As wonderful as it was to see Double Fine Adventure succeed, one success does not a movement make. For Kickstarter to mean anything in the grand scheme of things, it has to keep the ball rolling. Further, it can’t simply rely on projects headed by universally beloved developers like Schafer or sequels to cult classics like inXile’s Wasteland 2 or Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun Returns. While these franchises are not what publishers would consider mainstream and faced difficulty in finding funding, how much of a movement is it really if all the games being funded are relying on name recognition? As indie game designer Ian Bogost recently tweeted, if that’s the case, they may as well “change Kickstarter’s name to Sequelstarter.”

As it happens, that’s not the case. There are indeed completely original games from lesser known developers that are succeeding on Kickstarter, though you may have missed them in the buzz about the aforementioned Kickstarter campaigns. No, they’re not cracking seven figures, but they’re exceeding their goals and that means they’re getting developed. They’re the foot soldiers of this would be movement, the ones whose success determines whether crowd funded games are going to last two months or two decades and they shouldn’t go unheralded. So today, we’re going take a closer look at three of them – Takedown, FTL: Faster Than Light and The Banner Saga.

Takedown

After the success of the Double Fine Adventure campaign, the game development community looked a little like the kids at a junior high semi-formal, awkwardly looking around to see who else would be brave enough to step onto the dance floor before they tried themselves. Some other campaigns started during that time span, but none had goals anywhere near the bold $400,000 mark that Double Fine had set. Finally, in early March, veteran game designer Christian Allen – the lead designer of Ghost Recon 2 and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter – and Serellan LLC stepped forward with what was then called Crowdsourced Hardcore Tactical Shooter, which had a goal of $200,000.

As with Double Fine Adventure, Takedown is an attempt to revive a genre publishers thought was dead and gone but was near and dear to the hearts of both the developer and niche fans. Allen himself had wanted to make a game like CHTS for “over a decade” but hadn’t found the means to fund it. “I’ve pitched this type of game on and off again for years,” says Allen. “And then when I founded Serellan LLC late last year, first to do some consulting work, I started getting emails from people asking if I was going to make a tactical shooter, even though all I had done was posted up a splash image of the company logo.”

Then along came Kickstarter, and suddenly Takedown seemed closer to reality than ever before. However, Allen knew a game like Takedown couldn’t be funded from Kickstarter funds alone. So instead, he used Kickstarter to not only get the initial funds for the game, but as a way to prove that it would have an audience to secure funding from venture capitalists. “I was talking to a group of VC investors who were questioning how they could be sure there was actually a market for this kind of game,” Allen says. “I had been looking at Kickstarter for a few months, and decided to give it a go.”

However, as the first big campaign after the success of Double Fine Adventure, Allen and Serellan were working without many examples to follow and were taking quite the risk. According to Allen, “It was very possible if the campaign had failed miserably that Takedown would have not seen the light of day.” The eyes of the development community were on Serellan, waiting to see if they would succeed or fail. Did Allen feel at all like the canary in the coal mine, like people were watching Serellan’s campaign to see if someone besides Tim Schafer could pull off such a big coup? “I do think that was the case,” Allen confirms. “A lot of people had negative things to say or predicted our demise […].”

As it happened, those predictions came close to becoming a reality. With only 17 days to go, they were over $150,000 short of their $200,000 goal. The canary had stopped singing, and across the blogosphere they were murmurs of Kickstarter being a dud. “Not everyone is Double Fine,” declared a blog on Gamasutra. Still, Allen and Serellan weren’t about to quietly let go of their ambitions. They were able to separate the constructive criticism from the useless negativity and formulate a plan.

“We realized that our initial presentation just wasn’t up to par, and because we were getting the same questions over and over, we knew that we weren’t getting across the information that people needed to make the decision to support us […],” Allen explains. “With less than two weeks to go, we decided to reboot. We partnered with a production company, Anderson Live Media, who developed the concept of the interrogation and secured a film location in just a few days. We shot the video in a day – a very cold and miserable day for me.  Then we hooked up with Spliced Media to do the editing the next day. We finished the video after the guys worked all night on it, and we posted it up early Monday morning with six days to go.  It was a monumental effort for everyone involved, but I truly believe it made the difference.”

