- Orgone Accumulator
- Jan 28, 2006
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It's been a long time coming.
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So the Xenonauts guys are preparing to wade into the melee for your amateur investment dollars
quote:OK, so the time has come to bite the bullet and do a Kickstarter for this project.
If you're unsure as to why we'd want to do this, it's mostly because a variety of games have done very well out of it - Doublefine and Wasteland 2 being the two most famous Kickstarters so far, but much smaller games like FTL have also raked in a lot of cash too. FTL is sitting at $150,000 at the moment. To put that in perspective, that's substantially more than we've taken in pre-order revenue over the entire lifetime of this project.
The major difference between us and the other projects announced so far is that they are generally brand new games very early in the development cycle, whereas we're towards the end of ours. This is a disadvantage in the sense that we're not exciting new news in the same way as they are, but it's an advantage because we've got loads of nice art to show off and there should be less doubts about whether we can pull off making a game.
Because we're an existing project, we're going to take a slightly different approach. My plan is to make a playable demo of the game available to everyone, so people can see for themselves how the game looks. Our pitch in the video is basically going to be "We're getting to the end of our development cycle, and we'd like to raise a load of money so we can make the game as good as it can be".
This is a pretty honest pitch - we're going to need more money than we have now if we're going to make Xenonauts an exceptional game. We're on track to make it a good game - perhaps even a very good one, but we're constrained by cashflow on some of our ideas.
Anyway, the flip side of this is that next weekend we're going to try and release the basic version of the build that we'll be releasing to the entire internet. The idea is this build will contain the gameplay in the game until a couple of weeks after the Corvettes appear, which will allow the player to get laser weapons and Wolf armour, and then it'll spawn a couple of scripted events - a terror site and then a base defence mission. Once the base defence mission is over, the demo will end.
The hope is that it'll show off the best parts of the game to everyone, and convince them to pay up. It should also give journalists something to write about. Once the key features are in place, we'll just keep iterating it until it's basically bug free and then go ahead with the Kickstarter.
http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/1270-Xenonauts-Kickstarter-and-Public-Build
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Mar 26, 2012 12:19
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Apr 19, 2024 12:17
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- Orgone Accumulator
- Jan 28, 2006
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It's been a long time coming.
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I think he kind of blew it with those stretch goal tiers. It looks like he just laid every item out separately at equal intervals according to how popular they are. Not only has he frontloaded all the costliest, most time-consuming stuff, but there's cool but minor things like proxy grenades (which apparently won't even require new art) and tall grass which should have been folded in with the bigger things. An extra $55,000 for proxy grenades and grass seems a little ridiculous, and at $300,000 there's almost no chance of them actually making it in. It's cool that he's adding female soldiers though.
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May 17, 2012 11:01
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- Orgone Accumulator
- Jan 28, 2006
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It's been a long time coming.
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I'd like to talk about the Xenonauts kickstarter for a minute here. Xenonauts is an X-Com/Ufo:Enemy Unknown remake/reimagening that looks like it will be quite good. Please pledge generously.
What kinda annoys me though, are their stretch goals, or rather the pricetags they have attached to them:
I am no programmer or designer, but most of the pricetags sound hilariously high to me. $25,000 each for a "Soldier Memorial Screen", "Tall Grass" or "Proximity Grenades"? They can pay the wages of some programmer/designer for several months with 25 grand and all that can be done in that time is "Tall Grass"? Seriously? What am I missing here?
They are probably doing it for two reasons: a. Interest check and b. free publicity
The main guy made a comment somewhere that the price tiers don't have anything to do with what's being offered and that the real reason they're asking for that much is so they can start a real physical studio to have everybody working in the same place. I think it's a pretty big misstep, yeah.
edit~ from here:
quote:Also, the money raised is not spent purely on the stretch goals. It's mostly money we'll need to pull the team together geographically, but that doesn't make a very exciting stretch goal in itself. Orgone Accumulator fucked around with this message at 11:27 on May 21, 2012
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May 21, 2012 11:21
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Mar 26, 2012 12:19
