Why Is It Typically Thursday When I’m Behind The Curve?
Two new webcomic-related Kickstarts, not nearly enough time to dig into them as deeply as is probably necessary¹; forgive any superficialities, please.
- On the one hand, Fred Gallagher has bounced back from his most recent health challenges and launched a Kickstart for a “visual novel” type game adaptation of Megatokyo², which has in approximately 45 hours cleared 375% of its US$20,000 goal, hit a bunch of stretch goals, ensured a sequel, and has another 28 days to go. If US$20K seems a low bar for funding a video game, it’s a game type that akin to a text adventure overlaid with art from the comic and a bit of audio — technologically, not something that requires oodles of money, a studio full of people, and a year or more of effort. The US$150,000 stretch goal to make Megatokyo The Visual Novel Game a three-game series seems a virtual certainty.
- On the other hand, Ryan Sohmer launched his third Kickstart of the year for a multiplayer RPG-type game adapted from Looking For Group³, which has in approximately 18 hours raised more than US$40,000, putting it slightly ahead of the Megatokyo effort in the backers-per-day and dollars-per-day departments. However, a multiplayer RPG with full animation and voice acting, with the possibility (via stretch goals) of multiple O/S platform support is something that requires oodles of money, a studio full of people, and a year or more of effort.
The fact that the basic goal — US$600,000 — is more than the final pie-in-the-sky-no-way-we’ll-reach-it-maybe stretch goal for the Megatokyo project (US$500,000) should give you an idea of the difference in scopes and scales of these two projects. If LFG & The Fork of Truth succeeds, it will be the first high-goal videogame Kickstarts not proposed by an established studio that I can recall (but I don’t follow the videogame section of Kickstarter especially closely), and may prompt further projects of this type. We’ll know soon enough, one way or the other.
- Calling it: Achewood is now on indefinite hiatus, presumably because of the efforts around the proposed animated series. It is for situations like this that RSS (whose demise is greatly overstated) was invented.
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¹ In this case, it’s because I don’t regularly follow either of the webcomics in question.
² Itself inspired by Japanese visual novels, in a nice bit of circle-closing.
³ Itself inspired by MMORPGs, in a nice bit of cirle-closing.
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