Interesting Kickstarter Catch-All

Ok, this is a Patreon project and not a Kickstarter, but I'm thinking that the company is using the wrong site:

Ok, I'm now a bit weirded out by the moves this week by Greenheart Games....

Greenheart Games's first game was Game Dev Tycoon, a good, solid business sim for PC and mobile. It received a ton of press and additional sales after the dev blogged in detail about guerilla-releasing a free version in which players would see their revenues drop to nothing because of piracy. I enjoyed it a lot and have been following the company since.

The second game, in development, is Tavern Keeper, website here: https://tavernkeeper.com/. Today the company announced a Patreon which like Kickstarter tiers has different tiers of how much you support the project, and provides different levels of access to the dev. But becoming a Patreon backer itself doesn't give access to the game!

I want to support the project and game, but this kind of setup doesn't sit well with me. If it was a company I was truly invested in and trusted to produce great game after great game (or podcast), maybe I'd have no reservations. But for $2 or $5 or $20 per month with no release date and no game key from doing it....why should I think this is a good development model to support as a customer? I may chip in but will likely just wait for more solid news of the game.

Note that the company disputes that the Patreon is necessary to fund development, but that is a weird hair to split:

No, we are fortunate that the development budget and plans of Tavern Keeper are not reliant on crowd-funding. We didn't start this Patreon to help finish the game financially but to have more drive to share our progress with those interested. Funds from the Patreon will be used to create more materials, merchandise designs and other experiments around the game.

Thoughts?

(Cross-posted from the GWJ Tycoon Manage-All.)

Vampire the Masquerade Heritage

Seems like a game with options for a continuing campaign (almost Legacy-like). I'm intrigued, but not sure I want to drop the cash right now.

Last Epoch just went into beta. It is $35 for beta access.
It looks like a really good mix of Grim Dawn, Diablo 3 and Path of Exile.
Crafting and skill modification look really good.

fangblackbone wrote:

Last Epoch just went into beta. It is $35 for beta access.
It looks like a really good mix of Grim Dawn, Diablo 3 and Path of Exile.
Crafting and skill modification look really good.

Yup, created a Catch All for the game. Its got its hooks into me. It is rough around the edges, but it could be something special.

Mirador - an interesting take on hack-and-slash games. You have 2 game modes, one in which you take your anthropomorphized animal avatar (I have to admit, I "huh?"ed at that one) through a set of levels, fighting Sentinels. You can take your earnings home, or push on to greater threats and rewards, but if you die, you lose what you have gotten. The other game mode (if that's the right term) has you making a Sentinel, and it appears in other people's games, giving you rewards if they fall to it. It's very early in the KS campaign, and it looks like it will be a really close call if it makes it, but I thought the concept was cool.

This is the second game by Sauropod Studios - their first was Castle Story. That game took a really long time to get finished, but unlike a lot of other games that far, far exceeded their timelines, I always felt like the development team and the Kickstarter people were working together really well to keep the backers informed on the how and why of the delays, which I have always appreciated as the main reason to actually back something.

Thanks for pointing out Mirador. I thought it sounded cool and backed it.

It is curious that they are only asking for around $60K. They must be using it as a marketing tool and to raise money for marketing or to lure funding from a bigger publisher. Otherwise, that can't be more than 1 month of funding with the team size they have plus office expenditures.

They are targeting an August 2019 delivery, so I think you're probably right.

Atras wrote:

You can take your earnings home, or push on to greater threats and rewards, but if you die, you lose what you have gotten.

Just like The Oasis! Are there full body sensory suits and omnidirectional treadmills, too?

BadKen wrote:
Atras wrote:

You can take your earnings home, or push on to greater threats and rewards, but if you die, you lose what you have gotten.

Just like The Oasis! Are there full body sensory suits and omnidirectional treadmills, too?

Ha!! I think that might have to be a stretch goal.