A screenshot from Takedown's second Kickstarter promo

The game was also given a proper name and logo, something that Double Fine had been able to do without, and suddenly new life flowed into the Kickstarter campaign. When it finished on April 1^st, it had raised $221,833 – ten percent above its proposed goal. Takedown was in business, and the Kickstarter floodgates had officially opened. For Allen, success was sweet.

“The excitement generated by Takedown has spread to the team, and especially the support we’ve gotten from other developers, both in the industry and indies, offering their time and support to make this project a reality,” Allen says. “It really is motivating to see something that you have wanted to do for years start off with such a bang.”

FTL: Faster Than Light

When Takedown succeeded, it helped prove that a new era had started on Kickstarter. Games with high funding goals could get funded during the pre-production phase, allowing games that publishers were wary of to still get the green light. However, in the days before Takedown and Double Fine Adventure, games being funded on Kickstarter had a different modus operandi. Video games with successful campaigns were typically ones that were nearly finished, and only needed a small boost to get pushed to completion and distributed. FTL: Faster Than Light started its Kickstarter campaign under this older model. It was the brainchild of two former 2K Games employees, Matthew Davis and Justin Ma, who had quit their jobs at 2K Games last year to work on FTL. After earning an honorable mention at the 2012 Independent Gaming Festival at GDC and getting a preview in PC Gamer, the pair decided to start a Kickstarter campaign.

“We had been getting a lot of positive press out of our participation in the IGF,” they said in a joint email correspondence. “It appeared that the project had the potential to be a success, so we wanted to get the funds we needed to be able to finish the game.”

Initially, their goal was set at $10,000. In the pre-Double Fine Adventure days, this was considered a reasonable sum, and so their expectations were well tempered. “We really had no idea how difficult it would be to reach that goal,” say Ma and Davis. “Having good previews in IGF and PC Gamer did give us some confidence that it would be feasible, but we were never fully confident. The number was chosen with the mindset of ‘how much do we need to finish the game?’ rather than stress too much about how much we could potentially raise.” It turns out they needn’t have worried. “The campaign exploded nearly as soon as we put it up. Within 12 hours we had passed our $10,000 goal and we were blown away. Within a day it was already considerably larger than we were expecting. Even just days away from the end, 2000% seemed unrealistic.” Yet that’s exactly where they finished. The final total was $200,542, over twenty times their initial goal.

A screenshot from the current version of FTL: Faster Than Light

Like Takedown, the story of FTL provided a sign that the Kickstarter movement was real. While Takedown was proving that the new Kickstarter model could work, FTL proved that even games that started campaigns under the old model were being swept up in the moment. Was the momentum from the craze that Double Fine started part of the reason that FTL was so successful? “Definitely,” agree Davis and Ma. “The Double Fine Adventure campaign brought a lot of publicity to Kickstarter and helped legitimize the concept of crowd funding for a lot of people.” They admit that their success at IGF and the PC Gamer mention certainly helped as well and their effect can’t be ignored. That said, if Takedown proved that the Kickstarter movement had direction, FTL proved that it had legs.

Such unexpected success does not come without side effects, of course. With an enormously successful Kickstarter campaign comes the burden of fan expectations. “There wasn’t too much pressure before the Kickstarter campaign. We were making a game that we thought would be cool, but did not stress too much about the financial viability of it as a product,” say Ma and Davis. “Now that the Kickstarter campaign is over, there is definitely a new and different type of pressure. There are a lot of people that are excited about the game and have trusted us with their funds, which is amazing, but it brings a lot of pressure with it to make FTL the best it can be. We’re working very hard to live up to those expectations.” As part of that, they’re being careful not to stretch their newfound funding too far and staying focused on their mission, a sentiment Christian Allen had also shared when discussing Takedown. “Our goal is still to make the game we’ve wanted from the beginning,” they confirm. What’s exciting to us is what comes after the initial game is complete.  FTL’s success means that we will be able to continue working on FTL and future games, which is of course the ultimate ambition of any independent developer.”

