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The guys over at extra credit often discuss different things in short animated videos, now they reached crowdfunding. I thought I was going to post it in one of Chris threads in goldhawk announcement subforum, but as it doesn't seem to focus on pitfalls or downsides of crowdfunding I decided to give it it's own topic. It's more a comparison to the 2-3 other ways to fund a game, and still an interesting watch. http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/crowdfunding And they have a forum. I havent browsed it yet but it could possibly contain some gems. [http://extra-credits.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2192 Totalbiscuit has an irregular series named "kicksmarter" where he looks up seemingly overlooked projects:

Hi there Chris, and everyone. Glad you guys got the game out on Steam but I am wondering what's going to happen to all the digital rewards for Kickstarter backers. By this I mean - How do I get the forum badge? as this thread : http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/145-What-are-the-Founder-bdges?highlight=founder is closed - How do I access the novella without the badge? (I don't use Desura) And is the Homeworld style exposition still happening!? http://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/showthread.php/3447-Homeworld-style-Story-Expositions?highlight=homeworld

Will you look at this. I backed it without question. It's a must have. http://battle-worlds.com/

http://www.xenonauts.com/kickstarter.html That was a wonderful guide, but it appears it was written before kickstarter started its services in UK. Any chance of a guide describing the UK funding process similarly? I have been meaning to fund my project for some time, and even have a prototype on call from china, and considering how long it took them to add just one more country, its evident, that waiting for them to come to India is a pretty bad idea :? Thanks in advance Regards a fellow entrepreneur Rika

Found this through Total biscuits WTF is... The MMO PvP in WoW never really appealed to me because of the advantages gear got you.. you had to farm PvP all the time, not just when it was fun to be able to compete. And you needed to be in a group of players that farmed together, if you took a break they replaced you. This game doesn't have progression. Anything you can change or buy are sidegrades so the playing is rather level in that sense. The maps and targeting system seems to allow for a lot more vertical combat then the MMO pvp allowed for. The game seems interesting, at least conceptually. http://www.playforgewar.com/ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/166522941/forge?ref=live

Let's face it. Making a computer game isn't cheap. The cost of salaries. The cost of licencing techology. The long development cycle. Rents. Equipment. The lead developer dying in a car crash. All of it adds up. If we go by kickstarter crowdfunded games, development typically starts at a quarter of a million dollars, and only spirals up from there. Hence the publisher. The guy with the money, the guy who can make dreams happen. Of course, only if those dreams happen to make the right margins. Only if your studio continues to be profitable, each and every game you turn out. Hence crowdfunding. For people that don't want the all-strings-attached rules of the publisher. But for every game that gets crowdfunded, many more don't precicely because they are so expensive to make. So, the question I ask is will publishers remain the primary source of funding for many of our games not only today, but going into the future or will crowdfunding slowly edge out the publisher?

If anyone here has their head brimming with brilliantly creative ideas but is, alas, out of funds and a non-U.S. citizen, I propose you take a look at this handy guide, written by your favourite indie developer. I found it a curiously fascinating read!

Who is checking emails every time hoping that the key is there?

I couldn't see anything around what the poster is going to be as the Kickstarter reward. Has it been announced?

I don't think I'm the first to post this and I know I'm not alone on this, but could you keep some of the kickstarter rewards open a while longer? While I currently lack the funds to do this, by mid-July I should have enough money to aquire the sweet $200 pre-order/kickstarter-thingy-mo-bob. I'd really like to get it, but it came about with so short notice, I wasn't able to save any up for it. Is it and possible?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1869102574/conquest-2-vyrium-uprising-rts-fans-unite?ref=category This kickstarter seems to be getting sad ending =/ Devs have been trying to do the game for years, but they don't seem to have any luck in kickstarter either. I guess original game is forgotten by now so nobody remembers it. Also no game journalism site wants to cover it. Do game journalism sites have something against kickstarters now?

I assume you've all seen the KS video. Well, if you thought your day was gonna suck, think again. /steals thothkins' slogan Sorry if this is spammy, I guess the excitement's getting to me.

