The big new Kickstarter I’m excited about this week is SpaceVentures. This is the new point & click adventure game from the creators of Space Quest, one of my favorite series growing up. It’s basically a new Space Quest game except they don’t own the license anymore. They’re up to $122k of their $500k goal with 32 days left to go. And speaking of old Sierra Online Point & Click Adventure games, the entire Quest for Glory series ( a mix of RPG and Adventure) just recently went up on Good Old Games for a mere $10 – it’s well worth your time and money if you haven’t played them.

As far as big money kickstarters go, a sequel to Carmageddon went up a few days ago and is up to $187k with a $400k goal. Never played the original so I don’t have much to say other than that I guess running over pedestrians never goes out of style.

Xenonauts is an indie take on the classic strategy game, X-Com. Looks fun and they’ve already surpassed their goal of $50k.

Legends of Eisenwald is a King’s Bounty style Strategy/RPG hybrid. The screenshots look impressive and their approach to the world (less fantasy than most games of this type) is interesting. They’ve almost reached their goal of $50k with 10 days left to go.

One development I thought was rather interesting was with a recent update on the Grim Dawn project where they added a number of Logitech-donated gaming mice as one of the reward tiers. Could this kind of small corporate sponsorship of kickstarters become a common thing in the future? Should it?

As far as new kickstarters go, our first one for today is Cross of the Dutchman. It has an attractive 3D overhead cartoon style and appears to be an Action/RPG somewhat similar to Zelda but with larger scale battles. They’re hoping for $50k.

Next we have a revival of that old favorite, Battle Chess. For those unfamiliar with the original, it was chess but whenever someone took a piece, the pieces would come alive and attack each other in heated combat. This new version will add modern graphics as well as online match support. They’re looking for $100k.

It teaches you while you learn! This Biology game for the PC and PC w/Kinect that will feature a number of little games as you go on a journey through various cells. It looks good and it sounds like the people who are making it know what they’re doing.  They’re shooting for the relatively modest goal of $27k.

That’s it for this week’s installment of the Kickstarter Video Game Report. As we close, here’s a link to the latest Penny Arcade comic strip which is relevant to our interests here.

The Banner Saga is done and they ended up with $723k, quite a bit over their initial goal of $100k. Valdis Story just ended at $49k (goal of $8k). Shadowrun Returns is at $1.666 million ($400k goal) with a little over a day to go. Jane Jensen’s Moebius is at $238k ($300k goal) with 3 weeks left. Leisure Suit Larry remake reached its goal ($533k/$500k) with 4 days left. Yogventures! is at $396k ($250k goal) with 8 days left. Grim Dawn is at $197k ($280k goal) with 3 weeks to go. Republique got a boost after announcing PC/Mac support and is at $123k ($500k goal) with 2 weeks left – I think it’s probably too late but it’s good to see they’re not going out without a fight.

Kitaru isn’t doing so hot but it has a while left to go so they’ll probably make their $25k goal. I think the big problem with this kickstarter is that the funding goal feels completely unrealistic – they’re showing off a big fancy 3D RPG but they’re asking for a pittance. I think a lot of people see the disconnect between the budget and the screenshots and that makes them cautious. Oh and it didn’t help that the please-support-our-kickstarter video they shared tried to be funny but failed.

Class of Heroes 2 failed with less than 20% of its total goal. Much as I’d like to see a respected old RPG localizer come back into the game, I don’t think this is the way to do it. Not only did the kickstarter fail, but I think they’re going to have a hard time breaking even on their costs when the digital version of the game comes out later this year. I mean, you’ve got a very niche subgenre of games (the dungeon crawler RPG) that is a sequel to a game that did poorly (both in sales and reviews) and that’s up against a lot of fierce competition (like the Etrian Odyssey series and Legend of Grimrock) – that’s just not a recipe for success. I’m thinking maybe 10k copies sold at $20 or under; less than 2k copies sold if the game goes for $30-$40. Double or triple those values if the game comes out on the PS3 as well. I hope GaijinWorks and Monkey Paw Games have a contingency plan for if Class of Heroes 2 bombs and they’re not staking the future of their companies on it.

