Independent games, especially smaller ones, often have a hard time making themselves known. Smaller indie games are often obscured by the shadows of both million dollar game productions and better known indie titles alike, and don’t get the attention they deserve. GameAspect.Com therefore hopes to shed some light on these games, and all the wonderful new ideas they bring. This is a feature in which I interview indie developers about their upcoming and recently released titles.
Filling in for Michael who started this series I interview Ben Steele as he and the team from Aoineko develop their new game, Kitaru.
Serena Nelson writes: "Until last week the last we heard from the Kitaru devs was almost a year ago. Several people, including myself, had finally written it off as a lost cause. About two months after I had written up a post mortem I got a message in my inbox telling me that development has been continuing, albeit at a snails pace due to having lost valuable people on the team and taking time to learn how to code. While I'd have loved to have heard this news much earlier than this at least we now know why there was radio silence and that the game is still on track to being finished. And we finally have a short, although in rough alpha state with low polygon count, demo to play in."
Serena Nelson writes: "Three years ago Aoineko Studios launched a Kickstarter for their Cyberpunk RPG Kitaru and managed to get funding to the tune of just over $35,500. The problem with this title, though, is that it still hasn't seen the light of day. Which isn't that surprising considering that there are other projects that ran at around the same time that are still being worked on. What is surprising is what's happened with the project since."
That is the downside of Kickstarter.
Some @ss devs just take the money and run. There should be some kind of rules or regulations for this kind of things.
Kickstarters have a time period to reach their goals. They do need the money for resources and to hire people to do the jobs. It would be impossible to refund money when the people do need to get paid for time put in.
It takes sufficient funds to finish a project. Without the funds, support, or the cooperation of parties involved a project is doomed to be cancelled, and the workers collect their pay for their work put in.
I like that Cliqist stays on top of these Kickstarter projects. I completely forgot about games like Kitaru.
It's nice that a gaming website out there actually takes consumer concerns into account.
Thank you, Cliqist. May you continue to be pro-consumer and grow steadily on the ashes of GJP-ran websites.
To kick of proceedings, we thought it would be best to start off looking forward. 2013 was a great year and we have plenty to reminisce about, but let’s look forward to 2014 and the games we can’t wait to get our hands on.