The Banner Saga

As the campaigns for FTL and Takedown were getting started, the developers at Stoic watched with interest. Stoic is a development power trio composed of Arnie Jorgensen, a veteran artist with tours of duty at DC and Image Comics before working at Retro Studios and Ion Storm, John Watson, who started as a programmer at NASA before jumping into the games industry at Sony, and Alex Thomas, the trio’s only lifetime game developer who began his career at Wolfpack Studios before they changed their name to Kingisle in 2005. The three met at BioWare, where they worked on The Old Republic together. Jorgenson and Thomas also worked on several side projects with BioWare’s blessing, including an iOS children’s book called DinoBoy. After The Old Republic shipped, they recruited Watson and they soon left BioWare began work on The Banner Saga. The timing couldn’t have been better. By coincidence, The Old Republic launched last December, and Double Fine’s Kickstarter campaign started shortly afterwards in early February.

“Truth be told, Kickstarter was part of the plan back at the formation of the company,” says Thomas. “At that time the highest games could make was roughly $30k. Our friends from White Whale – currently working on God of Blades – had a successful run and encouraged us to go for some extra funding since we’re paying for production out of pocket using our own personal savings. Then Double Fine and inXile blew the doors off the Kickstarter thing, which was pretty surreal to watch, knowing that we were working towards the exact same goal. Suddenly we weren’t sure how to approach it. Ultimately it became obvious that the right thing to do was to ask for the real amount that we could use toward making the game the biggest we could while still manageable for three people.”

How did they come to this conclusion? They did their homework. With a handful of campaigns either completed or in full swing, the Stoic trio had enough material to formulate a solid plan. The first part of this plan was to avoid going in cold. “We did a lot of research when we were planning out our campaign but the best advice we got was to talk about the game early and often, pre-launch,” says Thomas. “By the time our page was ready to go we had a lot of people already interested in the game, which got us to our goal quick, in turn generating a lot more media attention and so on and so forth.” They also took special care when it came to the different rewards Kickstarter backers would receive at different levels. “One of the things we’re most happy with is the extra time we took to show all of our prizes at the start of the project,” Thomas elaborates. “As far as I know we were the first to really go all out with [it] and I think people have really connected with that.” Finally, they made sure people would get a preview of the game itself. “Another top priority was to make sure we had an actual game to show and make sure it was an accurate representation of the final product. Without a big name backing us we knew we’d be relying on the quality of the game itself to get people interested and the sincerity of how into it we truly are.”

After doing their due diligence, Stoic’s initial goal for The Banner Saga was set at $100,000. Were they still nervous about a goal like that even after planning so carefully? “Yeah,” confirms Thomas. “So to elaborate on that more, we were pretty nervous about reaching $100k. Unlike [Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2] we didn’t have any high-profile names supporting us, just our reputation as leads from BioWare and a game concept. We even considered playing it safe with a lower target with a whole whiteboard full of pros and cons. One of the pros to sticking with $100k was ‘It’s what vikings would do.’” Like the FTL team, their worries were for naught. The Banner Saga currently sits at roughly $570,000 with time still on the clock as of the writing of this article. “To be at over 500% funding now without even asking for future milestones is pretty mind-blowing and encouraging,” summarizes Thomas.

A screenshot from The Banner Saga's announcement video

And what of the factors that come with success? Does Stoic feel like such success in their Kickstarter campaign relieved some pressure, or did it add pressure of a different sort like it did with the FTL team? “That’s an interesting question, we’ve recently been talking about this because you’re absolutely right on both accounts,” Thomas answers when asked about the topic. “When there was no expectation we were planning to market the game as more of a grass-roots effort, like the trend with games to come out in alpha and grow a fanbase over time. With all the attention we’ve gotten recently that’s probably not the right approach anymore. We’ll be keeping fans up to date on our progress but I think there’s a certain expectation now that didn’t exist before. Plus, as we add top shelf talent to the project there’s the pressure of making sure everything meets that high standard.” Still, Thomas has a hard time being picky. “I can’t complain though, it’s the kind of pressure we’re happy to deal with and clearly it’s given us a lot of breathing room to give us a chance to make the game we really want to make, not a compromised version. I think we’re in a better position now than we ever could have hoped for.”

