Now, Sooner, Soon – Three European-Accented Kickstarters Head For Home

14 January 2013

It’s been a week of threes – first three games for the sick, and now three games earnestly seeking your funding.

To be fair, I’ve been ill.

Two have already reached their goal, and are stalking their stretch targets like ferocious jungle cats. One is still short, but with time to spare is definitely worth looking at. With the first wave of British Kickstarters now coming to their closes, after the opening of the UK Kickstarter store and an end to scrabbling for an American board member and a Delaware address, two also represent the first wave of UK Kickstarter appeals for games.

Maia

Simon Roth, whose appeal for funding for Maia is ending in less than 24 hours, has a degree of form, having worked as a technical artist for the big (Frontier’s Kinectimals) and the small – notably the conversion of Terry Cavanagh’s indie darling VVVVVV from Flash. A technical artist and C++ developer of no little accomplishment, Roth is building a custom engine for his proposed god game, Maia. Very much in the rock-hewing mould of Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper series, Maia is set on an inhospitable planet, being terraformed for human habitation. The player has to build a colony and keep its inhabitants sane and alive, in the face of internal and external threats.

The debt owed to Peter Molyneux’s visions (Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black and White) is clear – colonists need to be kept happy, or at least sane and alive, and the cute, bobble-headed robots who form the core workforce are even known as IMPs – and there is a particular kind of Britishness promised in its approach, with the patched-up space tech and emotionally disturbed androids characteristic of Douglas Adams. It also draws for inspiration and award names from the sci-fi dystopic mold of Silent Running, Dark Star and other reasons why the 1970s represented a Golden Age of science fiction cinema.

 

After a flurry of donation took Roth over the funding line with little time to spare, he is now assigning stretch targets – and allowing his backers to decide what happens if Maia manages to pass £200,000 (around $300,000, give or take). They can vote either for a top-down roguelike combat mini-game, or three different selectable worlds in which to build the colony, ranging from a dead world without resources to an undersea base on an ocean world. So far, the varied worlds seem to be getting the majority vote – which feels like a tremendous amount of extra work, but a stretch target is a stretch target.

Peter Molyneux, meanwhile, has launched his own Kickstarter campaign for GODUS, a god sim to be released by his indie studio 22Cans. Is this a case of kick-blocking? Time will tell, but on the rising tide front few can advocate so fluently for the god game as a medium as Molyneux. Admittedly, few will also be met with as much skepticism, either, but the case of Molyneux is a bigger one than this blogpost can sustain.

(I’d argue, also, that there is something quite American – and specifically quite Californian/Cascadian about the sim game, in which one focuses on creating an environment in which an individual or private forces can flourish, and something quite British about the god game, in which you tend to slap subordinates about until they are utterly cowed or totally neurotic. But that’s an analysis for another day.)

Humor is legendarily hard to do in video games, and god games are not an unchallenging genre – but if Roth can pull in the right team, and pull off something that evokes the bleakness of Silent Running and the humor of Hitch-Hiker, Maia could be a treat.

Sir, You Are Being Hunted

From British humor to the great British countryside – and specifically The British Countryside Generator, which is at the heart of Sir, You Are Being Hunted. This game has been in development for some time, and its Kickstarter, which ends this week, is aimed at part-funding rather than fully funding its development. Developer Big Robot’s primary media asset is no doubt studio co-founder Jim Rossignol, whose other hat at Rock, Paper, Shotgun gives him immediate name recognition among PC gamers. However, arguably their secret weapon is Tom Betts, whose procedural expertise will drive the creation and endless recreation of the British countryside.

Marketed as “Tweedpunk”, Sir, You Are Being Hunted will put players in what appears to be a procedurally generated Derbyshire – complete with gorse, high grass and rocky outcroppings – being hunted mercilessly by robotic gentlefolk. A first-person stealther/shooter built in Unity 3D, hopes are high for a sort of Deus Exmoor.

[I am on fire. No, I mean I am actually on fire. Someone has set fire to me for that pun, and honestly I can’t blame them.]

With new enemies from the Kickstarter funds including a monocled landowner and red-coated robot fox hunters, this is a class warfare simulation in the great British tradition, with cold-blooded robots standing in for the Harris-tweeded gentry.