Popup Dungeon

Two of the most promising potential Wii U Kickstarter campaigns are now in full swing this week. With $100,000 stretch goals for Wii U support in both projects, let's take a look.

Texas-based studio Triple.B.Titles brings us Popup Dungeon, "a roguelike papercraft RPG that lets players create any weapon, ability, enemy, and hero they can imagine." As its title implies, this turn-based dungeon crawler features a pop-up book art style and an infinite number of unique procedurally-generated dungeons. It includes a Dungeon Master Mode, where one player acts as puppetmaster to other players' dungeon crawling experience. Triple.B.Titles believes this is a perfect fit for asymmetrical multiplayer on Wii U:

We own a Wii U ourselves and would love to bring Popup Dungeon to the system. Obviously, the prospect of having the Dungeon Master play on the controller's screen while the adventurers play on the main monitor/television is tantalizing!

We'll do our best to make this happen, but for the time being, it must remain a stretch goal.

There's a reason Popup Dungeon looks so polished: Triple.B.Titles already has experience successfully Kickstarting a game, with 2012's Ring Runner - Flight of the Sages. Popup Dungeon will be released via Steam for PC, Mac, and Linux, with Wii U as a $100,000 stretch goal. Triple.B.Titles has raised just under $30,000 of its $80,000 base goal as of this writing, with 27 days left. You can learn more and pledge your support for Popup Dungeon here.

We've written a bit about Hover: Revolt of Gamers before. Developed by French studio Fusty Game and published by Midgar Studio, Hover is an open-world freerunning/parkour game inspired by Jet Set Radio and Mirror's Edge, with a soundtrack by Jet Set Radio composer Hideki Naganuma and support for Oculus Rift. The game takes place in a futuristic alien city with non-linear missions and persistent multiplayer; you can switch between single-player and multiplayer at any time.

Fusty Game explains why Wii U isn't a base goal for Hover:

We don't want to do a bad port of our game, the Wii U is an amazing console and it have [sic] specific devices like the gamepad that allow us to create something amazing for this console like asymetric [sic] gameplay and local multiplayer and that cost a lot more than simply port the game to other platforms.

Also the Wii U is by far less powerful than XB1 and PS4 and have [sic] less memory, also our engine is not in the same version on PC/PS4/XB1 the Wii U version is an older version, we are already working on Wii U but for all that reasons and the asymetric [sic] gameplay we want to create, the Wii U version IS another version it require us to "recreate" the game especially for Wii U when other platforms is basically a one button export, and that justify the very reason of the goal, it's a real challenge and it deserve to be a higher goal.

Hover: Revolt of Gamers has been in production since October 2013 with a tiny development team of just three people, which makes its gorgeous 3D cel-shaded cityscapes all the more impressive. It will release on PC, Mac, and Linux if the campaign reaches its base goal of $38,000 — the Wii U target is $100,000. The team has raised just over $18,000 as of this writing, with 31 days to go. You can learn more and pledge your support for Hover: Revolt of Gamers here.

[source kickstarter.com, via kickstarter.com]