No logic or even real aesthetic thought behind it just, "Hey I can afford x cogs, stick them on!"


Yeah, though don't the recent laws Congress passed for this force at least a little regulation on it now?  I can't remember other than the idea that it didn't resolve the, "Put up funding initative, take money and declare business closed after minor expendetures" problem.

They're taking 5% for providing what is essentially a useful middleman service. I really don't see the issue.

Because they are potentially acting as a middleman for fraud, and have no policies in place to deal with it. Also, when NPR brought it up, they were like, "Well we HOPE that doesn't happen."  :oh_i_see:

I suspect that the video game section of Kickstarter will implode in a couple years. Most of the highest-profile projects are going to be garbage.

Paelos, you seem to be operating under a lot of assumed occurrences.

Don't back steampunk cupcakes. Back trusted sources for deliverable product. I've thrown a couple passes into double coverage, but I'm pretty sure I'm backing stuff that I'll see. And in every case I got a great deal and helped some people out. Not to mention in most of them the fans have had a say in the direction of the project, sometimes to a very significant degree.

Now, if you want to grind an axe the way Az is, that's one thing. Delays and spotty communication are legit gripes, even with solid campaigns otherwise. But the stuff you're talking about is stuff that's pretty easy to see at a distance if you have any perspective. And if you can't...that's the beauty of the free market. Fools and their money, yeah? So don't be a fool?

I'm not grinding an ax. What I'm suggesting only takes a small bit of foresight to see that the wild west of internet trade law, and the lax structure of recourse for people to deliver on their promises, those elements make dangerous bedfellows. I will never use it, you can use it if you feel comfortable. However, I think they are setting themselves up for some serious lawsuits in the future if they don't get more aggressive in their policies.

Ok. Are you done yet?

Yep. Have at it.

Was browsing Kickstarter and got a kick out of this one - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/967946252/rainfall-the-sojourn?ref=category (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/967946252/rainfall-the-sojourn?ref=category)

After watching the video and reading through it, it dawned on me that they are saying nothing about the game play.  It's all super vague with no game play details or examples, nothing really other than "2D sprites, RPG".  Yet it's still over $18,000.  :uhrr:

Good sign for me. I'm helping some friends from a local company setup a Kickstarter soon. They are actually a case for Kickstarter, in that they have an almost finished game, but have run out of funding to finish it. Company was formed by a bunch of art students from eastern Finland, so they have some really interesting looking stuff. Project I'm helping them to setup a Kickstarter for is kinda of a Tim Burtonish Diablo game.

I'm not the biggest Fate person around, but it's a damn fine system, and if you're interested in it, here's the new edition -

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evilhat/fate-core?ref=activity

$1 gets you the draft text - NOW

I know the people behind this personally, so I don't want to go too fanboy, but they really do run a good Kickstarter.

It's actually tempting to throw together a game Kickstarter with no intention of ever finishing it, but putting together some pretty screen shots and making a video expressing some huge completely unrealistic goals.  Take the money and run!  Who wants to get in on this?  :awesome_for_real:

Monorail?
In.

Sure.  Just throw me my cut before you abscond with it.

Monorail controlled by your android or iphone.

Monorail controlled by your android or iphone in THE CLOUD!

Bluetooth? Gotta have bluetooth.

Raph, you should totally put up a kickstarter for a music and retrospective talk cd.  Talk about uo and swg. Play a few songs. It would all be gravy!

I can understand Kickstarting in some sectors, but video games isn't one of those. Especially since a lot of projects get funded by making an appealing pitch but without apparently having a plan to deliver other than "Get money, make game".

As for that savoury cake stand (which, in itself, is WTF) what people fail to understand is that by providing the money that is all you are doing. You may feel like you should have a say in what the person does with their business, or how they operate, but you don't. To me that is what is going to ultimately undo crowdfunding at the top end - when businesses take that money and deliver something you don't end up wanting, or selling out that business in some way. As I've said, I'm looking forward to the internet storm when some high profile Kickstarted game sells out to EA.

Here's a great example of a bad kickstarter where people didn't understand that providing capital doesn't always mean you get a product in the end (nor that you can trust the people requesting funding):

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/primerist/code-hero-a-game-that-teaches-you-to-make-games-he/comments

Basically while the guy just responded, he went incommunicado not long after funding went through and hasn't delivered anything yet. Word is he spent all the money.

Did I mention he's also responsible for this project where he took a bunch of peoples money and delivered nothing?

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tactical-Corsets/75721587713?fref=ts

Yeah.

Tactical corsets... :awesome_for_real:

Sewn by his very own hands...

http://primerlabs.com/developmentcontinues

The Escapist article prompted Primer Labs to come out with a "we're not dead and development continues" message. Reading between the lines though, the "we're a long way behind schedule and this is is really hard but we will do this because it is important!" doesn't inspire confidence. And also the issue that they've potentially run out of money.

Speaking of sketchy...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/escape/eternity-dice-forged-from-lava

http://www.indiegogo.com/eternitydice

These could certainly be a scam.  They are NOT precision. 

If you are a dice gamer you should check out these videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bR2fxoNHIuU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxmkWrDbn34

Met that guy years ago at GenCon.  I do not think he does Cons anymore.  All of my playing dice are now from that company.

As a showcase I do have a set of Jade dice that are very nice, but even they seem to lack the precision I now demand!

Go here for precision dice:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/124127689/precision-machined-dice

I was talking more about running a second crowdfund campaign on the same product.

Also, Italy.

Trippy that smart young lass makes me feel old. What is she, 14?  :geezer:

Because I need a bag of dice that I can beat people to death with.  :grin:

Metal dice are awful, they're incredibly loud and they damage most tables.

College student, so probably no younger than 18.

Just saw this.

I think there is an excellent chance of this failing completely. :)

On the low end, I can see succeeding with a KS for another game design book.

On the high end, I get requests for a "spiritual successor to UO" KS *constantly* but do not believe you can raise enough dough for it with KS, honestly.

Partner up with Tim Schafer. Fake Indie Sweethearts do well there.

But TUNGSTEN!  Who doesn't want dice made from wolfram!?!

I like my Iron Die dice. They're metal and don't seem to fuck up tables. No hard edges on the ones I got at least. But let's be honest, I'm waiting for these:

http://dicepl.us/

So wasteland 2 is giving away a steam code for the bards tale to all their backers. Merry Christmas.

The other part of that announcement was interesting too -- apparently they're setting things up so fans can contribute assets for potential use in-game via the unity asset store.  No monetary compensation, but you retain all rights to your creations, can sell them in the asset store, and if they choose to use them, you get a "used in wasteland 2" badge on the item in the asset store.

She added damascus steel too, now.

No copper beryllium?

I already own the game. PM me if anyone wants my download code.

Adamantium or GTFO

I just 'started my first Kick. It's a choose-your-own-adventure-styled novelization of Hamlet titled To Be Or Not To Be (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/breadpig/to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-adventure), written by Ryan North.

Ryan North touched it, is all you really need to know.

As I said in another thread, I've consistently seen great results from webcomics related publishing projects (and have some really wonderful hardcover editions of some great comics on my shelf as a result).  I have every faith Ryan's crazy hamlet-as-choose-your-own-adventure is going to be hilarious and I love that as the money has stacked up he's folded it into improving the existing reward tiers (full color, more illustrations, prequel adventure, extra goodies) rather than just cashing the check.

Par for the course for any campaign that wants to be considered "well-run."

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1548272412/radio-the-universe-0

 :ye_gods:

Gonna need a bigger budget.

I thought you were waiting for these (http://www.diceagegame.com/).    :why_so_serious:

Neat. I think I'll wait for it to actually come out.

Some people have been talking about this card game KS, which is up to over 2400 cards at the $125 pledge level.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1325766284/up-front-the-card-game

List of what's unlocked thus far: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/889065/so-you-think-youre-ready-for-the-kickstarter-ok

I don't think I'm going to support Up Front. The game came out in 1983. Which basically assures that it's a clunky, rules-added, overly complex mess. Cards that look like this:

(http://i.imgur.com/f4Sxv.jpg)

Well, they make my fucking skin crawl.

Just gave the rules a once-over. I'm right. It's a mess.

I watched a good bit of the video. There seems some decent stuff, but I kept thinking 'this game needs dice'.

The cards don't bug me, they're fairly straightforward even after just watching the KS video. Similar to Sedition Wars' tactical data cards for the minis.

MFZ is incredibly fun -- I played a bunch of games while it was in development and now the final 253 page rulebook is out (PDF available for free, CC noncommercial, hardcopy preorder or paypal donations also available if you want to toss some money their way): http://mobileframezero.com/mfz/

(http://frotz.net/misc/mfz-battle.jpg)
(http://frotz.net/misc/mfz-company-sheet.jpg)

Oh wow, this is super neat.  I love building small-scale LEGO mecha MOCs - combining it with tabletop gaming means I'm sort of obligated to support this.

I feel like I'm seeing a re-run of OUYA, but GameStick has already hit their target (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/872297630/gamestick-the-most-portable-tv-games-console-ever) (and nearly doubled it at this stage.

What if you could play a tablet/phone game, except tethered to a TV and minus a touchscreen, thus eliminating the only two reasons you'd ever want to play a tablet/phone game???

In a couple years smartphones/tablets/etc will have better video out options and these things will be irrelevant. If you want to play your iPad games on a TV you'll just buy an iPad with the right video out option.

