Knights: Spiral Island Gets Kickstarter Page

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.

The gist of Knights found on the Kickstarter page is as follows: you play a mighty space knight on quest to defeat pretty much anything the developers can think of, in whatever style the devs can think of ("from single player narratives to multiplayer arenas, co-operative gameplay, and everything in between", "cutting edge graphics or 8 bit"), with the game being expanded with new levels as fast as the developers can churn them out. The end result, they say, will be like "a music playlist that goes on and on in endless variety".

The eight hour FPS re-imagined as the fifteen minute FPS, then? That's something I'd play. Though something that jumps out at me as more than a little stingy is that on the lift of project backer rewards it appears that you only get access to the finished game by pledging $50 or more. This is for a game they're planning to sell for $5 to $10. $30 gets you beta access, and $10 gets you a unique community rank, a unique game rank and a signed note of thanks from the developers. Hmm. I always thought the smartest option for Kickstarter funding was to simply let people fund the game by pre-ordering it. Then again, what do I know? I have the business sense of a bag of hams. Here's a video of the Playground State guys talking us through their dream.