Altar Quest is supposedly the next HeroQuest. I’m not going to back a $100+ dungeon crawl with grey plastic. HeroQuest had pretty cardboard and cost a lot less 30 years ago.

But it costs more now. If you're looking to relive that experience AQ would very likely be cheaper. Although you could just buy one of the dozens of already released dungeon crawler games.

This is absolutely worth five minutes of everyone's time. No need to pledge, he's already hit his goal.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

This is absolutely worth five minutes of everyone's time. No need to pledge, he's already hit his goal.

Based on the highest pledge tier I'm starting to wonder about his credentials...

Jolly Bill wrote:
Fedaykin98 wrote:

This is absolutely worth five minutes of everyone's time. No need to pledge, he's already hit his goal.

Based on the highest pledge tier I'm starting to wonder about his credentials...

This is a good observation, but after watching his video I see him as a sincere person.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/aatCTP8.jpg)

Crypt X: A narrative puzzle game

Looks interesting. I've Kickstarted a game from them before (SubTerra) so I'm confident that they can deliver.

I appreciate this update's transparency, even if there are a LOT of red flags in it.
Well, if it fails, it'll be the first kickstarter I backed to fail.

Spoiler:

Dearest supporters,

We need to apologize for the silence on the development side of UnDungeon, and transparently explain what has been happening for the past few months.

As you know, about a year ago we announced that we've signed with tinyBuild to help bring the game to more people and platforms. tinyBuild is known for being a developer-publisher hybrid with dozens of games under their belt. They've provided much needed additional funding and development expertise we were missing in the project.

Original plan - January 2019

The original development plan was to be Gold Master (ready for console ports) in January of this year. However, by this time the game was only in Alpha stage. UnDungeon was showcased and extensively playtested leading up to that moment, with several red flags becoming apparent. One of the builds was also shared with you all last November in the previous update.

First issue was combat "didn't feel good" - when you take the controller, and something just felt off, wrong.
The second was a poorly organized codebase which made feature development apparently very tedious.
Third is that development was always behind schedule. The development was structured around the project manager trying to do both management and game design. Both disciplines suffered because of it.
Issues with team structure, delays, churning through coders

Turned out the main reason the codebase wasn’t in good shape was because the team churned through 3 lead coders in under a year. This goes hand in hand with game design issues and the combat not being great, it all came down to a single bottleneck not being able to delegate or effectively manage a team. As a result of these issues, timelines constantly slipped.

This surfaced when tinyBuild took a deep dive into development. Here's a timeline of events that followed:

On December 15th 2018 we all agreed on a new list of milestones that added 50% more to the game's budget. tinyBuild has funded this on top of what they already put in
The new structure assumed an Early Access launch on the 25th of July 2019
Out of the new milestone schedule, the first two were conditionally approved (they were approved so that the team has money to continue development while we workout development issues). Conditions being to catchup to the dev schedule, which was missed. Again.
During this period the team started churning through more people due to “conflicts with the project manager”.
The third milestone (delivery date March 25 2019) was not accepted, after the team wasn't able to catchup with the previous two missed milestones or deliver on the third one. At this point we had to take action, however, the project manager bargained for 2 more months to fix the issues.
The issues revolved mostly around gameplay, balance, and tech. There was no "flow" to the game itself, which was made worse by constantly changing team members.
On June 24th 2019, we had the third milestone build - late by 3 months - which still had the same issues with gameplay, balance, broken boss fights, and so on.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting things to change. At this point the project was about 400% over budget without a clear process to finish it. Had we had good project management in place from the get go, we wouldn’t be in an over-budget situation. There also wasn’t enough room for iteration in original planning, the plan had assumed everything would “hit” the first time around - with combat feel being the main paint point.

Reorganizing development

A logical change that both we & tinyBuild felt would solve the problems is reorganizing the development team to have an experienced producer / project manager in the lead. Get game designers and great engineers on board to speed things up, and have the original project manager be on a consulting basis.