That said this strikes me as more grounded than Ouya, but the concept seems fundamentally off to me. The whole selling point of mobile gaming is the mobile part. You already want a phone or tablet and hey, you can play some mostly shitty games on them as well! Who wants to buy a system that only plays those shitty mobile games but not mobile, and as an added bonus doesn't come with the primary input device those games are designed for?

Yeah that's my big questionmark for Ouya and its ilk.  You can handwave about the huge amount of content, but apart from games that were ports from gamepad style console devices (and there are a bunch of those), most mobile games don't seem like they'd translate well to TV+controller without a bunch of work.

These things will make fantastic emulator platforms for early consoles, but it's unlikely anyone will be able to negotiate suitable licenses with the owners of those classic titles (who all are busy trying to monetize their back catalog through their own consoles or channels).

Sadly, the chosen chipsets are rather underpowered for driving 1920x1080 displays -- bigger titles (more AAAish stuff) probably will require a fair bit of love to get reasonable performance which seems unlikely unless they manage to get a *lot* of units in the field to justify such efforts (10s of millions I'd expect).  Lack of local storage (8GB of flash) is also a pain for larger titles.

For the companies behind them I don't see their hardware as being what makes their business work; it'll be how much of a share of the Android market they can grab and the size of their customer base. Think Steam sales, but on Android.

They've got the usual new-platform chicken-and-egg problem in that they need to convince developers to publish in their markets and adjust their applications to work on those devices, and developers go where the volume is.  They've got to convince users to buy these consoles, and users buy consoles for the apps that run on them.  About as many new Android phones and tablets are activated every hour as Ouya consoles were pre-sold in their kickstarter effort.

On the plus side, the delta between Android-on-phone-or-tablet and Android-on-Ouya is mostly going to be about controller support, which is not a huuge amount of work, but going from 720p to 1080p on the same CPU/GPU (say games that run fine on a Nexus 7 now, but have to perform as well pushing ~2.25x the pixels around) can be some effort if you don't already have performance headroom.

I'm curious to see what retail price they end up at for their final hardware -- presumably they hope to sell a lot more units longer term than the 50-60k they pre-sold.

EDIT: Of course the flip side is in a new ecosystem (even if small), with a smaller app catalog, it's easier to stand out, so one might see early developers hoping to capture a much larger chunk of sales.  Hard to predict, really.

Ouya is now available for pre-order on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050SZD18/) for $100. There's conflicting info about the expected ship dates for pre-orders. Some place are reporting that pre-orders from the Ouya site are expected to ship in April but the site itself lists June. June is also the month retailers (Amazon, Best Buy, Target, etc.) are expected to get the product.

I think kickstarter backers get them in april/may with public retail in june (including pre-orders not on kickstarter).

Probably one of the quieter studio departures I've seen - Jon Shafer just announced the formation of a new studio to basically create a 4x Indie game

Polygon article - http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/2/6/3950722/they-could-be-heroes-conifer-jon-shafer-at-the-gates

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonshafer/jon-shafers-at-the-gates?ref=live

At the Gates is an empire builder similar to Sid Meier's Civilization. Starting with a small tribe, you must explore the world, exploit its scarce resources, and eliminate or outsmart potential enemies. The game starts simple but grows in complexity until you command a mighty economic and military powerhouse.

Over the course of a single game your tribe will migrate to more lush and bountiful lands, conquer and barter with other clans, work alongside the Romans, learn from them, and finally destroy them. Along the way, you'll need to master the art of war and craft cunning plans to strengthen your kingdom - all while enduring the worst mother nature can throw at you!

Got the hell away from Stardock, apparently.

That alone should earn him some money.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/461687407/kickstarter-open-source-death-star

Ragnar Tornquist back to what he does best  :heart: :awesome_for_real: :

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey

You must back this now. Snooze and lose, I warned you!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1730070783/doing-time-boardand-dice-game

Creators face would make a good avatar.

Paying off already. (http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/ryan-north-kickstarted-head-pop/)

Bryan from Reaper linked a few interesting articles for the doom crowd.

http://albinodragon.com/shipping-call-it-the-fastest-bankrupt-kickstarter/

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-one-stupid-mistake-and-35000-from-kickstarter-made-an-average-guy-bankrupt-2013-1

http://hive.slate.com/hive/made-america-how-reinvent-american-manufacturing/article/the-lost-lockpick

The second one is priceless.  What an ignorant tool.

How can someone nearly illiterate make a good boardgame?

Depends who you are talking about. The article linked talked about a pledger named Neil Singh suing the project creator and bankrupting the company, but Singh has come out to say (http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2013/01/kickstarter-lawsuit-neil-singh/) all he went for was his money back and the project creator was bankrupted by his debts to his credit card company.

If you are talking about Seth Quest, I agree. You don't mix business money with personal accounts. And perhaps you plan things out before you take people's money too.

In some states like California if you are effectively a sole proprietor it doesn't matter if you have a business structure like an LLC set up you are still personally liable for all debts.

We agree.

Another one bites the dust. Outed as a reseller.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/75321040/free-roll-machined-gamers-dice/comments

Most business loans will be structured this way, as well. 

The guy who bit the dust trying to resell dice on KS (and then cancelled his project and then his account and a bunch of stuff related to it)?

http://youracnehelp.brannelsolutions.net/bui-e-launches-innovative-ultra-thin-and-precision-crafted-minimal-wallet-line-good-for-pimples/

http://www.indiegogo.com/BUI-EWallets

Bets on it being flexible funding (guy gets the money whether the project funds or not)?

After all, we all need a wallet that is good for clearing acne, right?

Looks like he's still covering his tracks; the Indiegogo page is now set to 'draft' mode and not visible to the public.

--Dave

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/springboard/emperors-new-clothes

(https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/411/086/b5a66be425132ab5c9368343f338c39d_large.png?1361974055)

(https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/410/366/6eb5f1217f854444a00e9d02887f4d0e_large.png?1361938443)

I hope that your point is that those look identical.

edit: after going to the actual link, now I get it.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petroglyphgames/victory-1

Petroglyph got booted off of End of Nations - and now seem to be trying to make another version of it on the cheap.

I thought it was clever:

Ok, to be slightly more serious than I have been...


http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera

I normally dislike video game KS....but...

Holy shitballs, $300,000+ and it's barely been open like, what, 2 hours?

As a reminder, we have a thread over here (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=22901.0) about it.

The only thing nice about Kickstarting Video Games is they have to put a fake release date. I now know I will either be playing a Planescape followup in December 2014 or afterwards or a bunch of people are going to get scammed, me not being one of them.

$460,000. I know Planescape Torment is hailed as having "the best writing in a vidja game ever" or whatever but I didn't expect it to have that many fans left. Guess it would be a generation at an age old enough to have disposable income though.

The $95 tier sold out long before the $20 tier did, so yeah.

Plus, buzz. The fact that the page updates the amount collected and how many left of the certain levels adds in an urgency that I'm sure fuels a certain amount of PANIC BUYING.

These kickstarters just show how screwed up the gaming industry is.  They are evidence that there are many people who will pay north of $100 for a great game, a price that should be more than economically compelling.  Yet the big guys turn out drek after drek, worrying more about how some gamers might pirate the drek as opposed to actually delivering a good game.

Just imagine a kickstarter pitch for the new SimCity that told the truth.  Not a dime would be advanced.  Now, of course, a lot of those funding game kickstarters are doing so with the "perfect" game in their heads which is a standard doomed to disappointment.  Still, the evidence that many people will pay more than adequate prices for quality games is right in front of the industry but all the big guys ignore it.

You can't quantify quality on a spreadsheet unless you put in a field for the Metacritic score.

I don't know if the video was up when all this discussion was going on (edit: Doh just noticed this is all dated today. Strange I didnt find it searching the front page)
I just saw the video and it is funny and really puts the company perspective on kickstarters into perspective. I just hope they don't mess it up too badly because otherwise it's a great way around the requirement to deep throat  publishers. It's over a million now btw.

It's at $1.15M now, having hit the goal in less than a day.  So, reports of the death of Kickstarter as a funding source for video games have been greatly exagerated.

--Dave

The poster on the wall was  cool too. Where can I contribute to save the tree octopii.

A million dollars is not a lot of money in publisher terms, so the idea of a few thousand people shelling out $100 is not enticing. Alternately, it's too much money to throw away, and there's no guarantee that lightning will strike twice on outdated, niche products like this. Even if it does and the project ultimately triples or quadruples its production costs, a few million dollars is a small profit. (http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-top-10-highest-grossing-video-games-of-all-time-2012-6?op=1)

Kickstarter isn't either frightening or exciting publishers: It doesn't compete with them. It's another market entirely.

... and Sim City will make more money than this game by an order of magnitude.

It's not how they start, it's how they finish.

I agree, but for different reasons.

Fans are throwing money at a product that isn't anywhere near finished based on nostalgia and hype. All based on a short pitch by the developers that puts their plans in the kindest, softest light.

Plus they are paying $100 not just for the game, but for the reward levels. It's $100 for the supa-special collector's edition, plus P&H. Let's hope that the studio have accurately calculated how much it will cost to deliver all those extra rewards.

We've entered this weird phase where players are willing to effectively buy a game years in advance of its actual completion / release, but then baulk at buying any finished title for full price that doesn't score 8+ out of 10.

For every KS i've participated in, the idea is that the cost of the tier includes shipping/handling. That's why a lot of them run another tier that is slightly more with the same exact stuff for outside the US.

Edit: A lot of them seem to just be adding a note at the bottom that reads "Add X for shipping outside the US" these days.

In my mind, the money provided by kickstarters is what's needed to make it a zero sum game to produce, i.e. any sales after the fact should in theory be pure profit. And this market should be bigger than the market already tapped by kickstarter.