Like both Christian Allen and the FTL team before them, Stoic is also being careful not to overextend itself. “One of our primary objectives throughout this whole thing has been to run the campaign with quality and integrity. Sounds like corporate speak but it’s true,” Thomas says. “We’ve gone out of our way to avoid exaggerations and false promises. Basically, we never set out to make the game bigger than something we could handle with a small team, which has become an interesting problem because our backers are really interested in what we’re going to be doing with all the overflow donations. We’ve decided to keep the scope the same but up the quality everywhere that we can – animations, sound, music, additional programming support, QA, playtesting, writing.” Being level headed and realistic clearly doesn’t exclude being excited, though. Thomas adds, “When we started working on the game we knew it was something we were way into but we couldn’t be sure other gamers agreed. More than the funding. what Kickstarter has done is told us beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are a lot of people interested in the game. Nothing could be more inspiring.”

The success of The Banner Saga seems like the culmination of the lessons learned during the dawn of the Kickstarter movement, when Takedown and FTL were among the first to follow in the wake of Double Fine Adventure. The lessons on presentation that Serellan learned and implemented during Takedown’s campaign, to the effects of both FTL’s positive press and the surprise pressure and momentum that it gained all seem to ring true. Was the success of The Banner Saga at least partly due  to this? If so, does that mean that it represents the future of this Kickstarter movement, beyond long awaited sequels and campaigns led by big name developers?

What’s Next?

Each of the developers featured over the course of this article were asked what the future of Kickstarter funded games as they related to their own projects. To Serellan’s Christian Allen, what did the future hold? Could traditionally AAA games be somewhere down the line? “I think in the short term, you will continue to see smaller projects or games that have a strong dedicated audience that have not been well served by the traditional publishing model be the ones that are successful,” Allen predicts. “Something along the lines of a GTA or a Fallout still require huge budgets and highly experienced devs to pull off, but I am excited to see the future and how it shapes out.  We are proud to be at the beginning of something that can only grow from here.”

The FTL team were asked how much Kickstarter could help smaller indie developers. They responded, “Kickstarter has massive potential to help out smaller development teams. Independent developers often create really unique and interesting games that have very small markets.  Kickstarter can help connect developers to those fans.”

Asked more generally about the future of Kickstarter, Alex Thomas of Stoic answered in depth. “We’ve been talking about this a lot lately,” Thomas reveals. “The way I see it, Kickstarter is an incredible good-will generator and if you really hit the right note with an audience that feels abandoned by the current games market they won’t hesitate to support you. Interestingly, models that are popular with publishers right now like mobile games, micro-transactions, Facebook titles, MMOs and generally online or social aspects in a game are the kiss of death on Kickstarter. Since Double Fine’s success we’ve also seen a flood of old-school known developers looking for support.” All sound observations, but what does it mean for Kickstarter? Thomas goes on. “It seems to me that Kickstarter’s lasting success is going to depend on holding tight to that good will and making sure that the backers don’t feel betrayed or become cynical or burnt out over time, which is going to be tricky without any real barrier to entry. The second backers become cynical about the process the whole thing falls apart. That’s not to say I’m all doom and gloom about it; on the contrary I’m mostly concerned because it has been so amazing to see all these amazing games coming back from the past that I really, truly hope the whole thing becomes a new staple of the industry that gives some of that buying power back to smaller but passionate groups of gamers.”

Certainly something that’s so positive couldn’t be a prophecy of doom, but Thomas’ point shouldn’t be ignored. The consensus seems to be that Kickstarter has the potential to be a golden goose of sorts, a tool that could allow fans and developers alike to reap rewards they never could have had before. That said, we live in a world where James Bond is getting a twenty-third movie and the spinoff of the thirteenth game in a popular Japanese RPG series is getting new DLC almost monthly. Takedown, FTL and The Banner Saga prove that Kickstarter could be a fantastic resource in the future, as long as we don’t exhaust it in the present.