In other news, I thought this quote from the creator of Ben There, Dan That was interesting:

“So yeah, because someone’ll shout KICKSTARTER: I’ve said why in more detail in the upcoming issue of Continue Magazine, but (spoilers): basically as a solo dev I don’t want to toy with other peoples’ cash. If I die, or catch some horrible disease, no one else is going to make the game. That money’ll go to waste, the project will die, and angry people will probably wind up hounding my loved ones demanding their fiver back.
I’m also slightly wary of some of the alpha-funding horror stories I’ve heard: seems like people get a sense of entitlement with that kind of funding that I’m keen to avoid – I spoke to one sobbing indie dev who said he was in ‘perpetual crunch’ because being seen to take a single weekend off got him hatemail from his backers.”

That brings up a lot of interesting ideas – even if you can do a kickstarter should you? Like with the kickstarter we did for Cthulhu Saves the World, we had less than 200 backers, most of which were friends, other developers, and hardcore fans – a very supportive group. And we only received a few thousand dollars – if something had gone wrong, we probably could have figured out a way to pay everyone back. However, when you’re talking about tens of thousands of backers and hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars, that’s a big difference. With a successful kickstarter of that magnitude, that’s a lot of money to be accountable for and a lot of people who feel like you owe them. Is it worth all that stress? I’m not sure.

On a similar note to this topic, the editors of Gamasutra recently posted an article entitled Should I Do a Kickstarter Campaign. Well worth a read if you’re considering one.

If you’re a fan of the Atari 2600, this kickstarter for Star Castle is worth checking out. The original creator thought it would be impossible to port Star Castle to the 2600 but this individual has done it and it asking for money to produce more copies of the game (right now he just has the  prototype he made). It’s already surpassed its modest goal of $10k but if you want a fun little piece of gaming history or just like collecting classic games, it’s worth checking out.

Also, I wanted to throw a shout-out to one RPGMaker kickstarter – Unemployment Quest. Does it look like the most incredible RPG ever? No, not really. But I think it deserves kudos because it’s not another naive RPGMaker kickstarter that promises the stars with THE MOST AMAZING 40+ HOUR RPG OF ALL TIME despite the developer having no experience in making games. No, here we have a new developer who had an idea of how to twist the genre in an interesting way and wants to make a modest game out of it while asking for a little help so he can do a small print-run of it. Good for him.

Now I’d like to talk a little bit about stretch goals. For those unfamiliar with stretch goals, it’s basically when a kickstarter project says that they’ll add stuff to the project if they reach certain funding goals beyond their original. Personally, I think they’re a really bad idea. Yes, they’re a way to convince people to give you more money, but should you really be trying to get that much more money than your original goal? Shouldn’t your initial goal be enough to cover your expenses and allow you to create what you wanted to create in the first place? By adding stretch goals, you’re essentially saying “Feature creep, here we come!” and as anyone who has run into the problem of feature creep can tell you, it can ruin projects. Rather than do stretch goals, set reasonable goals in the first place and if you get more money than you expected, just consider it a cushion in case your expenses turn out to be more than you expected.

Now before I close this week’s article, I’d like to say something about solicitations. Namely, I don’t like them. I post news and talk about kickstarters that I think are interesting. That doesn’t mean that they’re the only kickstarters worth supporting, just that they’re the only ones I feel like writing about. If you come to me and ask “Why didn’t you write about Super Mega Happy Fun Slide – The FPS?” my answer will generally be the same – “I personally didn’t find it very interesting.” I’ve heard stories about how bigger publications are getting bombarded with requests to cover their kickstarter and I want none of that. Begging me to cover your project will get you nowhere – if you want me to cover your kickstarter, create a good kickstarter project and chances are I’ll notice it when I look for exciting new kickstarters to talk about.

Wasteland 2 is finished with $2.9 million dollars to their name (over $3 million if you count Paypal donations through their own site). The Banner Saga ends today in a few hours and they’re at $683k. If they reach $700k, they’ll add customizable Viking cities to the game. Valdis Story is up to $32k with a week left to go. Shadowrun isn’t doing as well as Wasteland 2 but it’s still doing very respectably with $1.28 million raised and a week left to go. Jane Jensen’s kickstarter is at just under $200k ($300k goal) so it ought to reach its funding in the next 4 weeks. Leisure Suit Larry has almost reached its funding ($430k/$500k) with a little under 2 weeks to go. Yogventures! is going strong with $333k raised ($250k goal).