And that's absolutely fine by me, since "publishers" seem to be increasingly insistent on alienating players like me, either through removing features I think should be in PC games, or adding features which I believe shouldn't be in PC games, or trying their hardest to fuck me over by requiring it be activated online on their servers (which literally almost always fails on launch day) or, in the case of sim city (which, incidentally I had hoped would be niche enough to be treated with actual respect :oh_i_see:) an always-on requirement which doesn't work, requires you stick to the one server you've begun on or lose your progress and and and and.

I've helped kickstart 3 different games, and I was on course to kickstart a fourth, elite: dangerous. Turned out they were talking about making it into a semi-MMO (I have one space MMO I'm playing already, EVE, and I've also backed something which promises to be more of what I actually wanted, which was a new elite-like game, i.e. limit theory), at which point I pulled my backing because it wasn't what I was looking for. vOv

And this saddens me.

I'm interested in seeing the results of the first big waves of kickstarters done by former notable devs from the industry just because it'll answer the question: Are these people really as good as we thought they were?

I mean even the hugest kickstarter is a small budget affair in the industry, but with complete creative control and well...pretty much complete unaccountability to the people who funded them (yeah their reps would be ruined if they failed to produce a game, but legally responsible? Nope.) we might get to see if their version of "teh vision" is really a pile of shit or not.

For whom, though?

I'm not bagging on Kickstarter. I really like the idea behind it, and am watching it to determine how the risk/reward curve plots. It theoretically allows shoestring and small budget games to get made, and promises that money goes to developers rather than middlemen. It's one of those things that internet allows that could really change the business landscape.

It's just not going to solve the "why do big budget blockbuster games suck?" problem.

That's not what it's there for.

I don't really care of big budget blockbuster games suck as long as high quality small budget niche games are being made.  It is that second group that was missing for a long time and has started making a comeback in the last 2-3 years.

I know. I was originally responding to a specific post by shiznitz.

Garriot was feeling left out.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/portalarium/shroud-of-the-avatar-forsaken-virtues-0?ref=live

I hate myself for reading shit like this and thinking it will result in a fun game.  After all these years, I still fall for the hype machine.

His weird tiny hair braid rat tail thing turned me off. Plus the shirt undone to expose the CHAIN.

Since when was 'what made his seminal Ultima Series great' anything about 'choose the life of a homesteader'? The fuck, Garriot? It's like he's the George Lucas of video games.

And I'm playing U7 right now so it's painful to have my nostalgia tugged at.  Also,

No.

This doesn't fill me with hope he knows what made the old Ultimas good. I think this might be the CRPG Kickstarter I'll pass on.

Oh, Richard.

Could someone tell him that maybe, just maybe, he should drop that part of it, unless he wants to make it a proper MMO?

I'm done with game Kickstarters until I actually get to play one of the games that I have backed.

Smart decision.

I thought this was single player...

DON'T BACK SOFTWARE ON KICKSTARTER

DAMN, PEOPLE.

Welp, looks like I have to fund another kickstarter game.   :awesome_for_real:

I like the setting and the alignment system they've got going for the new Torment.  I can't help myself.

However, I've never played a single Ultima game (well, except for the Ultima Underworld games) in my life, and Richard shall see none of my money!

If you've played the Ultima games, it's even more depressing.

However, Torment does sounds pretty decent.

Gariott doing Kickstarter is like Jamie Diamond asking for a bail out.  Someone should UPS him a genital cuff.

Well...he did spend a bit of cash to go into space.

I think Garriot isn't to blame. If you can get people to give you a million dollars (the goal of the kickstarter) well in advance of you actually delivering anything (especially in this case with everything up to $100 pledges being purely digital and the actual physical products for pledges over $100 costing a minor part of the sum) then why not do it?

Ethics?

I like the part where they talk more about how they're going to monetize the thing they make up-front profit on more than the game.

Then again, RG's ego is putting everything into livestream instead of actual updates, so who knows what the hell is going on? I'm not going to sit through hours of RG blathering into a webcam, ffs. This is a funny schtick, but a man has his limits.

I thought Kickstarter was for people who didn't have money.  And who needed help to produce a prototype or break into an industry. 

That was the initial idea.  Now that Congress legitimized micro-funding with last years bill, expect everyone and their brother to go looking to be risky with other people's money.  Particularly those who have failed before.

That idea (if ever true) died when Double Fine made a lot of money based on vague promises of a game sometime in the future.

I wonder if anyone has figured out that you could advertise a Kickstarter project to the 484k people who "like" Kickstarter on Facebook.

That sounds like a brilliant idea, but it'd probably cost quite a bit of cash...maybe they could use kickstarter to drum up funding for it?

Eh. It's just always been about funding creative projects. Double Fine just gave it major exposure.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/559914737/the-veronica-mars-movie-project?ref=live

So, now the movie industry/scene gets to have the same conversation that the games crowd had when Double Fine hit Kickstarter.

I see Schild has already bought the $10,000 speaking role in the movie.

Not so much.  Kickstarter has had film projects on it for a long time (although usually documentaries), and 2M is a trivial amount of money by Hollywood standards.  If the project winds up raising 20M, then they'll pay attention.

--Dave

You haven't seen the convos going on online then. There are people freaking out about how this is terrible and that no one should contribute money because Hollywood has money, etc etc.

It is identical to the conversation freak out that happened with Double Fine.

See where you went wrong there?

I'm sorry, I'm not following...

I could, of course, be underestimating the size of the VM audience who has money to throw at a Kickstarter, but I expect the $2 million to be hit within a day, and then taper off sharply.

If they were to maintain their current rate (they won't), they'll have roughly $60 mill before the end of the Kickstarter period.

It was the part where you /were/ following. 'Convos' going on online.

Who in their right mind gives two fucks? Utterly meaninless and best ignored.

Oh, well.. we're actually on the same side of that. I just reported that the convo was happening. It actually amuses me greatly, I care not that much about it.

I was talking about Hollywood's reaction, not the public.  When Doublefine got 4M to make an adventure game, that attracted attention in the industy.  That's why you've got 'known names' like Garriott on Kickstarter now.  But 2M isn't enough to get Hollywood to do the same doubletake.

--Dave

Well, your responded to me, so I took it as a correction/argument. I wasn't talking about that. I don't disagree with you on that at all.

I dunno.... 2.4 Million in one day is enough to make a lot of people take notice I bet.

I agree. It's obviously not a way to fund the next CGI Summer Block Buster, but smaller projects certainly. Indy movies, movies based on TV shows with a huge following (such as the conversation starter), and smaller movies with lower budgets. Rom Coms with favorite actors/actresses. I don't know, I can see this as being not industry changing as a whole, but certainly a new way to get a movie or TV show made.

Weren't there 2 kickstarted projects nominated for Oscars this year?

Also Veronica Mars falls into the same nerd-circle-jerk vat that Joss Whedon and Double Fine does (and NPH and Tabletop, etc etc). So as long as all of this is kept within that sort of bullshit sector of Hollywood, I don't see anyone actually caring. I'd absolutely say the success here spawned from the Double Fine thing, rather than saying the movie industry will look at this thing as viable.

The Paranormal Activity movies where produced for only a few million dollars each (and the first one was only $15,000), and its the same for most other found footage movies.  I'm sure somebody could easily make some good found footage films through kickstarter (if you like found footage movies, which I do.  I know a number of people here don't :p).

I'm guessing it'll kickstart 3-4 million, Warner Brothers will fail to promote it because HEY INTERNET, and it'll open in an absolute minimum number of theatres to supremely modest box office as a far cheaper and, thus, slightly less disappointing flop than the Firefly movie.

The wildcard is that Veronica Mars is a lot more mainstream than Firefly: Mystery solving romcom should have legs in a number of moviegoing demographics. If they can keep a lid on the fanwank there's a chance it'll make a few million and get enough exposure to up DVD sales and inspire copycats.

It'd have to feel like more than a 90 minute tribute episode, though, and I'm not sure the writers and director have the cinematic chops.

That said, I'd be happy to see an explosion of LETS GET THE ACTORS TOGETHER FOR 90 MINUTE TRIBUTE EPISODES kickstarters like there was an explosion of LETS GET THE PROGRAMMERS TOGETHER FOR TRIBUTE GAMES kickstarters. If nothing else, the intro videos would be entertaining.

Starting to get turned off to backing any board game stuff too.  Twice in the last two weeks I've seen games I considered backing for sale at Amazon or CoolStuffInc for WAY less than the Kickstarter price was.  While I understand the whole "Well, Kickstarter isnt' a pre-order service, blah blah." thing, when I need to back at $90 to get a game that will be on Amazon for $50 a month later if ends up being popular it doesn't give me much incentive to back something unless I think it's really amazing, won't get published without more backing and has plenty of backer bonuses.

Ok?

Backing board games tends to be more about exclusives. You can always find some online outlet that will dump prices.

Someone was just saying people would be better off buying Zombicide season 1 on amazon than adding it to the current KS pledge for $70. It tends to go for $68 on amazon and hovers $70-80 at most gaming sites, even if you have prime shipping (I do) and don't have to pay taxes (I do), you're only saving $2, and not contributing to stretches for the current campaign, and I'd like to see The Dude unlocked.

But in general, I recommend people just wait until retail to buy things. Seems way too many people get upset way too easy over silly games. If you have enough money to drop $70 on a board game, you should probably stop complaining altogether :p

And boom goes the dynamite.