Hello there, I supported Xenonauts via Kickstarter and got the "Standard Pre-Order" Pledge, but i dont know how i access the dev-builds? I also used the search function, but i dont find any other with that problem. Greetings, Shuro

Can we add multiple kickstarter donations and have them add up? I plan on getting the old prenium pre-order soon. Also, I'd eventually like to get those extra features, at least once I get the money too, taht is. So, is that possible? Betuor

Build V10 is currently being uploaded onto Desura. This will be the Kickstarter Press Build that we'll be sending out to journalists so they can preview the game. Barring any serious crash bugs or things that are affecting gameplay, the .exe files will not change any further between now and the public release build - we may make some balance tweaks, update misaligned / broken tiles and update images, but we won't be making any further changes. This is simply because efforts to fix the bugs can end up causing more bugs, and we have to draw the line somewhere if we want to know we have a stable build for when the Kickstarter goes live. There are a variety of fixes, but here's the headlines: - Hidden Movement loop should be stopped. It was caused by aliens running out of ammo and then trying to fire their weapons anyway. - The Ferret should now have its LOS returned to normal. - The new props for the Industrial tileset have now been painted over in their undamaged forms. - Various mis-set tiles have been updated - Toggle Roof now defaults to being off rather than on, which should reduce confusion - Alien Light Drones (we need to come up with a better name for them than that) now have a less powerful weapon, so they can't one-shot your Ferret any more - Ferrets now have better ballistic armour and are less vulnerable to damage to Xenonaut small arms (friendly) fire - Typos and errors in the Xenopedia have been updated - The Alenium grenade sprites should be displayed correctly - The Basic Armour troops with Shotguns should vault walls correctly - Tooltips in the Air Combat now have appropriate line breaks so are a more reasonable size - Pressing M on the Geoscape no longer nets you $1m - Alenium and Alien Alloys now only sell for $1,000 or $2,000 each instead of 10x that - Alien fighters can now dodge missiles as intended The online manual is starting to take form at http://www.xenonauts.com/manual.html Please give the build a whirl. If there's any bugs, we'll want to know about them before we send it to journalists. Hopefully it'll basically just be a slightly more stable version of V9.5.1 though.

For the uninitiated, I've had the idea of a funding thermometer floating around in my head for a while. The basic concept is a kickstarter event where people can donate money, and once it reaches certain preset levels then we will add a new feature to the game. It's partly a marketing gimmick to get more attention for the game, but also a serious way to raise more money. There's a couple of part-time team members who I'd love to bring on in a full-time role, most notably the lead coder and the weapon / vehicle concept artist. Unfortunately this requires a certain amount of upfront capital because they're not going to leave their jobs unless I can guarantee them a wage for at least a year (which is fair enough). The idea would be to raise about $100k, which would pay for all the items on the list and also give me enough money to hire the lead programmer and the artist for a year. The three of us would then form the core of Goldhawk and would continue to contract out the other work as required. If we do this, I think it's important that we make it worth people donating, so I'm trying to get a lineup of proposed additions to the game that get people excited. Here's what I've got in mind: 1) Soviet weapon pack - this is a replacement pack for the starting weapons, which are currently NATO weapons, so they are Soviet weapons instead. The player will be able to choose one or the other at the start of the game and they are identical in-game. 2) Tileset Specific NPCs - the civilians would be dressed appropriately for the tilesets they are in, rather than having general purpose civilians across all the maps. I think this will give a better impression of geography rather than the feeling everywhere is somewhere in or around America that often happens in games. This will also extend to the local friendly NPC soldiers, which is part of the reason why we have the Soviet Weapon Pack - you'd want Russian or Arab troops armed with AK-47s and RPGs rather than NATO style weapons. 3) Extra portraits - at the moment we have 25 soldier portraits. These repeat too frequently as is. I'd like to have 45-50 in the final game so there's more variation. 4) Alien Corpse Variations - at the moment we've got a corpse for each alien type, but as each variation costs about $50 each we've not done one for all of the different alien ranks (it'd cost several thousand dollars). Ideally though, we'd like to have a unique corpse for each alien race/rank combination that reflects their model. 5) Medals System - soldiers level up through combat experience at present, but there's no rewards for specific behaviour like getting seriously wounded in action, surving multiple missions or killing a dozen aliens. It'd be good to add a system where there were a dozen or so medals that soldiers could earn that would provide them small stat bonuses and add a little character to the troops. 6) Intro Movie - we don't have an intro movie at the moment. It'd be good to have one. I'm thinking something like the Homeworld one, which looks awesome but would also be affordable for us. It would cover the Iceland Incident and the origins of the Xenonauts, and maybe be 2-3 minutes long. Link to the Homeworld cinematic below as an example: 7) Community Prizes - I want to encourage people to help us out in the beta, most notably with mapping and the game balance. Therefore I'd like to offer a $1000 prize for the best mapper and the best balance patch, as well as smaller prizes for other outstanding members of the community in areas like generally being helpful or bugfinding. I'm hoping that will get a few people involved (as well as get a little press coverage). 8) Animated Ground Tiles - it'd be good to have some animated ground tiles for the ground combat, particularly in the UFO and the alien base. Glowing power cores and things floating in test tubes etc. 9) New GUI - This would basically involve rolling out the style of the Main Menu across the rest of the game. The idea is that instead of a glorified spreadsheet (which is how the game currently looks) we go for a more immersive hand-painted look that puts the player actually in the base. The layout of the screens wouldn't change that much, but I think it'd really improve the presentation. 10) Dynamic GUI - This is an improvement on the new GUI shown above. The basic idea is that your base and the personnel change as you perform in-game actions. As you research new technology, the people you're talking to change (so the head engineer might start with a blowtorch but by the end of the game has an alien cutting laser tool or something) and the backgrounds change too. So the research lab starts off looking pretty old-school but by the end has lots of advanced computers etc in it. I'd love to put this in. 11) Hire our staff full time - as mentioned above, this is the eventual aim. Having our lead coder go full time would help us immensely because he's working more than full time on his normal day job already and we're probably working at about 20-25% of the pace we could be because of that. Our weapon artist would basically be working for us at cost, which is pretty low given his rates for everyone else are about $100 an hour. Right now he's basically donating his time to us for free, which can't go on forever. Anyway, I'm interested to hear if people have any ideas for other stuff we can add (NOT female soldiers) that would add to the appeal of the fundraising, or any comments on the above. The funding would hopefully come mostly from people buying Standard and Premium pre-orders of the game on Kickstarter at the normal price ($20/$30), but we'd have a few other levels of commit too. We'd probably have a $2 and $5 'tip' level where you don't really get much extra for your donation (perhaps a wallpaper or something), and then some higher ones. The higher ones would probably revolve around 'super-soldiers' which would have a 2% chance of spawning when you hire a new soldier. They'd have +5 to all their stats (so they're basically like a starting soldier). One level would give the super-soldier a chance to have your name and nationality, another would let you name it and choose a portrait, and the highest one would let you name it, choose a nationality and have us draw a portrait for it directly from your photo that you'd send to us. So, yeah, thoughts? Do you like it? Does it come off as tacky? Interested to hear opinions.

