Earlier in the year we told you all about Festival of Magic and conducted an interview with developer SnowCastle Games. Confirmed for Wii U, it's a game that promises to deliver a throwback JRPG experience — with some tweaks — that'll include turn-based battles, while also incorporating elements such as farming. It looks like a visually appealing and rather interesting title.
It seems that the strains of development have impacted on budgets and plans, however, as SnowCastle Games has now launched a Kickstarter campaign for the title, with the pitch making no mention of the previously-outlined episodic structure and giving a target release of January 2015 — an initial aim for early episodes was Q4 2014. Thankfully the Wii U is still a standard platform alongside PC, Mac and Linux, and the game looks largely the same. The following was posted to outline the funding still required to complete the full project, though the initial Kickstarter target is $250,000.
We have currently spent over $1M and will need a little short of $900k to complete the game. $250k we hope to get from all of you through Kickstarter, another $50k will come from the Norwegian Film Fund provided the Kickstarter is successful. Finally, the remaining $600k will have to come from stretch goals, pre-orders on Steam and finally, if we have to, from investors.
If the two main challenges are overcome, keeping the deadline for launch requires hiring at least one additional programmer and a game designer. This is something we have budgeted with in order to maintain the production schedule. If we don't find those two people in time, we will still complete the game, but it will take longer.
The least expensive incentive to back for a Wii U copy is currently the "Early U" option at $20, which is limited to 300 backers — at the time of writing 173 of these are still available. From that perk onwards all options require an extra $5 to secure a Wii U version rather than a Steam equivalent, so those that aren't quick will need to back to the tune of $30.
You can see the pitch video below; at the time of writing the campaign has reached just over $22,000 of its $250,000 target with 26 days to go. Has this been on your watch list since announced earlier in the year, and are you tempted to back the project to support its completion?
[source kickstarter.com]
Comments 18
I'd kill for a turn-based RPG on the Wii U in the near future (and I mean before 2015).
This looks pretty good, if too far into the future for it to really be on my radar.
That's very expensive for a WiiU download.
I see that the game will have a full overworld if they can get $300,000. So what will the game have if they DON'T get that much?
I consider help backing it.
Many details (not only the wolf-like creature) remind me on The Legend of Zelda.. must have been a big inspiration too.
I missed this earlier, but came across the Kickstarter a few days ago. It looks promising enough to be worth a $20 pledge, although that quarter million feels like it's too high a goal to reach, even if it does represent a reasonable amount for development.
I've pledged $20 for the Early U tier. This looks exactly like the type of game that I would enjoy, and I think the pledge amount is reasonable given the quality and content that seems to be present in the game.
And thank you to the Nintendolife staff for sharing these Kickstarter projects. I love Kickstarter, but don't always have time to browse the webpage looking for Wii U games I might like.
@Klinny I find that my problem is not lacking time to browse, but lacking the time to do anything more than that. There are a few hundred games available and I can't investigate more than a few, so I have to reject most of them based on only the icon and synopsis. Automatically rejecting PC games risks missing out on games like The Girl and the Robot which have Wii U stretch goals. Last week I pledged for Churbles, which I literally hadn't even heard of until it was in its final six hours. For so many reasons I love Kickstarter, but I definitely would appreciate help in finding the best projects. I'm sure the developers would appreciate someone helping me too.
I remember when NintendoLife reported this kickstarter project a while back, and I can still say that I am pretty interested in this title. I wish it luck in reaching its crowdfunding goal in a reasonable amount of time.
a lot of kickstarter projects don't live up to the lofty expectations they set for themselves. I'm getting the feeling this will be the same.
even if they do get if off the ground the price tag on the wii u is ridiculous.
This honestly looks interesting.
I might send some money their way when I get paid.
Unrelated, but the tech preview video for IronFall on the 3DS has been released. Pretty good looking game.
improved quite alot but his running still looks kinda wrong also they did much for this one thing but they got still to improve.
all in all looks interesting but i never back up kickstarter projects just cause.
improved quite alot but his running still looks kinda wrong also they did much for this one thing but they got still to improve.
all in all looks interesting but i never back up kickstarter projects just cause.
Backed immediately, been looking forward to this since it was first publicly shown.
@Dpullam The interesting thing is it wasn't a Kickstarter project back then when we first reported it, just a game in development. Budget issues appear to have pushed the developer to crowdfunding in order to finish the game.
@ThomasBW84 I completely forgot about that. Let's hope that crowdfunding can give the game an extra boost to edge it closer to being released.
@Thomas. You are quite right. We have talked to investors and publishers, and they all seem to have jumped on the F2P wagon. We can make FoM an F2P, but that would be the last resort, as we really prefer the game to be a one time purchase.
If our Kickstarter is successful, it will give us the needed leverage to persuade them to go with the one time purchase model.
As for the episodic content. We have merged the first two episodes and now consider that the first game in what hopefully will be a long series of games. Making episodic games is also a secondary option, chosen when money is tight.
It reminds me somehow of Beyond Good & Evil, which is never a bad thing. It's just that besides the art-style maybe, I can't point out why exactly it reminds me of one of my favourite games... But it looks to be turning out great, so I hope I'll be able to get it, and if I can, I will.
@ueI I'm guessing it means that the game uses a travel point system where you just get a 2d map and then go into those spots for full sized dungeons rather than say a fully connected world map where you can travel between destinations like Golden Sun. Unless, they mean something even further than that like Fallout 3 where you never actually "leave" the world map (so completely open world).
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