For me, Kickstarter is donating money towards something I really want to see made.  Its great I get something out of it as well, but the main goal for me is to use my cash to help create a project I want to see out in the world.  I treat it like a donation, assuming I will never ever see anything for that money again.

Else, I'd just wait around and buy it on the assumption it will make it to retail someday.

Here you go load it up: < a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alexcoxfilms/alex-cox-directs-bill-the-galactic-hero">Alex Cox directs BILL THE GALACTIC HERO[/url]

edit: I may have flipped that around into something I want to see made, but hey the cheesiest of space opera done as a college film project for 100k, who wouldn't want that?

edit2: wish more projects offered cool stickers for the low $$ backers, I need laptop candy and a bill the galactic hero sticker would have fit the bill nicely.  Maybe that is the next great kickstarter idea, creating an online service to provide high end low cost stickers (you know the shit that looks like it has a metallic surface on the glue side) for kickstarter projects.

Iamsad that he's low-balling his attempt to do Bill The Galactic Hero; it deserves a chance to have a proper movie made.  B&W also??? Fail.  It's a "technicolor" type series.  It's not meant to have some gauche noir feel to it.
Also, how is it that Bill gets made before Slippery Jim gets his chance?  Sense it no makes.

I agree on the color, bill needs to be psychedelic, but I  wouldn't want to see the rat on a 100k budget.

Yea - I don't get the b&w bit.  I mean a digital camera is what now days?

This is a Kickstarter I missed and I'm seriously pissed about it...  one reason I get so steamed sometimes at the corporate garbage that tends to dominate the site.  Anyways, it's a really cool concept and I'm surprised no one's thought of it before.  It's supposedly a year out, but they may release modules as they come available.

Draw Like a Boss (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ashdrawsthings/draw-like-a-boss)

Exactly. This is what a Kickstarter means to me. All this other consumer concern crap can DIAF, if it's worth it to me it's because I'm old and I'd like to see another one of "" before I die. Thanks for pointing out the Bill the Galactic Hero movie I may just back that too.

Larian Studios is running a KS for the new Divinity (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/larianstudios/divinity-original-sin). Game is already near completion, they just want to add some special sauce. I know that makes people nuts here, but it's a solid rpg series from a solid dev house so for $25 I look at it as a pre-order sale. That it might help development is a bonus, a steam sale a year from now wouldn't do that.

Also, the game looks pretty awesome. Drop-in, drop-out multiplayer with each player able to choose different options in dialogue.

They lost me at turn based.

I feel that's the best part about it. Diablo sucks.

Good find Sky! Already pitched in. I loved the other Divinities, and turn-based fights can only improve my enjoyment.

I might pitch in on this, too.  Larian is proven and we've seen the game working.  I'm not sure why I think they're any different than the others, but I do.

Special sauce my ass. It's either a preorder or you can't finish it without Kickstarter.

Also, they gonna have Starforce again? I'm not willing to read it to find out.

They claim that it shall be "DRM free".

Ok, now that we've resolved that end. You still shouldn't give money to it.

Divinity 2 was awful.

Yes it was.

I think I might back this - looks solid.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1369622196/the-crabby-wallet-a-wallet-that-is-not-for-everyon

This worked soooooo well the first time for investors.....

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reloadedprod/all-points-bulletin-apb-vendetta (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reloadedprod/all-points-bulletin-apb-vendetta)

God, that studios other Kickstarter is just hilarious looking. So terrible.

So apparently the general consensus on Ouya is that it's pretty lame.

Shocking.

Runs XBMC and emulators. Were people expecting something else out of it?

Nope. Honestly they massively exceeded my expectations here.  It's almost tempting to buy one for an emulator box (given my Nexus 7 doesn't have HDMI out), but given that we're likely to see reasonable "steambox" solutions this year which should have no problem running emulators, no sense cluttering the livingroom with more single-function gadgetry.

For my next media appliance, I'm trying to decide between Ouya and the Acer Chromebox (a decision that is safely theoretical for now, because neither is available).  Chromebox is more likely to just work for the stuff I want from a media appliance, but an Ouya has more upside potential.

Screw it, I know what I'll wind up doing; buying whichever is available first, and bitching that it doesn't do something the other does.

--Dave

I don't really get buying a system just so you can emulate other, better systems.

I'll be getting a Ouya soon, though I don't think I will use it. If someone *really* wants one, I'd be happy to part with it for what I paid for it.

Bless you laddie, but uhh... where the hell did you find that?

Considering I can buy a memory card an put every single rom from every system made between 1980 and 1994 on it - including every language variant of every game - I don't see the reason in owning other, better systems from back then.

I just messaged her on KS.

This is a great reason I'm not pissed about my sister selling the SNES I loaned her for my nephews 10 years ago in a garage sale.  It was just excessive clutter, held only for sentimental and emotional value. 

Also the SNES has a largely cycle-perfect emulator now. Requires any reasonably modern PC meaning I don't even think the Ouya has the juice to run it, but in terms of all actual games made/sold for the SNES it has 100% compatibility.

Which one?  Snes9x on Android seems to run quite well on Nexus 7 which is the same hardware platform as Ouya.

You certainly should be able to do cycle accurate emulation of the SNES on a quad core > 1GHz A9 platform with a decent GPU.

http://byuu.org/higan/

Higan. It used to be BSNES but it's now a multi-system emulator. The SNES portion is the most developed and the only emu with 100% compatibility. It's most accurate profile is pretty intensive:

"The accuracy profile is my personal favorite. It is extremely accurate, but it is also extremely slow. On my Core i7 @ 4.4GHz, I get ~135fps on Zelda 3 (best case), and ~65fps on the most intensive parts of Mega Man X3 (worst case.) If you have an incredibly powerful, top of the line computer, this is what you should use."

The least accurate one ran on an Atom just fine, so I guess that would work possibly. 1ghz is pushing it since this stuff is mostly clockspeed constrained. the SNES9x ports on Android are speedhack heavy and won't play all games but those should run okay on the Ouya...

I get the convenience factor but don't you already have 6 other devices that can run emulators of old systems?

On my TV?  Not really.  I've got a PS3 (games, dvd, bluray, netflix, amazon video) and a Sony GoogleTV (not my fault, is okay at playing h264/mkv from the NAS, otherwise doesn't really do anything the PS3 doesn't do better).  I can run emulators on the gaming PC, but console games are best enjoyed (at least to my way of thinking) sitting on the couch, using a controller, and the big screen.

But... since it seems pretty damn likely there's going to be some decent (to my way of thinking, small, relatively quiet, unobtrusive) steambox related entertainment pc options turning up later this year, buying an Ouya just to run emulators against the TV seems overkill.

We've solved that problem.

Well yes and no.  My current gaming PC is a pretty large critter and somewhat noisy -- not something I want next to the TV.  I've looked into building smaller/quieter machines in the past but the options have not been really great.  I'm hoping with this steambox business we'll see some reasonable options for PCs that could live in the livingroom but not be big bulky PCs.

I like my PC noisy. Then I don't have to listen to the annoying "ticking" sound that my wall-mounted panel heater/oven produces BOTH when it's heating up and when it's cooling off.

I got my Wally in the mail yesterday. Pretty slick.
(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1398285518/wally-the-iphone-wallet-reimagined)

How to win at Kickstarter (http://www.pcgamesn.com/how-win-kickstarter-brian-fargo-discusses-his-crowdfunded-millions), by Brian Fargo.

My copy of Race to Adventure just came in today (missed the UPS guy yesterday). Hopefully, if the kids cooperate, I might give it a go tonight.

Get a board with heatpipes and over-sized slow fans for everything.  It'll be whisper quiet.

Some of those cute cube micro-atx boards would probably work for this, too, if you want small.

Yeah, I know it's doable, but I've worked with small cases before and they're kind of a pain to deal with.  For something I'm building myself I've always ended up going with a mid-tower to suffer less and not have to fight with perfect component fit.  For an entertainment PC I'd prefer to buy something pre-built that has everything fit and tuned for that purpose, but hadn't found anything I like thus far.  So I'm hoping this excitement about steambox will result in more options in the space of "small, quiet, tasteful, but reasonably powerful". 

I am aware this is total #firstworldproblems territory.

They are a pain.  That's why if I were making something for this purpose I wouldn't be looking at modding it in the future.  It'd be a build once and not have to deal with it later sort of thing.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/86041/Condo%20%26%20Ideas/IMG_20130104_201128.jpg)

That little silver box in the bottom right of my TV stand is my home theater PC.  Lian Li case, mATX board.  It's running an i3 IIRC, has 8GB of ddr3 ram, and a GTX 460 or 470.  If I had gotten a black case instead of silver, it'd look even more like just another piece of home theater equiment - it's not that much bigger than my receiver (bottom middle).

I love this thing - saves me $20/mo in not having to pay the cable company for a DVR ($3/mo cablecard instead, with a Ceton 4tuner PCIE card), has almost 3Tb of storage, and with a logitech wireless controller I can play whatever games I feel like without having to leave the couch.

Build wasn't all that tight either, Lian Li makes some gorgeous cases that disappear into your entertainment center while being just as functional as a mid tower.

Your speakers don't look level.

The whole picture is tilted a bit, although the left speaker is actually off plum by like 3/16".  I still haven't finished my whole gutting the condo to the studs and rebuilding it project yet, so haven't bothered fixing it - still have to redo some of that wall.  Maybe I'll snap some pictures with my snazzy new camera and update the remodeling thread.  Maybe I'll think about doing it, then :effort: will kick in and I'll put it off forever - make your bets now!

Too much mud too...