So Double Fine (Tim Schafer) put up a Kickstarter project last night seeking funding for an old-school point-and-click adventure game. Their target was $400,000-$300,000 to make the game, and $100,000 to document its creation for contributors. They are currently sitting pretty at over one million dollars in under twenty-four hours. I'd say this has some interesting ramifications for the future of gaming in general. Get that Kickstarter up and running, Chris!

Yes, I understand this is a capital venture. I also realize I can buy multiple copies of the game, but it seems more efficient to donate directly to the organization. Is this possible? What is the best recommendation? Thanks

EDIT: Disregard, saw an earlier post with Kickstarter mentioned. Have you guys checked into Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/) to get funding? Seems to be an easy way to get the necessary funds to help finish the game.

Hello everybody Due to recent events with this whole hoopla of paypal being bitchy and so on and the massive ammount of work chris has put into getting everybody sorted i thought it appropriate to do afew things in return All of us here understand the risks that G.H.I is taking in creating a game like this, esp since the new (FAIL) X-Com game is on its way, as i see it there will be numerious problems along the way, not just legal issues but development issues aswell So in part, since Chris and the others already have enough on their plate, the last thing they need to worry about is funding issues aswell, sooo since Chris worked his ASS off to get everybody sorted, im proposing that one the new finance provider is sorted that we all donate alittle cash in G.H.I's direction The way i see it, by doing this we get our lovely devs in a good mood for awhile which drasticly increases our's and their chances of doing the right things, not just for the game but for the community aswell So as ive said, i think it will be a good idea, so what im going to do is Once the new finance provider (Hopefuly not paypal again) has been sorted and up and running, im going to donate an extra 30 euro to the back pockets of G.H.I, and i will hope that i wont be the only one, since we are all looking forward to the resurrection of a game that should have been done YEARS ago As a sign of good faith ......Now i just gotta find the donate button Peace be with you all... atleast until we get ingame -VegetaFH1