Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Well this is quite the thing. While we’re all in the middle of crossing our fingers, legs and internal organs in the hope that Mojang and Double Fine will find a way to fund a sequel to Psychonauts, Schafer’s company have surprised us by announcing they’re seeking funding for another dream project – a new “old school” graphic adventure game from Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. You know – two guys of the three guys who wrote Monkey Island. The team that led to some of the greatest adventures ever made. Please squee now. And now they’re trying out a Kickstarter to make it happen.

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Indie Game: The Movie has been in the making for a good while now and all the bits we’ve seen so far have been fairly interesting. The filmmakers are into the final stretch of post-production now and to rally the hounds of publicity they’ve released an official trailer, which I should warn you contains footage of some intense-looking young men in thick-rimmed glasses.

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I’m posting this more as a reminder of No Time To Explain’s status than anything else. It started off as a free flash game, then the developers announced they were polishing the game into something more substantial with the best trailer ever made, and since then they’ve amassed almost $20,000 on their Kickstarter page, shattering their original target of $7,000 like a tiny bird flying clean through a windowpane. You’ve still got another 24 days to pledge, with $5 getting you the game at launch (they’re aiming for late summer), a saving of some 50%. For $25 you’ll get beta access and a level editor, and any particularly amazing levels will get into the finished game. Genius.

On April 1st TinyBuild released their first gameplay trailer, which it turned out was just three people dancing. More recently they’ve released an actual gameplay trailer. That’s after the jump.
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I’m really liking what Kickstarter is doing for PC gaming. It’s incredible. We’ve got renowned Interactive Fiction authors quitting their day jobs to make IF full time, indie devs making adventure games flooded with Americana and magical realism and jetpack dinosaur multiplayer extravaganzas, and even a fund for continued development of an indie game arcade in NYC. Beautiful stuff. And here’s another one. An indie studio made of up industry veterans wants your money to make Knights: Spiral Island, an online FPS boasting crab warriors, star vikings and potentially even “haunted bicycles” and “psychic space bees”. Interested? Of course you’re interested.
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If you’ve been following the development of Orion: Prelude – the sci-fi action game of jetpack combat and dinosaurs – then you might be aware that the recently team appealed to crowd-sourced money thing Kickstarter to get the project funded. I took some time to take to Spiral’s David Prassel about raising money through Kickstarter, and the overall state of the project. Read on for elucidation.
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Cardboard Computer, indie developer of A House In California an the excellent I Can Hold My Breath Forever has created a Kickstarter page for his next game, Kentucky Route Zero. It looks like another riff on the the theme of companionship, but with a much more confident and heavy-handed use of magical realism. Are you sitting comfortably? Then please, watch the video below. If only all trailers could be this entrancing.
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Next, another tale of glitz and glamour from the PC’s drug-soaked, rock-n-roll interactive fiction community. And by “another” I mean “possibly the first, ever”.

Highly respected IF author Andrew Plotkin (Spider and Web, Shade and much more) wants to make the switch to writing IF full-time. He created a Kickstarter page, saying that if he raised $8,000 in a month he’d proceed across the rocky tundra of self-employment and start making IF games for iOS devices (a pledge of $25 or more WILL get you a PC version on CD, though). What happened next? Well…
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There’s a lot of kickstarter projects around, but this is one which I think some of you will find interesting. Hell, even the people who will bristle against it. Babycastles is a NYC-based indie-arcade project, and have been doing events for a while. What do they want to do with the money? Take it to central NY: “By presenting six consecutive 2-week exhibitions of independent video games at the center of New York, Babycastles is looking forward to showcasing international game development to a wide audience of game enthusiasts, students, press, curators, children, and especially to an audience that may never otherwise encounter the variety of activity in video game culture. It will be an incredible arcade in Times Square!” Go to their kickstarter for more details on what they’ve been up to, some footage and the benefits for pledging. Oh – and here’s the LA Times covering it. Really, this is like a transmission from another gaming dimension. I hope they pull it off, not least because I’m in NY then so will be able to go.