Absolutely a shit drywall job.  :why_so_serious:

That's what happens when you let a cockeyed dog have a mud knife.

Anti-gravity device (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1887069385/a-silent-anti-gravity-device-can-now-lift-99-of-it)

From the FAQ:
:awesome_for_real:

Sounds rock solid to me!  :oh_i_see:

My fiancee would definitely back the concept of 'stopped wind'.

If you know what I mean.

They removed the ability to browse comments by page.

 :uhrr:

Another pixel-art indie sidescroller kickstarter.

Chasm (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/discordgames/chasm)

Basically a semi-procedural metroidvania game. Notable however because they actually have a full-on playable demo you can try.

It's not bad. The demo doesn't show a whole hell of a lot outside of the basic gameplay but I'd pay ~$15 for a completed version if they do more with it.

It's not "truly" procedural imo since the rooms are all hand-made; they're just pieced together randomly by the CPU as you go down. Loot is random as well; you can find standard/magic quality items in the demo and magic items have other stat bonuses and so forth. It's the same batch of indie pixel-art shit that's all over Kickstarter but you can actually evaluate what you're possibly buying.

Is pixel-art a thing now? Why not just have like, actual good art, e.g. Bastion?

It's a style thing, like cel shading.  If you're aiming at a retro audience, you want to hit that retro vibe.  Quality 2d graphics like Bastion's are really rare in core gamer titles (even most side scrolling platform games nowadays are 3d, like New Super Mario Bros.), the more common place you see them is in casual games like Bejewelled or Farmville, which is not a comparison you want people to make if you're aiming for the core gamer market.

It's also a way to not have to pay an artist.

That's a bit extreme IMO.  The quantity of art may be different (depending on how retro you want to go) but you still need a skilled artist in there unless you're trying to look like VVVVVV or something.  Chasm specifically definitely has someone who knows their shit handling the graphics.

There's certainly a ton of developers who think "retro" is a license to half-ass, but it's not a universal truth.  Something like A.N.N.E. (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=122461670) is on a whole different level than something like Fuzzie World. (http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=104707960)

I don't have a problem with pixel art; it is super fake-retro shit anymore (see: Fez) but it's not easy to do WELL.

I kinda have a hard time deciding if I like pixel-art better than the Vanillaware type of art. The backgrounds/large characters in Vanillaware stuff look awesome but it all kinda looks like an adobe flash game where everything looks like a paper doll with multiple poorly animated pieces sliding all over eachother... but if the art is done right you can scale it up almost infinitely and it looks good. Pixel art you either increase the amount of stuff you can view or it just becomes a gigantic blocky mess when upscaled (filters only do so much).

I'm not a fan of faux-retro pixel art. Sprite art and pixel art are two different things.

One of the cool things about sprite art, and by that I mean art that uses actual sprites, is how it forces you to re-use parts and construct characters and animations in a very scientific fashion. It's very different from just drawing something in low res. The vast majority of 8 or 16-bit style games wouldn't actually work on those systems and don't even really look like they are from those systems.

I do feel that in general retro has become a lazy crutch and workaround for lack of funds and talent. If you don't have the money for complex 3d characters there are 20 different art styles you could adopt. Unfortunately the "indie games" space is often times just as bound by convention as AAA games.

Wow. All this time I assumed that the clunky art style featured in games like Minecraft was because the programmer couldn't affort an artist. No one told me it was an actual Style.

Well, again, there's varying shades of these things.  I personally don't think Minecraft is particularly well done, AFAIK visually it's supposed to be a tribute to Infiniminer or something but it's not actually particularly interesting to me from the point of view of the craft involved.  I'm not claiming that all pixel art is somehow immune to all criticism forever because it's supposed to be like that and you plebs just don't get it, or anything.

I just don't think it's fair to automatically conflate all pixel art or retro or whatever with "unskilled," either, there are some people out there who are quite good at it, some games where it works really well.  It's not some magical pill that will make your game look better; if you can't draw and you decide to do your game in retro style as a result, you won't magically gain an understanding of color theory or composition or anything, any more than filming your movie through a blur filter would hide your weakness as a cinematographer.  It generally won't cover up the fact that you don't know what you're doing.

3d put graphics back /at least/ a decade for rpg and strategy games, which were heavily 2d animated. Then we went from beautifully drawn art to blocky shit with low res textures that persisted for years. I'm pretty sad 2d went away so abruptly, for I believe it takes more (artistic) talent to produce 2d art, if maybe less technical talent. And I'd rather hire artists than split the budget between modellers and artists.

TUG ("The Untitled Game". $215,000 goal):

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nerdkingdom/tug-1 (the six minutes-long presentation video explains the design approach a bit more in detail)

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/05/01/mmo-sandbox-tug-launches-its-kickstarter/

So early and pie-in-the-me.

But the ability to run private servers is a step in the right direction. I really hope they pull it off, it's the kind of thing I'm looking for.

lol that's not getting made how they want.

At least they're asking for a pile of money instead of like... the $30,000 Star Command asked for.

I don't know how often you use that line but it's the first time I've seen it and it made me laugh.

I really like the look of what is being shown in TUG.
Even a partial success will give me something to mess around with.
If the part that works in modding, that could be entertaining for quite some time.

Jesus, take a drink every time an idiot tries to revive a property that everyone kinda forgot about:

http://shadowoftheeternals.com/

So yeah, a "spiritual successor" to Eternal Darkness done by Denis Dyack, the former president of Silicon Knights.

I would totally be behind that if he hadn't shown himself to be a colossal dick over the Unreal Engine lawsuit and that X-Men game.

CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN LAU^ SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP

Even Schild should like this one. C-Wars. A chinese CyberPunk tower defence. Already funded but looks interesting and there is a Demo too.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1054244612/c-wars-roguelike-pixel-art-pc-game?ref=search

Truely and international youtube video liked.

Game demo download page. http://www.onipunks.com/download.html

The Silicon Knights guys are literally too cheap to give Kickstarter a cut of the proceeds so they're actually doing their own hosted crowdfunding that just so happens to look exactly like kickstarter.

http://www.precursorgames.com/shadowoftheeternals/

Oy.

So, the one guarantee that Kickstarter gives backers -- the project only gets your money if they meet their fundraising goal -- doesn't actually exist here. ^^

These guys claim they can't use Kickstarter because they're not in the US or UK... but I'm pretty sure I saw Canadian Kickstarter projects before (Castle Story comes to mind).. unless they laundered it through a US entity or something.

Is it really so? Because Larian, that recently ended a successful campaign for "Divinity: Original Sin" is a belgian company (although, in the KS profile of the game, you can notice "Sacramento, CA", but AFAIK they don't have an actual office there or in the UK). http://www.larian.com/company.php

Indiegogo has flexible funding, that's what they're copying. I would never back a flexible funding, and mostly stay away from IGG (they charge your card instantly, no backing out unless the project creator does it on their own).

And IGG is also where a lot of foreign places go, so it does invalidate the issues setting up a KS (which is a valid issue, just that there are options besides KS and direct funding). Raging Heroes is having a hell of a time setting up banking to launch their KS, apparently (French company). So yeah, Euros either set up a shell or partner or go with IGG.

I would have killed for this one back in college.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rrpgt/robotech-rpg-tacticstm

That was back when we were playing battletech like crazy and loved robotech. I still will likely pick it up because my inner  robotech junkie demands it.

I want some of those minis.  Hopefully they're obtainable individually later.

I've never been into the mech thing, so easy will save there. GW just released a slew of new Tau Empire mechs if you're into that kind of thing.

Raging Heroes is (still) getting ready to launch the Toughest Girls in the Galazy KS, the latest blog post makes it sound like it's getting close (again).

There's a pretty decent iconic D&D demons (http://www.reapermini.com/forum/index.php?/topic/49207-fractured-dimensions-demons-of-the-abyss-kickstarter-coming-soon/) KS going up soon. Sculpts look better than the CSM attempt (and hopefully with much less newb mistakes like CSM made).

They will be the kickstarter is basically to cover the initial production runs for retail and given they have so totally blasted past what they were shooting for funding wise should see the minis available at a game store sometime december ish from what they are saying.

What kind of freak are you....  :oh_i_see:

I blame Warner Brothers, Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, etc. Grew up loving the beautiful animation, music and voice work, not to mention the humor, of the Merrie Melodies. When Saturday morning started to get polluted with horribly animated and voiced cheap drama/action stuff from Japan, I stopped watching cartoons and moved on to other things. (Not that there wasn't an increasing glut of american garbage on, too!)

Yeah.  I hear you.  The pre-70's looney tunes were the best.  They really went down the drain, both writing and art quality, once the late 70s and early 80s hit.  Still, how can you not relish the idea of driving around in this fucking shit up? 

(http://zweischneid.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/reaver-titan.jpg?w=800)

 :awesome_for_real:

(http://damommasboyz.com/sodapop/rtkick/sizechart-3.jpg)

I want to see a pic of a nicely painted up MAC2 it is amusing how huge that thing is in scale compared to all the other miniatures. Those are images of the pieces full size.

Fuck you, Sky.  You just cost me another $100. (http://hotlink.escapedredpanda.net/smiley/motz.gif)

I thought this was interesting:

Penny Arcade Kickstarter for a podcast. Goal $10.

Kind of genius. With a $10 goal there is no way to miss and they can pocket the money no matter what.

Also sleazy as hell. Wonder how many Kickstarter projects in the future will have a $1 goal and make the first stretch goal the real goal?

The golden goose is going to die fast at this rate. KS is quickly becoming just a website where people can beg for money based on fake or non-projects.