On the sad side, Republique has stalled out at $77k ($500k) so it doesn’t look like that one’s happening.

The big new kickstarter I’m excited about this week is Grim Dawn. Grim Dawn is the spiritual sequel to Titan Quest, a hack & slash RPG for the PC. Titan Quest is one of my favorite games of all time and Grim Dawn looks even better so I really hope this one succeeds. They’re currently at $128k of their $280k goal.

Another kickstarter that looks interesting is Kitaru. It’s a dystopian future RPG done by a guy who is known for his CGI animation skills. Looks impressive though  it’s a bit weird that their goal is only $25k – looks much more expensive than that.

To end things off, I’d like to talk about kickstarter reward tiers. With kickstarter, you have two very different kinds of rewards – digital rewards and physical rewards. You can treat digital rewards as if you were selling someone something. For example, say you’re going to sell a game for $10 – you can have a $10 reward be that you get a copy of the game. You can do this because the cost to deliver a digital reward is next to nothing. However, with physical rewards, you really need to treat them like, well, a fundraiser. Namely, the tier that gives a physical reward should be drastically higher than the expected cost of that physical reward because you want most of the money to go towards funding your game and not to go towards creating and delivering physical rewards. Several kickstarter planners don’t think this through very well with the result that you get things like the Star Command kickstarter where they ended up spending a substantial percentage of their funding on fulfilling the various reward tiers.

So in short, be careful about your physical rewards. I’d even go so far as to say that unless you’re a bigger company like Double Fine with the framework already in place to mass produce physical products, you shouldn’t give away any physical rewards at any tier under $100. Remember that not only do you have to make whatever physical rewards you promise, you also have to ship them and that can be very expensive.

Wasteland 2 is nearing the end of its road with 4 days left to go and $2.35 million raised. At $3 million, they’ll add free mod tools to the games so hopefully it’ll get a last minute boost. The Banner Saga is still going strong with $482k raised and a little over a week left. Valdis Story is up to $24k funding (300%+ their goal). Shadowrun Returns is doing fantastic with $858k raised ($400k goal) and 16 days left. The Leisure Suit Larry and Jane Jensen kickstarters are both at about half funding with a few weeks left to go. And Spriter is going strong and has passed its goal of $25k.

Class of Heroes and Map Monsters are both failing big-time.  I’ve discussed Class of Heroes’ many faults in the past, but as for Map Monsters, my guess is that freemium is instant death to a kickstarter.

Republique is the big new kickstarter these days. Billed as a stealth survival game, it sounds quite cool. Only problem is that it’s only coming out on iOS. At $55k of their $500k goal and a month left to go, it has a chance – hopefully the lack of platforms doesn’t hurt them too much.

The popular Yogscast is getting turned into a video game called Yogventures. Looks to be a 3D open world game with nice cartoony graphics. It’s at $174k of its $250k goal so this one’s almost definitely getting done.

As far as kickstarters that bother me go, we have Echoes of Eternia. Lots of grand promises but a few pieces of concept art and a couple screenshots full of stock RPGMaker tiles doesn’t exactly prove that you have the ability to make an epic 30+ hour RPG complete with voice acting, especially when you’re a brand new studio. Comments like we’ll use part of the funding for “Legalities like Copyrights and Trademarks” makes me think they really don’t know what they’re doing. The project is already past its funding goal of $10k (at $15k right now) but I predict this is one project that won’t actually get finished… or if it does, it’ll be several years after the 1 year goal they have right now.

Star Command had one of the most successful video game kickstarters before Double Fine Adventures came in and changed everything. It sounded like quite a fun little game – basically a lighthearted non-licensed Star Trek sim. Now, there’s a teaser trailer:

I didn’t really see anything new that I wanted to recommend for this week so how about something that’s been up for a while? Team Notion is a cute beat-em-up that only has a few days left. They’re only at 50% of their modest $3k goal – why not give them a last-minute bump past their goal?

First up, the recap!