However the initial project manager didn’t take this idea lightly. He felt like he was getting kicked off the project, and had a very aggressively defensive reaction - causing all constructive dialogue to go out the window.

Flash forward almost a month later, and the dialogue went into a stalemate with the original project manager trying to get the team to run off and do another project, trying to get everyone to "buy him out" under the blackmail pretense to go public claiming he got scammed, and hiding the source code. The latter is especially worrying, because he cut off access to the source without telling anyone. Fortunately we do have all backups.

We tried to have a conversation, where instead of trying to figure out a solution, the project manager simply demanded money only to drop the phone in anger when prompted for justification. He then proceeded to threaten to “tank the project”.

Upon seeing some inappropriate messages on Facebook sent by him from the official game page, we've decided to cut off all access to UnDungeon social media. This came with an immediate reaction consisting of aggressive threats and cursing.

Needless to say we put too much faith into the project manager being able to pull off a production of such size, and he simply collapsed under pressure. We did our utmost to reason and come to a peaceful solution to actually make the game happen. What we can’t accept is someone actively trying to kill off something we worked so hard on, and that you -- our fans -- put your faith in. We’re not backing down, we won’t allow the project to be sabotaged, and we’re making UnDungeon into what fans deserve.

The Plan Moving Forward

Between Laughing Machines and tinyBuild we have a solid plan moving forward.

The original vision of the project remains the same, and it's what you've all put your faith into. The initial project manager will not be involved due to destructive behavior that cost everyone too much time and money.
The original team is being brought back together under new leadership.
tinyBuild is getting a game designer and producer on board -- and funding the homestretch of development.
We will make development transparent with 2 week “sprint reports”. These reports will digest what’s been done in the last 2 weeks with all the information we can make public. It will give you all an idea of where we are and what kind of progress/issues we have.
It will take us a little bit of time to get the sprint reports started, and we will keep you all posted.

From the same creators as Tainted Grail, Etherfields.

These guys really seem to have their finger on the pulse of what I dig.

Nevin73 wrote:

From the same creators as Tainted Grail, Etherfields.

These guys really seem to have their finger on the pulse of what I dig.

But have you played any of their groovy-looking games? I've been very curious about a number of them, but I haven't played one yet.

Admittedly no, but hope springs eternal.

I think this one is cute. Cat/Sphinx

Does anyone have any thoughts about the slew of Gloomhaven type games?

I've not played GH (it seemed too combat heavy for me) but both Etherfields mentioned above and Trudvang (from Eric Lang at CMON) look interesting to me, but I don't have any frame of reference.

I like the idea of being able to solo them. I'm more interested in story and choices than dice chucking combat.

If anything, EF seems more full of Kickstarter Stuff, while Trudvang seems like a neater System (pulling tokens from the bag and putting them on your spells seems like a strong framework to me, with adding good / bad tokens to the bag representing bonuses / maluses).

I'm told Gloomhaven is more about tactical combat than storytelling.

Etherfields looks like a weird, dream-based Choose Your Own Adventure to me.

Trudvang Legends looks like a story-focused RPG-lite.

Tainted Grail looks like a cross between 7th Continent and a fantasy RPG. I like the idea of exploration element in games like that one.

This is all just my inpression from reading and watching YouTube, though. I haven't played any of these games yet.

Also along those lines and coming soon is Sleeping Gods by Ryan Laukat, which also looks to focus on story and exploring. I guess it will play a bit like Near and Far, with a lot of looking up what happens in the storybook as you explore different places.

Hexplore-It is running its Campaign now for its 2nd Stand alone expansion. Other than its lackluster name, it has to be one of the best DM-less adventure systems I have ever played. I highly recommend checking it out. They just reached the stretch goal of doing a reprint of the original game, which is probablt a better starting point then Sands of Shurax.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...

Just received Keymaster Games Fifty-Nine Parks. The family is looking forward to giving it a go.

I backed Calm Cuffs

My kids get stressed and overheated so I think it will be interesting to see if the help.