So the Grim Dawn alpha shipped today, and is getting pretty positive reactions from people. I haven't seen any comments on it here so I guess people were too hesitant to back this one or something.
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3549560

I gave Grim Dawn $1.

I only had a little time to install and look at it this evening.  Too soon to form a strong opinion.  The art is not as muddy as Path of Exile.  I need to find the release notes or something and figure out what's supposed to be done / not-done at this point in the alpha.

Beh. Shame I don't have $85 to throw at them.

Unless you've moved to some foreign country with worse exchange rates than Australia the cost to get in on alpha is 50$ unless you just have to have the digital map and the glow in the dark mini pet http://www.grimdawn.com/contribute_buynow01.php

oh hay $50

shame

heh. I can't really just spend money on things not life (as I've repeated, Hex is being supported by Magic atm)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1388023634/dogs-playing-dandd-full-color-poster

He needs a pledge level whereby the those pledgers are allowed to punch him in the dick.

I'd much rather punch him in the balls. 
Jesus Christ.   :oh_i_see:

You guys are broken. That's an awesome poster. I'm going to get two -- one for me and one for my friend who was our DM in college *and* had a poster of A Bold Bluff.

I like the concept but it's a lazy implementation.

Disclaimer: we had a massive tapestry of the dogs in our band room.

If I can't get it on black velvet, no sale.

I mean, in theory it's funny but the art kind blows.

They've been trickling out information and screenshots for just over 3 years now. I wanted to be excited about it since I liked Titan Quest, but this hasn't exactly been a speedy development process.

Hey, I have been out drinking with that guy!

He does/did stuff for living forgotten realms and now Living Divine (A 4E based game)
I wonder if he would deliver it at GenCon...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-taking-the-cloud-out-of-the-datacente

Ran into this today. Peer-to-Peer Distributed storage device. (No data center for "cloud" storage). Hmm. Only 23 hours left if you want one.

I love the name.

At this point our mighty dollar is worth more than yours.

Not according to the exchange rates I just looked at!

Damn will have to stop buying things mail order from Australia then.
Oops just checked the exchange rates. Looks even to me http://coinmill.com/AUD_CAD.html

Heh, yeah. After months of being US$1+, the AU$ dropped a bit below parity with the US$ just before the weekend. Ahh well.

Hmm, getting time to order that back-2-base-ix paint rack!

Well now DoubleFine has another KS, and it's also another "here's a vague idea now give us some money please."

It seems that there are quite a few "video game" companies that are more in the business of internet pan-handling than actually making video games.

I am now kind of looking forward to the day when KS tanks and these companies quickly go under.

KS won't tank. But those companies will stop getting funded. This sort of hobo-addled shit that's happening is fine for KS.

Tank? No, not in the traditional sense. It could get sued into oblivion though.

I expect KS will regress back to a level somewhat higher than it was before the first DoubleFine project, but much lower than it is now, in terms of total volume of dollars passing through.

Heroes of Might and Crusader Nethack sounds sort of promising in a peanut butter/chocolate sort of way. And it will surely be better than Elemental.

A friend of mine is running a Kickstarter. If this is inappropriate to post, I'll remove it.

It's a "Cars Wars" sort of miniatures game. The designer (Miles Holmes) is an ex-BioWare colleague, as are the writer (Jay Turner) and the guy who did the music (Steve Sim).

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/infinitygate/road-kill-ultimate-car-combat-miniatures-tabletop

Cutter Yolo.

Flying RC car. I think I like the tech Kickstarters the best. Only the hardware ones though.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2017062404/b-go-beyond

This looks interesting, 3d printer for $400.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pirate3d/the-buccaneer-the-3d-printer-that-everyone-can-use/

That's pretty tempting.

I don't know enough about 3D printers to know if this matters or not, but the fact that it looks to have special proprietary cartridges/filament you have to buy from them sends up a red flag to me.

I think the remote control cockroach (http://gigaom.com/2013/06/10/the-kit-that-lets-you-control-a-cockroachs-brain/) kickstarter might be the most disturbing thing I have read this week.

That is all kinds of fucked up.  :ye_gods:

Not included: vocal coaching to teach kids how to project while yelling, "Fools! I'll destroy them all!"

Why a roach?  Why?  <shiver>

I'm guessing this is why: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrHMBletjXg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrHMBletjXg)

People get pissed when you want to cut in to household pets or other mammals like squirrels and birds are too hard to catch.   Nobody cares about the insects.

Plus your chances of getting another test subject to perfect your technique are much better if you fuck up!

It could be a June bug, or a firefly, or anything else... just not a friggin' roach.

Kickstarter pulls plug on scam minutes before $120,000 heist (http://money.cnn.com/2013/06/17/technology/kickstarter-scam-kobe-jerky/?source=cnn_bin)

Project was for Kobe beef jerky, which I was a backer for :ye_gods:

KS had it featured for a while which is probably why it got a decent number of pledges.

The hipster twats that run KS just bumbled into the money and want to spotlight anything they think is cool without regard for reality.

They hassle the shit out of small miniatures companies trying to run legit projects, but scams and even joke projects (remember the prison break board game?) can get through without a hitch.

Why would you back Kobe beef jerky?  Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of a high quality meat?

Let's see, $571M in funded projects. That's about $28.5M for Kickstarter.

And Amazon.

So, Kickstarter fucked up (http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/we-were-wrong), they admit.

After allowing a huge asshole to get lots of money for his guide to harassing women, they apologized and sent 25k to RAINN to make up for it.
What a mess.

The takeaway I think is that they need to do way more proactive screening than they do. Assuming they're being honest, it is something they should have been aware of well before 2 hours before the project closed.

They claim the project as submitted was not the same as what it ended up being.

They are also heavily reliant on their users reporting issues (see my story above).

Edit: whoops spell check error

What was the shit posted on reddit that pissed everybody off?  Another 'the game' rip off is douchebaggy but nothing to really raise alarm bells or get in a tizzy over.  Which is probably why it went through in the first place.  Must have said some some really nasty shit or something on reddit....

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/1dvnem/above_the_game_part_7_physical_escalation_sex/

(http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/195/8/d/he_took_it_out_by_urs13-d3rbnm5.jpg)

You mean that works?  :why_so_serious:

I think this sums up the situation:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/295600

Guess who is jumping on the kickstarter bandwagon now? American McGee!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spicyhorse/ozombie

Literally a zombie game set in the land of Oz. Oy.

It's not the first time. He ran a kickstarter for Akaneiro as well, which turned out to be an amazingly bland action RPG (which is a shame, there's lots you can do with Japanese mythology)

My eyes almost popped out of their sockets from rolling so hard when I saw this last night. I am so incredibly over both zombies and steampunk (At least steampunk as it's represented in pop media. I still like the literary movement that was around for several decades before it became a fashion movement and everyone started gluing cogs to things)

Youtube link for anyone not in the USA.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBVuAGFcGKY

Just got my KS'd Art of Brom.

Phenomenal.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Brom/dp/1933865490

I can buy it for $31.  What was your KS payment?

57. I'm ok with that. Got some art prints and a sketchbook, as well as a limited cover. I'd give Brom a c-note for it if it cut out the retailer.

Anyway, the KS allowed for more pages and an upgraded binding. The binding upgrade is a big deal, since this book will be a reference book for a real long time in my house.

edit - it was $47 for the version that I linked on amazon, I have a publisher/artist only version.

Also, Akaneiro officially launched before the Kickstarter had completed. McGee called the process a "Kicklauncher" where the game was 100% finished for launch, but they wanted to give their F2P title a revenue boost (effectively). If you look at the reward levels for that particular project, they were full of Alice promo materials and signed copies of other Spicy Horse titles.

Even then it only just got up.

Do you feel that you never have enough useless, niche peripherals for your mobile? Well now there's the BowBlade (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rongreen/bowbladevideo-gaming-meets-archery); pledge at least $49 and you get a cheap ass t-shirt, a sticker, some badges, and a keychain!

(seriously, what is the point of these low-level pledge rewards)

That actually looks pretty awesome.

But... it works via a hammer that physically taps the screen when you pull the bow's trigger. (a) Limited in what it can do; (b) No way I want something physically hammering on my phone.

Satellite Reign (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-reign/) by 5 Lives Studios ("A real-time, class-based strategy game, set in an open world cyberpunk city, from the creator of Syndicate Wars.")
Might be good or a total disaster.

I haven't looked around but is something up with the Doublefine kickstarter? I guess Doublefine spread itself too thin and has blown through the KS money, and the game is now going to be a 2-installment deal where the first half is what Kickstarters get?

Shocking news: company that turned to donations to stay afloat after a series of development debacles mired in another development debacle.

The majority of established video game companies on Kickstarter are there because publishers no longer want to work with them after a series of botched projects. Expect this kind of thing to happen a lot.

From what I understand they're just splitting in half. I haven't seen anything that the Kickstarters only get the first half.


via: http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/2/4487692/double-fine-planning-to-launch-first-half-of-broken-age-in-january

Ah, that's better than I heard. Still, lol.

Here's a thing from the Banner Saga guys in response to the issues that Shadowrun Returns and mostly DoubleFine are having:

Old Republic cost well over 300M. Maybe one day ill be precise.

It did NOT need to cost that much.

Lots of the problems in the industry are the net result of the inmates running the asylum. This applies to a good many indie studios also.

Anybody that gave money to doublefine (and really any of these guys) to get a specific product out on schedule and on budget is a fucking moron.  But specifically, I gave money to doublefine, and for a specific reason.  Not so they would stay under budget, so they would hit whatever targets, etc.  I'm happy they overshot, overthought, and blew their budget.  That's what people that make creative things do.  You can't put anything that is actually interesting in a financial or temporal box.  Anything that is interesting artistically/creatively is inherently unpredictable and grows on its own terms.

Throwing your hands up in the air and saying "it's game development" is such a cop out.

A game that is supposed to cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and is supposed to come out in 6 months being delayed for 2 years, granted millions of extra dollars then still running can not be dismissed as simply "game development."

I am currently funding a game out of pocket. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to go "oops, this is going to cost ten times as much as I thought!" I imagine it's a lot easier to do that when you are spending other people's money.

But there was no game.  When you say  'A game that is supposed to cost...', you're talking about nothing in this case.  If DF squeaked by with 400k on their kickstarter they would have made an incredibly simple retro point and click in flash with some witty dialogue.  But there was no game.  There was no design document.  There was nothing that was supposed to cost anything.  DF specifically had an insanely vague pitch.  Old school adventure game...that's it.

Once 3 million was invested, the stakes were raised, and they had to make something fucking good.  Grim Fandango good.  That is a fundamentally different thing than a cheap short flash game.  I'm sure, if DF wanted, they could give you that cheap short flash game with their 3 million dollars.  Would you be happy with that?  Of course, going far past the kickstarter funded budget is a different story, but at the same time, I have to reiterate that anyone who gave schafer money to get a game out on schedule and on budget is a moron.

Lol at "that's how games work" excuse for poorly managed production. It is a massive cop out from the fact that these people are not professional and have the wrong people in charge.

Yes, even in well run companies it can occur from time to time. But if as an industry you're failing as a matter of course then you are doing something wrong.

If you don't know what the fuck you're doing the professional thing to do is say "holy shit, you all have given us more money than we thought. Fucked if I know what we will do with it yet. We might add to our original plans but I'll have to get back to you on that."

FTL and Star Command delivered a product (much smaller in scale, but still) relatively on time and within spec with the money they were given and that's with particularly Star Command getting less than they needed to actually finish the game due to failed payments costing them a significant percentage of the KS cash.

This is where game development REALLY fucks it up. So many of the stories I hear about game development is people spending other people's money badly. Gearbox outsourcing Aliens: Colonial Marines. The Deus Ex: HR guys outsourcing the boss fights. Probably the entirety of the dot.com crash was about these companies spending OTHER people's money badly because fuck it, it's not their money. The fact that anyone gave Romero money after Daikatana is insane. That anyone would spend north of $300 million on The Old Republic is ludicrous.

Kickstarter takes the other people's money problem and makes it lots of other people's money instead of a few investors. At least it gives a modicum of transparency during the process so the gamer won't get to the end and go "Why does this suck so hard?"

I wouldn't call Star Command within time and spec given we're still waiting on Kickstarter rewards.

I wouldn't lump FTL in there either, since it was already mostly done by the time the kickstarter was going on.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahahhaa.....

Yeah, good luck with that. We live in the Drama Age.

What the hell?

The fact they got a shit ton of money should have never changed their goals of what they wanted to achieve.  The fact that they went "hey we got 3 million instead of $400k, lets up the ante but 500 times" is no excuse.

The stakes were only raised because they themselves raised it, not the kickstarters.  They only asked for a certain amount of money, the fact that people were excited and paid them more does not excuse them for trying to go way beyond their original intentions.  It has nothing to do with creativity and everything to do with bad business management (and no, creativity is no excuse because you still need to manage a business to make your creative vision a reality).

They got way more money than they expected.  Great for them.  They still should have budgeted accordingly.  It's not like money they expected didn't show up or someone backed out.  They just can't manage for shit. 

This whole thing isn't making a good case for removing the publisher from the equation. 

And even if you thought differently - that maybe you wanted them to release their game vaguely close to schedule, or stay on budget - it doesn't matter, because they already have your money.

I find Kickstarter for video games to be an interesting way of demonstrating why publishers end up being EEEE-villlll after funding games for any length of time. The "I'm an artist, you can't put a time or budget on art, where's my next million dollars?" contributes a lot that process, I'm guessing.

Speaking of videogame companies being douchey...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1700755582/myth-0/posts/527334

EA, never change.

It's normal with trademarks to make the claims as wide as possible, and you have to enforce them or you lose them.  Still a douche move, they could have licensed for a nominal fee and still protected the trademarks.

--Dave

Lol. Rights to flames on letters an numbers.

You have got to be kidding.

Don't forget, Apple trademarked rounded corners.

I sure some of you donaters might have some kinda semi-plausible reason, but I don't know how anyone in here can say what Doublefine did during this whole KS thing was even remotely ethical.  They essentially raped and pillaged an independent startup funding system with little more than a few kiddie graphics and the hope of making a game (with no idea wtf the game will even be); to essentially just make their balance sheet work for another year.  Fuck those guys; seriously, as well as every other big(ger) studio that runs the same business model.

And before you harp on the fact "they created a lot of KS hype;"  there were a lot of great, truly usable, projects back then that were already doing that.  All Doublefine did was prove how retarded gamedevs could be when given the keys to KS.

To be fair on the logo thing, it was fairly similar to Mythic Entertainment's logo. As Dave says, they probably had to enforce or risk losing their copyright.

(http://cdn2.sbnation.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/15781719/myth-ea-mythic-entertainment-logos_960.0_cinema_960.0.jpg)

Of course, why any company would care about the Mythic logo at this point is beyond me.  :awesome_for_real:

Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

There's a certain gap between what kickstarter advertises itself as being (a way to support projects on a personal level rather than letting some faceless venture capitalist/production house that probably doesn't share your tastes do it), and what many kickstarter users view it as (a way to preorder things). That's been acceptable until now because kickstarter hasn't been in the public eye long enough to have to rectify those two different perspectives often, but people need to start accepting that they may never see *anything* come out of the money they spend backing projects, or crowdfunding is going to fail.

More and more kickstarter projects are going to start crashing and burning because, honestly, that's just what projects sometimes do. Blizzard is one of the biggest names in game development and they've had several large projects fail (Warcraft: Adventures, Starcraft: Ghost, and for the moment, Project Titan), costing what I'm sure is millions of dollars.

In this particular case, yep, Double Fine screwed up. As a software engineer, I have some sympathy because I know I'm horrible at estimating how long a project is going to take me, which on some level translates directly to "I am horrible at estimating how much money my projects cost the company", and I am eternally grateful that it is not my job to give a damn about that. I'm sure most of the people over at Double-Fine feel much the same way, which is probably exactly what landed them in this mess.

Hopefully the take away here is that projects need to be much more transparent about putting up budgets for projects and doing their best to stick to them. As projects take off, people just start throwing incredibly unrealistic stretch goals around like candy with absolutely no real idea of what it's going to mean development time wise, or what it's going to mean for the cost of the project as a whole (See the Ogre boardgame KS which funded itself 4618% and is going to end up costing the company money). Scope creep is practically built into the "stretch goal" concept that the kickstarter community has evolved around, and it's going to continue biting people more and more.

And while I'm blathering anyway, I'll toss in an obligatory "Fuck EA" to the other conversational thread that's going on.

Well, I'd like to see the actual proof that they think they have that. We're only seeing the guy who received the letter's side of things, and given the Myth logo compared to the Mythic logo I think EA's claim may be a lot more specific/narrow than "omg they think they have the rights to flames on anything."

Another game Kickstarter.  Frontiers is an rpg that looks a lot like the Elder Scrolls series.  Unless it brings something new that those games didn't have, I just don't see the appeal for Frontiers.  Anyway, its already met its goal with 10 days to go.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/railboy/frontiers-explore-discover-survive?ref=live

In the beginning of KS, I would agree. As it develops into it's established phase, and I think it has with over half a billion in funded projects, I think greed and malice does replace incompetence in this arena. Especially when the incentive to fund these projects with no guarntees has netted KS itself almost $30M in it's own right.

Kickstarter will be filled with broken promises. How could it not?  Think about it from the business guy;s point of view:

1) start a company with some of your own money
2) raise KS funds but keep all the equity
3) pay yourself from KS funds for a year or so
4) maybe your product works and you get all the upside because you have the equity or it fails and you got paid for a year

There is no downside at all.  KS rewards those who can hype well.  There are a lot more hypesters than those who can actually deliver something.

Hey, who wants to trust the security of their worldly possessions to Bluetooth 4.0 enabled doodads made from a kickstarter?

http://www.thetileapp.com/

https://lockitron.com/preorder

These seem like a really bad idea.

To be fair to KS projects. Most businesses fail, whatever the funding...

To be fair to most businesses, failing is generally something you want to avoid rather being a way to pocket money.

Running a successful KS campaign then failing to deliver something reasonable (or at all) is itself a "business" of sorts. There's very little incentive to do something with the money you've collected. If anything there's an incentive to do nothing. Everyone can collect a salary for a while then shrug and claim they gave it the old college try.

True.

OMG the Tile is something I would so love to get my wife.

The Police Quest guy wants to make a new first-person Police Quest.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/precinctgame/precinct

If you didn't play the original it was a Sierra point-n-clicker where instead of fucking you over by having items you had to pick up at the beginning of the game and keep for hours, it forced you to follow proper police procedure to the letter or (usually) die.

Was kinda cool in the day; like having to be careful where you pulled someone over, had to approach the car right, had to follow legal procedure to get permission to search it, etc. otherwise it came back to bite you on the ass. Like, if you forgot to search a perp after arresting them they could pull a knife/gun and kill you and so on.

$10,000 in the first handful of hours or so. Being as bleeding heart liberal/fuck the cops as I am it sorta feels gross thinking about playing a modern cop but my nostalgia for the games over comes that. Hope it makes it.

It did do the fuck you over hours later thing, though - if you didn't calibrate your gun at the range at the beginning you would fail at stuff much, much later on in the game.

Well that's more police procedure which the game rather ham-handedly beats you over the head with, rather than "Oh whoops I didn't pick up that innocuous pixel on the third screen and now I'm dead!" stuff.

Sort of, although the delay between not calibrating your gun and when you actually have to use it is so long that it might as well be the same.

If you haven't seen it, The Origin of Species book is awesome and ends in 48 hours. I'd like, but, nah.

Heh, my friend and I got stuck on a bit in an apartment building until someone told us we couldn't just kick the door down - we had to phone for back-up (I think).

It was a mature series, but like a lot of Sierra output it has been mostly forgotten, or at least supplanted by LucasArts adventures.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1517270521/motorgun-return-of-the-auto-duel

Probably appealing to some here. Haven't seen a Car Wars type game in a while.

Ubuntu wants $32 Million to launch a prototype smartphone. Get yours now for just $830 bucks.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge

Yeah....... good luck with that.

I never give money to Indiegogo campaigns. Ever.

1. Pick a price -- $830 sounds good
2. Render a 3D model
3. Promise to use "the fastest CPU!" (seriously?)
4. Attempt to raise $32M
5. Profit?

I mean, hell, the Ouya people at least had an NVIDIA reference platform to build on and were aiming for a very non-challenging form-factor (little plastic box with power brick).

These guys haven't even picked a chipset yet and they want $32M up front.  Hilarious.

You know it'll be great though, because it'll build on Ubuntu's enormous success in Desktop Linux!

The IGG fixed campaigns are ok, but the flexible funding campaigns are  :ye_gods: The fixed funding projects are basically EuroKS, since KS is kind of dicky to non-US companies. By kind of, I mean I think they're secretly funding a wall.

I only backed Starforge on IGG (awesome track record), but there have been a couple I wish I'd backed (like Werner Klocke's project).

edit: 3.5M already on that campaign...what is it about linux nerds?

Terrible video, but I like the idea of a cheap arduino board a lot.  Enough to get over my usual reluctance of indiegogo

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/9-arduino-compatible-starter-kit-anyone-can-learn-electronics

Eterium Definitely Deserves a look. It has a demo too.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1989266212/eterium-a-space-combat-sim-for-windows-pc

For your reading pleasure.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1820893788/katalyka/posts

Crazy people that aren't serial killers aren't actually interesting. That girl is basically Tumblr incarnate.

I don't know, but you could probably get in touch with one via your decentralized Beard2Beard network.

Here's pretty much the kind of thing Paelos was talking about.

That is not an invitation to gloat, Paelos. :P

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/forkingpath/the-doom-that-came-to-atlantic-city/posts/548030

lol

Also, here's another kickstarter that will likely make people mad

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spikelee/the-newest-hottest-spike-lee-joint

seriously

I try to avoid gloating about failure. It's not hard to predict.  :why_so_serious:

In all seriousness I am interested to see how the legal sides of these issues play out and what role KS will be forced to eat.

None. Nothing will come of any of these things.

These incidents specifically, likely nothing. A trend of these over the next few years? How many frauds does it take for a smart lawyer to examine the system for a class-action?

Enough that there's real money involved. It's more likely a lawyer looks into Double Fine before they muck around with Kickstarter. The onus is not on Kickstarter to tell stupid people how to spend their money.

They may not believe the onus is on them, but Ebay went through a similar situation a while back in 2004. One of the reasons Ebay prevailed in the case was they had made prior policies and investments in policing counterfeit goods on their site. That's the direction KS will have to head with further policies and checks if frauds continue. They can't catch everything, but they can't just sit on their hands either.

I don't see how the project Fabricated posted would be considered fraud. Expecting 100% of funded KS projects to succeed is delusional.

And they don't. When things look like fraud, they shut them down.

They don't get them all though, and eventually there will be a lawsuit of some sort, I would imagine. 

Anyone following this? Seems pretty weird as a Kickstarter project.

City of Heroes successor built on blood, sweat and Kickstarter (http://www.polygon.com/2013/7/24/4545140/missing-worlds-preparing-to-launch-kickstarter-for-city-of-heroes)

Seems to be a sentimental undertaking (i.e. "We Miss CoH!") rather than an actual business project from what anyone involved says and based on a post by this guy, TonyVazquez:


City of Heroes spiritual successor plans Kickstarter for Sept. 8th (http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/07/24/city-of-heroes-spiritual-successor-plans-kickstarter-for-sept-8/)
Anyone care to guess how this one goes.. and when does this whole CoH thing become  :dead_horse:

In the miniatures game-to-digital game transition department:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/409030043/warmachine-tactics

Anyone who loved City of Heroes that much is entirely too fucking suspect to be given a goddamn dollar for his work.

Won't work unless it's Warmachine: Tactics Online, and only then with three sided RvR.   :why_so_serious:

The game is not driven by money!

Yeah, this was not fraud.  It was a project failure.  It's only fraud if you can prove they took the money with the specific goal to take it and run.  No evidence of that so far.  This is no different than when you invest into any other startup/company and it then fails.
Wow, project already canceled due to lack of community enthusiasm.  They say they'll reformulate it based on feedback and try again later.  To bad, I really did like the twisted metal games.  Was interested in seeing what they could do.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1517270521/motorgun-return-of-the-auto-duel/posts

Ok, this project confused me.  Are they directly translating the rules of the table top game into computer form?  Or is this just a squad TBS game clone using Warmachine skins?  Never actually played the table top game (though I know it's gotten pretty popular).

I think the idea of Kickstarter is so new that people still see it as a form of advanced purchase, rather than speculative investment. I imagine that will ease over time as the novelty wears off, and the platform matures.

In other project funding news: have you ever felt the need to open a bottle while holding something in your other hand, and have you longed for a solution that sounds like a sexual misdemeanour? Well this guy has just the product for you. (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gropener)

I'd like KS a lot more if it offered a longer term return on investment, plus a product. That would make it a true speculative investment in a functioning company instead of just a financial black hole.

Yes, we need more speculative investment opportunities up in here.

 :oh_i_see:

Whatever your point was, it's not clear.

He's talking about Hex. At Hex felt like an investment as opposed to 99.9% kickstarters that are charity to rich/entitled people.

Ah yes, investing in digital cards.

More value than giving money to Spike Lee.

A kick in the crotch is better than a bullet to the face.

Oh man, that's a fantastic metaphor that makes zero sense in this context.

The only difference between Hex and any other KS is that people here like Hex.

Well, other than the fact I can sell my accounts right now for twice what I paid for them and no one has even gotten to play the game yet. Yes, it's exactly like every other Kickstarter.

I wasn't talking about Hex.

Sell it now...think about Hellgate Schild.

It's already there.

The Massively thread is hilarious with Golden Girl (who is / was in charge of another attempt to remake CoH/V that also started at the Titan Network) passive aggressively attacking the project for using Kickstarter, TonyV is in an argument about how he's not a plant for the project despite being a massive part of the Titan Network and CoH-promotion actions... good to see the "if only NCsoft hadn't been involved in CoH/V, it would have been the greatest game EVAH!" meme continues in that part of the web.

This is part of a group who tried to get Disney to buy CoH/V through a letter-writing campaign and last I checked had started to go down the same path with Google. CoH/V is dead, gone, that's it. Time to let go.

A team of 136 volunteers (who, if successful, are going to become volunteers with Kickstarter money) aren't going to create something like CoH/V, or even its "spiritual successor".

Ha, I remember Golden Girl from the CoX forums. She, uh, did not strike me as leadership material.

I feel like anyone with a notable/memorable persona on official forums for a game they aren't already leading in some capacity (designer, dev, etc)  isn't leadership material.

Well here's some providence for ya...

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/cryptozoic-brings-cancelled-122874-board-game-kickstarter-to-life-will-ship

I would say "yay Hex," but like, I don't want that company dicking around with crap like that.

I like Keith Baker a lot, and I like CZE, so anything that could lead to future collaboration seems like a good thing to me.

I was referring to the fact the game didn't look interesting.

I have more insight into this situation than I'm letting on but eh, I'll leave it alone.

I get the feeling it's more about the publicity than it is about CZE thinking this is a game that just needs to be made. When the game was canceled the story made the rounds, and I even saw articles about it on non-game sites. CZE's very public rescue of this project essentially buys them a lot of goodwill from the board game community for what was probably a pretty inexpensive price.

Inexpensive, at least, when compared to Hex dollars  :awesome_for_real:

This has awesome written all over it.  I am kind of surprised that these guys are having trouble getting the funding as the ideas seem really popular and a good mix of Left for Dead, Fallout, and minecraft.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/7daystodie/7-days-to-die-zombie-survival-game

We do not need more zombie games. 

(https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/avatars/6874419/The_Fun_Pimps_Youtube_Icon.large.jpg?1372713216)

Refuse to give that money.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fourhorsemen/gothitropolis-raven-action-figure-by-four-horsemen

(http://i.imgur.com/3a6ab64.jpg)

Pezzle is sending me updates from GenCon. He'll be getting me Hex info and forcing Cory into answering some questions for me, but until then, here's this:

(http://i.imgur.com/vE32CPa.jpg)

http://golemarcana.com

That's a trend now, but I don't think anyone's cracked a way to make minis + tech fun yet.

Pre painted is good.