The Wasteland 2 kickstarter got a shot of adrendaline when they announced that Obsidian Entertainment & Chris Avellone (of Planescape: Torment fame) would help with the project if they reached $2.1 million. They’re currently at $1.9 million, quite a jump in just a few days. ARG Zombies and Takedown both made surprising comebacks and managed to reach their goals in the nick of time. The Banner Saga has slowed down, but it’s still very comfortably over its goal with $360k. My new pick for last week, Valdis Story is killing it with nearly $16k ($8k goal) and over 3 weeks left to go. And not surprisingly, the Vic Ireland/Monkey Paw Games kickstarter Class of Heroes 2 kickstarter isn’t doing so hot with only $59k of their $500k goal reached and their momentum almost completely gone.

One of the most interesting news for today is that Jane Jensen (Gabriel Knight) has started a new studio and is looking to fund their first games with a kickstarter. Donating not only gives you 1 or more of their releases this coming year, but also gives you a vote as to which of 3 projects they choose to tackle. Gabriel Knight is generally considered to be one of the finest point & click adventure games of all time so it’ll be interesting to watch her new studio’s progress.

In related news, other Sierra Online veterans have recently started a kickstarter to reboot the Leisure Suit Larry franchise with a remake of the first game. The kickstarter has only been up for a day or two and they’ve already raised over $150k of their $500k goal so this one looks like it’s probably getting funded.

I was a huge fan of the old Shadowrun SNES RPG and so it is with great excitement that I point you to this kickstarter to make a new Shadowrun RPG video game. It’s going to be turn-based, it’s going to implement a dialogue system similar to the SNES game “with a new twist or two” and the project is staffed by many Shadowrun veterans including the original creator. They’re only at $29k of their $400k goal so this one NEEDS your support. EDIT: I guess the Shadowrun kickstarter was still relatively new when I posted. A few hours later and they’re at $141k. Still should be supported though.

This week’s pick for smaller kickstarter to watch out for is Spriter. Although not actually a game, Spriter is software to create sprites for use in games. Looks like a quality project and at $22k+ of their $25k goal already with over 3 weeks to go, this one is likely to succeed.

That’s it for this week’s early installment! Stay tuned for next week! And if you’re going to be attending PAX East, be sure to stop by booth 678 and say hi!

EDIT: Breaking news! Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering) just started a kickstarter for a GPS-based iOS game called Map Monsters. Modest goal of $40k.

Wasteland 2 is up to about $1.65 million ($900k goal) so they’ve gained about $150k in the last week. The Banner Saga is at about $320k ($100k goal) so they’ve gained around $100k – very nice. ARG Zombies is only at about $6,500 with a goal of $15k due in 2 days so it looks unlikely that they’ll make it unless they have some big surprise spenders. Americana Dawn is up to $4,600 ($2,755 goal) with about a day left. And Auditorium 2 made a surprise comeback and is just over their goal of $60k despite only being a little over half funded a week ago. Awesome!

The Vic Ireland/Monkey Paw Games kickstarter that I mentioned last week has been released and boy, is it a disappointment. There are numerous problems with this kickstarter, foremost being that there’s no way to get a cheap digital copy of the game through (you either pay $59 for a UMD version or $100 for a UMD + download). This kickstarter does so many things wrong that I went ahead and dedicated an entire article to talking about its many mistakes.  At only $38k funding after about 42 hours, it seems highly unlikely that it’ll meet its goal (in contrast, The Banner Saga passed $100k in its first 48 hours). From listening to Vic Ireland discuss all the difficulties in doing a kickstarter for an enhanced localization and box sets for a portable game system, it really makes me think that Ken Berry and Jessica Chavez at XSeed Games had the right idea when they said Kickstarter was ill suited for game localizations. Gaijinworks & Monkey Paw Games have made a few improvements to the kickstarter since launch – adding screenshots, adding a digital download of the soundtrack at $20 and a digital download of the game at $100 – so here’s hoping they keep making improvements and are able to salvage this project.

In recent news, Kickstarter released an article where they talked about how big blockbuster kickstarters like the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter have been a tremendous boon to bringing additional attention and money to other projects on the site. There’s talk of using kickstarter to license songs for the Rock Band Network and Grim Dawn, the spiritual sequel to one of my all-time favorite hack & slash RPGs, Titan Quest, will probably get a kickstarter sometime soon.

