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It’s time for the weekly update in what’s what in the world of Kickstarter gaming campaigns and we’ll start off with the good news first.
Successfully reaching its target the day after my last update, GOAT ARMY is going to get made and distributed to the masses at large. As well Kick Ass Commandos met their admittedly very small target shortly after last week’s article and still has plenty of time for more funds to come in before they end their campaign and make their game keys Christmas presents to their backers.
Pankapu has also bypassed the three-quarter mark too with 12 more days to go. It might be a squeak but it has the potential to get itself funded before the deadline comes and passes. The Odds Game is also at the two-thirds mark with 19 days to go to make just over $1,000 AUD.
Of course, there’s also always some bad news and unfortunately three previously covered games finished their campaigns way short of their target goals: Vanity’s Dawn, Econia and Cold Blooded. The maker of Econia though has updated to say that this is not the last we shall hear of the game, so that’s encouraging (the other two had no updates I’m afraid to say).
Also worth mentioning is that GOTY the Card Game after a nice surge at the beginning of its campaign has not done too well in the last few weeks and has 6 days to go to make up an amount of about two-fifths of its goal yet. If you’re interested in a game about game development with real life stories from actual devs included, check it out!
Starting us off this week is the weekly card game, and this time the setting is the centre of the big time stage productions – Broadway!
As a Broadway producer your goal is to put on smash hit, sellout stage shows; but that’s the same goal of your rival producers too. The first to put on 3 smash hits wins the game, and you do that by assembling your shows’ casts and each Cast Set has a Diva, a Leading Man, an Ingenue, an Antagonist and two Chorus cards. There are also Understudy cards that can replace any of the others in a set. The game has already been designed and fundraising is only happening so that the printing costs won’t price the card game too high for consumers.
Casting Call has a goal of $2,500 and with 33 more days to go it has made $875.
This is a game that takes many elements into one game to create a game set somewhere in time and space.
A “2D top-down shoot ’em up with RPG and rogue-like elements”, Blacksea Odyssey sees four hunters competing for the honour of taking down the biggest game around – the Titan of the Stars – armed only with harpoons and a spear. A space shooter at its core, the developers are going for an experience that combines elements from many of their favourite games and will hopefully have some replay value as well.
Blacksea Odyssey has made $5,442 of it’s $10,000 goal with 13 more days to go.
This next one is an app game… and I’ll admit that i chose it because it was pretty unique in the results of new campaigns.
IRL is an RPG game that is set… erm, in real life. Sort of. Using the app on your phone you can track down loot or your friends, fight, gain experience, scan bar-codes to gain items, sell items and apparently even find rare loot that can be traded in for actual physical prizes (although the ones listed are small like free drink etc, still not to be sniffed at). The campaign page even has a list of suggestions for what you can do with it… and it includes cosplaying which I will get behind 100%.
If you’re interested in this one, IRL has a goal of $485,000 with 28 days to go although it has yet to make anything.
This game is another RPG made in RPG Maker, but it has an adult story included. Although some of that might be due to the references to ‘herbs’ made.
The titular characters are two deliver baked goods and those ‘herbs’ to places all over their world. Along the way they deal with the typical RPG road hazards – wild life, monsters, cliffs and your odd bandit… at least until they happen upon a mysterious package containing an item of such power that an evil force is willing to kill them both to get hold of it. The battles are apparently avoidable as well, and the gold is not a problem. There is the small matter of there being just one save point in the game though, so if you relish a challenge this might be worth looking at.
The Adventures of Sam and Hunni RPG has 29 days to go, and has yet to make any of its low target of $250.
Released recently for their free-to-play MMO game, the Ascendancy Supporter Packs that Grinding Gear Games made available for players of Path of Exile were quite widely criticised for their poor value.
Fortunately it seems like the developers were listening to the feedback, as Chris Wilson took to Reddit only an hour after their launch to apologise for the lack of value of the packs. They contained new Gargoyle Pets, Forum Titles, Portrait Frames, Points and the Awakening Extended Soundtrack; with Ascendancy T-shirts, Art Packs and new Portal Effects also being available in the higher packs. Unfortunately they were also rather pricey for what was on offer.
