Information Antharion Kickstarter Relaunched

Tags: Antharion; Orphic Software

Orphic Software write in informing us they have relaunched the Antharion Kickstarter, this time with the lower goal of $10,000:

Antharion is a hard-core dungeon crawling turn-based RPG set in a vast and interactive fantasy world that encourages player exploration. What sets Antharion apart from other RPGs is how faithfully it recreates the experience of classics like Ultima, Wizardry and Pool of Radiance. Antharion combines an immense open world, deep tactical turn-based combat and a rich character creation system, with the distinctive look and feel of a traditional Western RPG. Antharion breathes new life into an old genre.

On our first Kickstarter experience

Our first try at Kickstarter failed at 92%, but that’s not the whole story. We’d done a total of just 5% in the week leading up to that day. In the last few hours of the project, our backers just went nuts driving funding progress up from 73% to 92%. You’d think that with just hours left to go, and 27% still needed, that they’d feel hopeless and just give up. Instead, they kept going, upgrading their pledges and pulling in tons of new backers. Eventually we the day with a gain of 19%. It was just amazing, it’s hard to express in words how that made us feel. We’ve been working on this thing for over a year, never really knowing if anyone else would actually be interested in it other than ourselves. Just to find out that there were so many people out there who believe in what we’re doing was a really amazing feeling.

Antharion has been a passion project and a labor of love for us. But we've reached the point where we need a bit of outside funding in order to continue working on the project full-time. Pixel art, original music and producing original content are all time-consuming and costly. Reaching our goal will ensure that we have the resources needed to finish Antharion in a timely manner. Exceeding our goal will mean tons of game play improvements and loads of additional content.​

Be sure to check out the Kickstarter page and re-pledge if you feel like supporting it again, or just study the rewards and consider pledging if it sounds like your kind of thing. $15 gets you a digital copy of the game.

 

Needs more dwarves.

 

I find it very peculiar how they were able to cut their budget by a third. What's being left out? They don't say.

 

Probably nothing, just playing a psychology game, expecting the same money, but hoping for positive reinforcement of having a successful project with stretch goals, then people going "not worth pledging, its not going to make it" if it's funded, more people may be interested in pledging as its going to happen and the chances of a finished product at the end are higher.

 

They're doing pretty well, too - they're already at $5,111 of 10k. The previous attempt got to $13,810 (of a 15k goal) - it seems like a sure bet at this moment that this will get funded easily and will probably make more than the previous Kickstarter.

 

Wonderful to see some real indies who have to "really" work before they pitch unlike others.

 

Seems like a project that doesn't really need money as their costs are mostly their own manhours. It seems more motivated by cheap PR for a previously unknown indy team.

 

Thanks so much everyone for supporting the relaunch!

I can assure you that this is not the case. While I managed to hold down costs while working alone for the first 8 or 9 months, I'm now a position of having to pay our professional pixel artist for his 6-9 hours a day of work on a weekly basis, this will eat up anyone's savings rather quickly. I also don't much care for the whole PR thing, however, it's an absolute requirement for running a successful Kickstarter campaign.

 

The relaunch is off to a great start, I backed at the alpha level this time. The pledge tiers seem to be well thought out and hopefully some of the higher tiers are more accessible to more people. Ari seems to be a great guy and dedicated, I feel confident that he can pull this off and it will be well worth every penny.

 

Fair enough on the first point. Also, I didn't mean the cheap PR thing as a slam. I think it's a good idea for the unknowns to stir up some interest. Even if you could do everything by yourself, I still think running a token KS asking for 10k or whatever is a good idea.

 

Just like when I have to open my wallet for a coder.
Fellow indies are on the same wave length. If you can do the art, code and music for a game (plus design)
you are a dam machine. But in the real world you can only do one thing real dam good with the rest requiring
a nice diet of $$$.

I cost nothing but a few ginger beers to keep running and a $20 fan (hot here in Australia and can't afford air con).
On my project I will be working alone on all the art for about 3-4 months.
Probably take a $1000 hit just to do the small prototype for people to taste the combat (well my wallet hopes only 1G).

 

ajrs84

why haven't you polished those rough edges before launching the KS?

you know... the big heads, the bouncy effect, the iamaholdingmahswordlikeitwasacupofbeer

pet peeves I know, but important pet peeves

 

Die.

 

Pledged. Looks like a fun pick up and play Vogel-like with a few twists of its own. And this time this is someone who truly needs help, not a Molyneux.

 

Hey, glad to see this is back! However, did you add in more cool stuff like was requested? Say, more spells, some special stuff for fighters to do in combat (battle arts or something)?

 

Why don't you redo all your work for a nominal KS fundraising. Sounds like a great idea to me.

 

Eh, the heads aren't disproportionately large from the screenshots I see so he must have already corrected that. The art style is a bit goofy bordering on jRPGish but I can live with it.

 

No doubt about it those heads have been shrunk. Some people seemed keen on character walking animation too but that's got to be a whole other story to implement.

 

Hey guys, we just posted a video update on Kickstarter detailing our working character creation system.

 

I mean this in a good way, the project seems like what if Jeff Vogel ever decided to step up his engine and come up with new artwork. Just remembered to re-pledge. I hope you guys hit your 15K old goal.

 

Looks good. I don't mind the character style or the lack of walking animation, but do you think that it could be possible to add tooltips for the equipment, stats and spells? I know that the icons are kinda descriptive, but still, please consider the tool tips.

 

Absolutely. I'd like to stress that everything we're showing off is very early pre-pre-alpha. Anything we release will be nothing short of 100% polished.

 

How do you plan to make over 100 dungeons and keep them interesting? Or are a lot of those just a couple of rooms, like small crypts and what not?

 

I was a huge fan of TES:Oblivion, but I couldn't stand the simple and highly repetitive dungeons.

To me personally, a couple of small rooms or a tiny crypt doesn't qualify as a dungeon. If you're going to make lots of dungeons you need lots of unique environmental tile sets and monsters, otherwise you start getting frequent bouts of deja vu. You also need lots of dungeons types in your repertoire: caves, traditional, crypts, barracks, ethereal otherworldly, etc and they should all be very different from one another design-wise. Also, every dungeon should have some purpose, or some marked features that distinguish it from every other dungeon in the game, which really just comes down to good old-fashion iterative design sense.