The kickstarter formerly known as the Crowdsourced Hardcore Tactical Shooter has been revamped and is now called Takedown. I thought it had some problems when it was first released but apparently the creator agreed and is seeking to fix things. It’s up to $121k with 70 hours left to go. Will it manage to make a comeback and successful raise an additional $79k to reach its goal of $200k? It will be interesting to watch.

In current kickstarters that I think look promising, there’s Valdis Story: Abyssal City. It appears to be a Castlevania-esque Action/RPG and has rather nice visuals for an indie project. It’s at $3k+ of its $8k goal and it still has 4 weeks to go so it’s looking good.

That’s it for now! See you again next week! Next week’s report will be early (probably Tuesday or Wednesday) since I’m leaving on Thursday for Boston so we can show off our upcoming game, Penny Arcade’s On the Rainslick Precipice of Darkness 3, at PAX East.

Right now, the two hottest ongoing kickstarters are Wasteland 2 and The Banner Saga. First up, Wasteland 2. Wasteland 2 is a sequel to an old RPG that was basically the spiritual predecessor to the popular Fallout series. As of today, it’s up to over $1.5 million (original goal was $900,000) which means that the game will not only be coming to the PC but also to Mac and Linux. Although I doubt they’ll raise as much money as the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter (which holds the record at $3.3 million), I wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up at $2 million to $2.5 million, especially if they advertise that they’re going to add a cool new feature to the game if it hits $2 million.

Next up, The Banner Saga. The Banner Saga is a Strategy/RPG with a Viking theme. It’s at about $220,000 as I write this, making it the third highest funding amount for a video game kickstarter to date (Double Fine Adventure & Wasteland 2 being #1 & #2). I love the concept and the visuals are excellent but so far we haven’t really seen any proof that the story & gameplay will be up to the high standard shown by the visuals. Mind you, we also haven’t seen any proof that the story & gameplay won’t be excellent but it’s less of a sure-bet than something like Wasteland (which is being made by a lot of the people who made the original).

One thing that I think has been very interesting with both The Banner Saga and Wasteland 2 kickstarters is that neither one just appeared out of nowhere. In both cases, the developers tried to build up some hype for the game before starting the kickstarter, essentially treating the kickstarter like it was a game launch. Based on their success so far, this is something that should be done by more developers.

In other news, Brian Fargo (inXile Entertainment, aka the Wasteland 2 people) has created a site called Kicking It Forward. Here, kickstarter projects can pledge to donate 5% of the profits made after their game has been released to help other kickstarter projects. Other than the possibility of abuse due to lying (people pledging but then not following through), I think this is a great idea and hope many projects decide to participate.

As far as big upcoming projects go, there’s been news of a new Tex Murphy kickstarter project and Vic Ireland (of Working Designs’ fame) has stated that he & Monkey Paw Games will be starting a Kickstarter to bring over a Japanese RPG.  No news yet which Japanese RPG.

Now for a couple of projects that I think are interesting. First up, we have ARG Zombies – an Alternate Reality Game crossed with a Zombie RPG. Looks like it could be a lot of fun. It’s currently at around $5,000 with a $15,000 goal and only a week or so left. Next, we have Americana Dawn – a fantasy take on the American Revolution with JRPG style gameplay. Looks much more impressive than your average RPGMaker game (lots of custom art). It’s already surpassed its modest goal of $2,500 by a few hundred dollars but there’s still a little time left if you want to give them a little extra boost. Also, there’s a sequel to the critically acclaimed Auditorium that could use your support since it only has $37,000 of its $60,000 goal with a week left to go.

And that’s it for this week! Be sure to tune it next Friday for the next installment!

It’s amazing how important seemingly small changes can be to a game’s overall quality. Uncharted 2 is a good example – it’s mostly the same as Uncharted 1 but by making a few tweaks here and there (blind fire, better grenade controls, smoother stealth & melee, more locale variety, etc.), they turned a pretty good game into a great one.

