Hi everyone,
I don't want this thread to get bogged down too much here answering madd0ct0r's questions, but his questions are good ones and deserving of a response—not just for his benefit but for the benefit of anyone considering backing us. I've tried below to do them justice.
madd0ct0r wrote:
my feeling is you've already claimed to have used a large amount of money, and are nowhere near 50% complete, when the kickstarter is only going to double your money (at best).
I see where you're coming from, but there is no calculation of “$X spent to get to 40% means $Y is required"; such thinking assumes that the lowest crowd funding amount requested ($35,000) is the full amount required in order to complete—that is not the case. We expect a short-fall. Fortunately, though, Membraine has sufficient finance available that we can make up for that short-fall.
We never expected and do not expect the community to pay for everything—we
are asking for your help, though, for all the reasons outlined in the campaign.
madd0ct0r wrote:
Why should i pick you?
This is a very good question, and it is a question that I tried to answer in the pitch video, although it was necessarily brief in that.
I would recommend us for your support simply because we are making
a proper activation-based wargame, in the tradition of Epic:Armageddon or Future War Commander and other games of that ilk that we all love to play—
and no one else is, certainly not that I'm aware of.
We all know
why that is, of course. We are, sadly, seen as a very, very niche market and, as such, you're unlikely to see a computer game like Fracture Empire made by traditional development funding means—in my experience, the sort of publishers who offer development financing deals tend to be more interested in action-centric titles, or RTS at best. We
have spoken with several publishers in the past and will continue to look for such support...but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Personally, I'm not aware of any game to-date that attempts what ours attempts, that being a proper tabletop translation (they're all grid- or hex-based). I'm also not aware of any current game that captures the army-building that features so heavily in miniatures wargaming (Final Liberation being the only example that springs to mind).
So I guess my reason why the community should back us boils down to this: if you
want to play a game like this, we
need your support.
We'll try to draw this discussion out more in our campaign text.
madd0ct0r wrote:
One finished game should be on there with big flashing lights around it
That's a good suggestion. I'll add something mentioning Orbital Defence and perhaps listing some of the critical responses the game received, both when the game was reviewed and comments from users. We are enormously proud of what we achieved with our very first published game, but you're right that we haven't done a great job of blowing our own trumpet there. We can fix that.
madd0ct0r wrote:
along with the promise to release the demo by day X.
Sorry to say we won't promise release dates, not even for demos, beyond the fact we're aiming to have the alpha build in people's hands around the September/October timeframe. You've probably noticed that games developers never commit to ship dates when asked and instead respond with "it will be ready when it's ready"; the reason is that you can too easily ruin yourselves and your reputation trying to meet a promise that turns out to have been wildly optimistic, and you then find that, instead of shipping the quality product people reasonably expect, you end up shipping something broken. No one wants that. I hope you will all appreciate our reasoning on this.
Thanks to everyone for your questions so far—you've already given us a lot to consider and to address in our campaign going forward, and this is just the first day!
I hope my answers here are satisfactory, but of course if you have further comments or questions, please ask. We very much want the community here to be as excited about Fractured Empire as we are.