“Many people are disappointed with the value proposition of these new supporter packs,” said Wilson. “While I am personally very pleased with the new effects, and handled the pricing myself, I am very ready to admit I was wrong. We will be adding portal effects to the two lowest packs and will be creating new weapon effects to go in all packs (four tiers total). Like with other recent packs, higher packs include all lower effects. The team are hard at work on these new effects and we’ll unveil them as soon as we can (next week?).”
Any packs that have already been bought will receive the new content once it has been released as well.
Always nice when a developer listens to its fans, isn’t it?
After some turbulent times in the past two years, UK game spublisher Mastertronic has announced today that it has entered administration.
The firm has confirmed that a deal is in place to buy the assets of the business, and the existing team is going to be retained with one exception. MD Andy Payne is going to be leaving with the buy out.
Mastertronic applied for a CVA in July of 2014 to avoid a winding-up order, closing its retail business and laying off up to 40 percent of its staff at the time. A new investment deal in February of this year meant that it survived, but issues with the deal forced Mastertronic to seek new funding, which didn’t happen.
“We signed an investment deal with a Bahrain/Qatar based organisation back in February 2015 which would have seen our majority Dutch shareholder exit and be replaced by these new shareholding investors and the company financed going forward,” Payne said in an interview about the news. “Sadly, this organisation did not honour the contract and as a direct result have put us in the position we find ourselves in today. We made strategic investments into game development, based on this investment deal. When the Middle Eastern investors reneged on the deal, it left us desperately needing an alternative investor. Sadly we failed to find one in time.”
The Mastertronics brand has been around in the games market for 32 years, although in the last few years its name has waned as other publishers took the limelight.
If you’ve been following Payday 2 in the last few months you’ll know all about the debacle that was the introduction of micro-transactions to the game.
The Payday Black Market uses a CS:GO style stat-boosting set of loot drops that players had to pay real money to unlock. Players at large weren’t happy with it, complaining of the pay2win factor. Even some tweaks that Overkill made to it didn’t win the community over, and neither did comments made that asserted that the system was “working as intended”. However now it seems that the company has realised that they really dropped the ball on this one.
Payday producer Almir Listo said of the issue: “The past few weeks have been some of the most challenging in the history of this community. Players have been angry with us, media have written about us en masse and our volunteer moderators went on strike. For all the distress we’ve caused the past few weeks, I’d just like to take the time and say that we’re sorry. We’ve done a lot of things right in the past, but these past few weeks we screwed up. We need to get better at many things, and we will do our best to improve as soon as possible.”
Among other things it seems that Overkill are going to assign some staff members to actively engage with gamers on their forums in an attempt to better understand the feedback they’re getting to not badly misjudge a situation. They’ve also set up studio meetings with YouTubers Last Bullet, modder ‘I am not a spy’ and PeaseMaker – one of Payday’s most active Russian players – to discuss the state of the game.
It remains to be seen what the end of this will be, but it seems like Overkill are taking steps in the right direction to attempt to fix what was broken.
Last year we had a bit of a kerfuffle over a Duke Nukem action RPG, being made by a company that no longer held the rights to do so. A lawsuit from the rightful owners followed and eventually the game was scrapped and its progress used to birth a new game: Bombshell.
The protagonist is one Shelly ‘Bombshell’ Harrison and while it looks kind of interesting, we’ll have to wait a little bit longer to see the game result of the entire ongoing story – its had the release date pushed back into next year.
Interceptor Entertainment have spent weeks now testing the game to catch and squash bugs, but it seems that they feel a little bit longer is needed to present a game they’re happy to release; not wanting to make their fans feel cheated at all.
“Our first instinct was to just get this puppy out-the-door, and that we could fix the remaining issues with a quick patch after launch. But within ten seconds we realized that’s no way to treat paying fans of our games.”
Whether or not you think it’s just trying to score points with the gamers, I’ll always be a fan of delays to squash bugs. Bombshell would have released onto Steam and GOG sometime this month, it will now drop on January 29th.