Final Fantasy XIII, on the other hand, was a much more divisive game than Uncharted was. It’s understandable that they might make more drastic changes to the formula with Final Fantasy XIII-2 in order to regain fans they lost with the first one. However upon playing the demo, I was impressed that not only were there the bigger changes we were all expecting, but that they had also made some smaller but no less clever changes to improve the overall feel of the game. Therefore, I present my list of 10 Ways that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is better than Final Fantasy XIII, full of changes both big and small.

1. Large text option – How sad is it that in 2012, the option to increase the text size in a game is so rare that it caught my eye? Now I know my engineer friends are going to say, “Just make the UI so that the default text size isn’t a problem!” but that approach ignores personal preference. Some people may prefer smaller text so they can more easily see the visuals, whereas others may prefer larger text so that reading is easier and less of a strain. Plus some players may still be playing on an SDTV or may have visual disabilities that make it difficult for them to read small text. That Square-Enix has given the player a choice in the matter is to be applauded.

2. Fight the enemies rather than fight the game – In Final Fantasy XIII-2, the delay from animations when paradigm shifting has been removed and there is an option to make the cursor default to the Abilities line in combat rather than the Auto-Battle line. These may seem like very minor increases in speed (a few seconds here, one less input required there) but they make combat feel more fluid and over the course of an entire game save the player a lot of time.

3. Real-time cutscenes – Final Fantasy XIII was full of prerendered cutscenes which always seemed a bit silly to me considering how good the in-game graphics already were. In Final Fantasy XIII-2, most of the cutscenes are rendered with the in-game engine. This has a number of benefits such as reducing the amount of space required for the game (thus allowing it to fit on a single DVD in the Xbox version), making the visuals more consistent, and allowing for a variable character appearances in cutscenes.

4. Monster party members – Once you had the option to choose your own party members in Final Fantasy XIII, there was rarely a reason to switch members – just pick your favorite team, your favorite strategies, and use them for the rest of the game repeatedly. In Final Fantasy XIII-2, one party member slot is dedicated to various monsters. Since I assume that later monsters will tend to be more powerful than early monsters, the player is going to want to change their monster lineup over the course of the game thus adding variety and helping to prevent the player from getting in a strategic rut.

5. Goodbye tubes – The change from extremely linear maps to more open maps is the change that most people have been focusing on the most so little more needs to be said.

6. Items & equipment – Final Fantasy XIII had a very poorly designed equipment system where the player was supposed to pick one weapon for each character and then spend the entire game grinding materials to give that piece of equipment better stats. It required the player to lock-in their decisions at an early stage and was extremely tedious to maximize stats. Final Fantasy XIII-2 ditches that poorly conceived system for a more traditional item and equipment system.

7. Greater control over the party – Final Fantasy XIII-2 adds the ability to switch the currently controlled player both in and out of combat. It also adds an optional additional layer of control over paradigms with the ability to prioritize single or multi-target abilities.

8. Trust the player – One of the main complaints many players had with Final Fantasy XIII was how it felt like the game didn’t trust the player with comments like “30 hour tutorial!” being common. That does not seem to be the case in the sequel with a full 3-character party and most combat, equipment, and leveling options unlocked very early on.

9. Time Travel – This is hard to see in the tutorial but based on comments on the full game, it’s possible to make and remake decisions in the various time periods and to see their effect on other times, thus making the story more interactive than past Final Fantasy titles.

10. Improved Leveling System – Final Fantasy XIII’s Crystarium leveling system had the illusion of freedom with its various paths but in actuality, the game carefully gated the various ranks to the point so that just playing through the game normally usually gave the player enough XP to max out everything. Final Fantasy XIII-2 looks to have removed most of the restrictions as well as speeding up the process (just select the paradigm you want to LV-Up) giving the player much more control over how their characters will progress and develop.

It’s easy to overlook the importance of relatively small aspects of game design and focus on the big picture, however games are often made by their smaller aspects. Seemingly minor things like “The jumping feels floaty” or “the text speed is too slow” are all too often the only things that stand between a great game and a not-so-great one.

Note: Although most of the characters on this list are primarily physical warriors, I did make a few exceptions for some hybrids (characters that are good at both physical and magical combat).

Top 20 Best JRPG Warrior Heroines: