Kickstarter - The Thread.

[Krakrok]

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

[Thrawn]

Don't think I've seen thins one -

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.

[Bunk]

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.

[Merusk]

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?

[Bunk]

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.

[pxib]

CLANG

"These things... they take time."

[Bunk]

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

[Fabricated]

Thank god for The Onion.

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

[schild]

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

[JWIV]

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.

[Bunk]

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

[Chimpy]

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....

[schild]

$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.

[sickrubik]

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

[Trippy]

The $99 ones are going quickly too.

[Ingmar]

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.

[Quinton]

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.

[Fabricated]

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

[Sky]

I think I'll save my $99 for something more solid like magic beans.

The more you eat, the more you magically toot.

[Fabricated]

Getting this thread moving again:

Donate to Penny Arcade's kickstarter to remove ads from their website for a year. For everyone.

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.

[NiX]

Taktik iPhone case

[Fabricated]

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

[ghost]

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

[schild]

Getting this thread moving again:

Donate to Penny Arcade's kickstarter to remove ads from their website for a year. For everyone.

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.

This isn't even selling out.

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

[Lantyssa]

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.

[schild]

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.

[Fabricated]

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.

[schild]

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.

[ghost]

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

[Quinton]

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.

[schild]

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

[ghost]

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

[Thrawn]

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.

[ghost]

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

[Sky]

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.

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 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.