Pledge $25 or more
“I pirated Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island when I was a kid and I feel bad!” This reward tier instantly absolves you of all guilt and includes the Thimbleweed Park game. All subsequent tiers also include guilt absolution.1- Thimbleweed Park Kickstarter campaign reward tier
While most people realize that pledging [on Kickstarter] is just a pre-order in the dark, some backers feel like they are investors or game designers, working alongside the development team. If this is true and the final product doesn’t live up to the standards they’ve set up in their minds they’ll feel quite unsatisfied or worse. To avoid this type of complications, we have decided to take a different route with this campaign. We don’t want to deal with the trivial and somewhat elitist stuff like backers only forums, backers having their name in the credits, re-designing stuff in our project or going to dinner with some of the staff. […] We respect the community and are thankful for every pledge we get but we want to create the game the way we envisioned and designed it. We would also like to concentrate all our available time to development, so if you want to support us in hope to get a great game please do so.1
- Ebb Software, developers of Scorn
These days, almost all promising, mainstream-enough video game Kickstarters (and, to a lesser extent, Indiegogos) seem to attract enough traction and interest to succeed. Offhand, I am unable to recall one single notable project that would not have succeeded as of late, especially if self-cancelled projects are counted out of the equation.
Alas, one such project is now in great danger of going undeservedly unfunded. Early this month, I tweeted to Andy Kelly how I had - much like him - been absolutely awestruck by Raindrop‘s beautifully-designed Kickstarter campaign:
@ultrabrilliant Rightyo! One of the best-designed Kickstarter pitches to date, for sure.
— Martyn Zachary (@martynzachary) November 4, 2013
Their image-laden, equally professional website was no less impressive. According to its developers, Raindrop would be a “a surreal, environment driven, survival game that includes fully explorable levels with intuitive, complex puzzles”.
Below, you can watch their amazing pitch video:
Kickstarter, bless ’em, have made possible many projects that would have been much, much harder for indie developers to initiate only a few measly years ago. We’ve seen plenty of really interesting projects receive funding via the platform, including Kentucky Route Zero, Octodad 2, Star Command and Blade Symphony.
Goats vs Nazis, then, is the latest game project to kickstart their development with the platform.
I don’t even know where to start - or end, for that matter. Certainly, Goats vs Nazis looks to be one part game, nine parts marketing campaign - heck, that’s exactly why we’re mentioning the project on the blog! The actual novelty value of juxtaposing goats to nazis is obviously up to the funder/player/developer to decide. If you DO feel that it’s a good idea, then off to Kickstarter you go!
As if Goats vs Nazis wasn’t enough for just one post, I also stumbled upon Jay Tholen’s Dropsy. Dropsy seems - by my estimation, anyway - to be a Windows-bound point and click adventure game about a… clown… that is manic, depressive or both? The hero, “hand-less, unintelligible, and questionably human” … “will also encounter colorful characters and mind-stretching logic puzzles in surreal, off-kilter landscapes”. Sounds a notch like Toonstruck to me.
Other than that, I haven’t the faintest idea as to what is going on here. But fret not, for there be video! The Kickstarter video gives you a fantastic idea of what you might be getting. (You’ll be getting crazy, that’s what you’ll be getting). Keep in mind that Mr. Tholen has set the funding bar for the game very, very low indeed, so don’t be afraid to pledge just because the measly sum of $225 has already been fulfilled.
P.S. Can’t believe I just wrote this post.