A Kick for Kickstarters: Sea of Stars and Holmgang

The year 2020 has been a bad one, far worse than even several cynics who thought they were well adjusted to this dark timeline expected. But it’s been a good year for something: Kickstarter. The Wonderful 101: Remastered’s crowdfunding campaign showed how video game project crowdfunding isn’t dead after all. It raised over $2.2 million by the end despite having a $50,000 initial goal, making it the biggest video game-related campaign to grace Kickstarter in a good while. The same applied to the campaign for isometric RPG Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which ended by making a little over $2 million.

Naturally, several developers feel that now is the best time to launch a campaign, though whether that will last is another question.

One such campaign is for Sea of Stars, a turn-based RPG with a sprite-based aesthetic reminiscent of a 16-bit or 32-bit Japanese RPG. It’s not evident upon seeing it in motion, but this project is a prequel to critically-acclaimed indie ninja platformer The Messenger, though in a different genre. It will star two main characters, Zale and Valerie, young trainees on a journey to become Solstice Warriors. They intend to become the most formidable line of defense against The Fleshmancer, who threatens to ravage the land alongside his monsters. The two trainees are the only characters being shown at the moment; the game will actually have six playable characters.

There’s a semi-lengthy trailer and plenty of screenshots and GIFs on the page because this game is a looker. It combines classic-style sprite work and animations with modern lighting effects, with pretty results. At the very least, the experience will be a visual and audio splendor.

The developers at Sabotage Studio stress that Sea of Stars is being made so it won’t be tedious, balanced in a way where players won’t have to level grind for experience points and enhanced stats to progress. Each character, they’re also promising, will have a variety of attacks; having only six, a moderate count for an RPG, should give them the opportunity to create several unique attacks.

The game’s presentation and the well-designed pledging page, along with the popularity of The Messenger, was enough for this campaign to reach its $92,249 goal within less than seven hours after it launched. It also already reached the stretch goal at $217,000 for a single-player+ mode and a bonus dungeon. The campaign has raised a little more than $257,000 as of this writing, an impressive-enough amount that it should reach the next stretch goal at $350,000 for in-game cinemas by the end.

It will take a while for Sea of Stars to release after the campaign finishes, though, making this campaign more honest than others. It’s not planned to arrive for unspecified consoles and PC until sometime in 2022. Remember that 2D games can still take a while to develop.

Another campaign launched recently is Holmgang: Memories of the Forgotten coming from Zerouno Games, which consists of former staffers from companies like 343 Industries, EA, MercurySteam and Rockstar Games. It will be a 3D quick action-adventure RPG, “quick” in how it can be completed within eight-to-ten hours, shorter than other titles in the genre these days — even of the indie variety. It will feature three playable characters: Barbarian Kandar, ronin Tatsu, and Amazonian Valentia, who all seek to defeat Emperor Hazulem in the land of Dracorum.

Holmgang’s hack ‘n slash combat, the developers are promising, will allow for players to edit their own combos from the options menu, and unlock more attacks as the game progresses. It will be accompanied by a watercolor-style aesthetic, with occasional ink effects thrown (or splashed, perhaps) in. The animated GIFs on the page show parries, and how players will be able to execute enemies if they enter a special state. The development team has given some thought to the combat and overall style, despite this being a self-classified “quick” game.

It’s just a shame that it’s not doing better. Zerouno Games asked for $45,000 for the initial goal, and it’s made a little over $5,800 as of this writing with 24 days remaining for the campaign. For one that’s been active on Kickstarter for a few days now, this isn’t a good start. The time in which this campaign launched didn’t help it, with the pandemic enveloping the world causing people to readjust their spending habits. The Kickstarter page also doesn’t contain enough previews of the game compared to other recent crowdfunding campaigns, and the pledging video has no gameplay despite an alpha demo being available for download. Stretch goals were already planned, which suggests that the team was hoping it would do far better than it’s performing at the moment. This isn’t doomed just yet, but it will need help from here.

If Holmgang is funded despite its current odds, it’s planned for a release on Steam in fall 2021. Other platforms are attached to stretch goals that haven’t been added to the page, and they likely won’t be.

Campaigns for projects like The Wonderful 101, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and Sea of Stars launched at the right time, in fact, just before the Coronavirus pandemic started getting bad — and it will only get worse. This isn’t to say it still won’t be possible to have a successful crowdfunding campaign from here, but it will be harder. It, in fact, could make this new crowdfunding renaissance short-lived. Hopefully that won’t be the case.