In the flurry of finishing up The Journey Down: Over The Edge, I managed to get a hold of Theodor Waern of Skygoblin for an interview. The game still won’t be coming out for about a month or two, but at least we know it’s on the tail end of things. It’s been awesome to watch this game progress over time, and I’m sure the developers will be happy to see the game in its final form.

GamerFront: What inspired you to make this game?

Theodor Waern: There’s no denying that the so called “golden era of point n click” have influenced me quite a lot, but most importantly for my drive to pull this through, has in fact been my will to expand my drawings and characters to something more than just still pictures on the screen. As an artist, seeing my environments and stories come to life in this interactive storytelling way, is an amazing thing.

GF: Why use African themes?

TW: I grew up in a home surrounded by African art and music, my parents have always had a fascination with African culture, and me being brought up in that environment, has definitely bonded me to these forms of art. Also, it’s a culture that is extremely poorly represented in games, I saw this as a good opportunity to try and give it some exposure, and also a good opportunity for me to explore those arts, personally.

GF: What would you say was/is the hardest part of putting The Journey Down together?

TW: Well, the game started out as a hobby project, and was one for nearly five years. The difficult part of this was definitely staying focused and interested. Starting a brand new project in the middle of this one was very, very tempting (and I have in fact started a couple of them during this period) But fortunately I let none of these come before TJD.

On the actual production side of things I wouldn’t say there have been any specific hurdles that were excessively difficult, but some of them were indeed a lot more time consuming than I would have wished. For one thing I had viciously under estimated the amount of work required on character animation. And frankly I’m still not really happy with the animation in my original freeware version of the game. Fortunately we’ve now got Henrik, a real animator on the case. With him on board, all animations are looking gorgeous.

GF: Why did you choose to use voice actors instead of text dialogue?

TW: The voice acting adds a ton of ambiance and really goes a long way in further immersing the player in the story. Fortunately we are blessed with an incredibly talented and fitting voice cast that do a great job enhancing the experience. Now that I’ve played the game with speech, I’d never have it any other way.

GF: How many hours of work would you say have gone in to this game as it stands currently?

TW: Wow. There is no way to estimate this and I’m not sure brooding on it will make anyone any wiser. It is safe to say though that all my free time the past five years, and pretty much all my (and my three colleagues’) work time the past year, have all gone into this production. Not sure how much that adds up to, but it’s a lot of time. Lots of the time has been spent on the following chapters though, so not all of this time has gone into producing chapter one.

GF: How much more work is left before its complete?

TW: We’ve pretty much wrapped up chapter one. There’s still quite a lot of nitpicking and polish left and we are still missing a couple major cinematics, but apart from that and some minor technical snags, we are basically done. On the whole four chapters however, there is A LOT of work left to be done. The whole story and large parts of the script have been written, most locations and characters have been sketched out, and the basics of all puzzles have also been designed. But none of the content has actually started being produced. That’s what takes time.

GF: Is the story going to leave us wanting sequels?

TW: Definitely, in a good way though.

GF: When can we expect an official release date?

TW: We hope to have the game launched on PC and Mac some time during April, and we hope to see our iOS and android ports go live some time during summer. When the actual individual releases take place is actually more up to our digital distribution partners than to our own production though.

If you want to keep up with the development of The Journey Down, head over the to Dev Blog to keep track of things.

Back in June we managed to catch up with AJ Locascio, who is the voice actor behind Marty McFly in the new Back to the Future games. E3 was a pretty busy time for everyone, so rather than publishing it back then, we decided to time the release of the interview with our review of the game. Feel free to check out the review here, and watch the interview below.

During Sony’s conference at E3, a surprising face took the stage. Ken Levine spoke on behalf of Sony, more particularly the PlayStation Move. What we had all thought impossible became a reality when Levine announced that Bioshock: Infinite would indeed offer Move support.

BioShokc: Infinite takes players away from Rapture – far away into the sky to be exact. Players will find themselves aboard Columbia, a new city built in the clouds. Placed in the shoes of Booker DeWitt, a former Pinkerton agent faced with the task of rescuing a damsel in distress and bringing her back down to the ground.

Levine sat down and provided an interview before the E3 conference, giving us just a bit more insight to the story behind Bioshock: Infinite. Though he announced that the game will support the move, he didn’t offer any other details to how it will be incorporated. Check out the interview video below to catch up on the great game that’s coming in 2012.

The last thing we would want to do is spoil the ending of a great video game. If you haven’t beaten Portal 2 yet then you need to go get that handled, and then come take a look back here. If you have beaten that awesome game, though, then we have a treat for you. See what happens when you accomplish things?

The guys at Rock, Paper, Shotgun were able to sit down with Valve’s Chet Faliszek and Jay Pinkerton, both writers for Portal 2. Both guys take the time to shed light on early designs of the game as well as how it felt to work with J.K Simmons and Stephen Merchant, both actors who offered their voices to the game. There is even talk of GLaDOS and her evolutionary stages throughout the story in the Portal series.

The interview is a great read, and it’s perfect for fans of the game. To see the whole interview, head over to the post here. It’s great to hear from those who helped create a game that we all love, wouldn’t you agree? What has been your favorite part of Portal 2 so far?

While at C2E2 a couple of weekends back, we had the pleasure of meeting up with Claudio Sanchez. He is most well-known for his work with Coheed and Cambria, as well as The Amory Wars. Since we try to promote creativity here at GamerFront, it’s nice to chat with someone who has experienced success in their artistic endeavors such as this. Be sure to check out the newest comic, and catch the band when they head out on tour a little later this year.

Felicia Day, perhaps best well known for The Guild webseries, isn’t waiting around for work. She is currently donning her elf ears, daggers, and studded leather armor in the new webseries based off the Dragon Age video game.

Day is playing Tallis, an elf assassin who is hired by the Quinari to track down a wanted rogue mage who has his mind set on wreaking havoc across the land. She is joined by a misfit band of heroes who don’t exactly get along, but they band together when they need to get the job done.

Internet gaming site io9 spoke with Day in an exclusive interview about the webseries as well as her thoughts on the project. To see the interview, be sure to head over to io9′s site here.

I know I am excited for the webseries when it hits the web later this year. Are you?

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Con season starts once again and we at GamerFront decided to kick it off with one of our newest shindigs: Cosplay Shorts! Cosplay Shorts will be our short interviews we have with various cosplayers around conventions. So if you can spot us at the next con near you, why not come over ot us and tell us a bit about your costume? You could be our next interview-ee!

And as for our first interviews, we didn’t even test the waters… We just jumped right in. We had life-sized props, jaw-moving-snakes, and face-painted kitties. Needless to say, all the costume we saw at Ohayocon were amazing, so we tried to find our favorites and interview them for what they do when they’re thinking on making costumes.

Cliff Bleszinsky was in the G4 studios recently, and he spoke for a bit about Gears of War 3. Being the head of Epic Games, which is the company behind the previous two Gears of War titles, Cliffy B. has plenty of input about the newest title in the shooter series.

Bleszinski chooses his words wisely, and makes good points when it comes to how designers make players want to “marry a game instead of just dating it.” He also explains how Versus Mode in Gears 3 is “his personal sweet spot.” Check out the interview video below.

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A week ago we had the extreme honor of being able to go the Organic Armor Studio and see some of their work close up. Who are they you ask? Well, they make armor that is squishy; from the best way I can put it. We got to hear their personal story of how they got to where they are today, and how they’ve branched out from there. It’s always amazing to see exquisite work first-hand!

A big question some of you may ask is why did we interview this company? The answer to that question is that we think that they are awesome.  Plain and simple. Not to mention we have seen some of their work bring our world of video games to life, such as Tali from Mass Effect.

GamerFront is all about getting a closer look into all things gaming related, with a little cosplay thrown in for good measure. Just as video game designers create an imaginative world for you to be in virtually, Organic Armor brings you an inspired world to live in. The following is a little bit of what we experienced there.

Edited by: Suton Edens
Filmed by: Chris Barr and Caitlyn Muncy

[ Organic Armor ]