KickStarter Nighthawks - urban fantasy vampire CYOA RPG written by Richard Cobbett and published by Wadjet Eye

[HoboForEternity]

I am interested. Hope this succeed too.

 

[MRY]

Has any Kickstarter ever reached the 85% range and yet failed? I'm sure it's happened, but it seems unlikely.

 

[Urthor]

Has any Kickstarter ever reached the 85% range and yet failed? I'm sure it's happened, but it seems unlikely.

Plenty of times at the lower end, which this one is in the upper bounds of. Not uncommon to hit 60/70k and poop out.

 

[thesheeep]

Yeah, I think it is going to make it. 5k missing with 11 hours to go. Quite possible.

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

Its funded.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/753131002/nighthawks-the-vampire-rpg-0/posts/2305643

The Final Stretch...
Posted by Richard Cobbett

Madame Lux by Lucy Kyriakidou (@lucyrawrs)

I love fan-art...

Ahem! I mean, it's time for the final countdown. We've got 48 hours to make this thing happen, people! That's still very doable, but we're obviously going down to the wire. If you've been meaning to upgrade a pledge or nudge a friend, now is the perfect time. We've added some Silver Credit Cards along with the previous Gold ones, for if you want to donate a little more but don't want a second copy of the game, and of course we've got a few Be In The Game options left for particularly generous types. Pledge! Share! Eat donuts!

Is there anything else to say? I don't think so. Let's rock this thing...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/753131002/nighthawks-the-vampire-rpg-0/posts/2306604

90% Funded - 24 Hours Remain...
Posted by Richard Cobbett

Lux, always playing her cards right...

Okay, I wasn't actually going to send out another of these before the end of the campaign, but I thought this was cool enough to warrant it. Meet Madame Lux in person - and by that I mean her actress, Ivy Dupler, who also does cosplay on the side, donning the wig as well as the voice. Isn't that awesome? I think it's awesome enough for a final update.

Ahem. Last few hours, blah blah blah, retweet, share, pledge, etc. You know the drill. Just one addition - I've been asked a few times about add-on copies etc. Unfortunately, Kickstarter doesn't have built in support for that, but if you want to add an extra copy/tier onto your pledge, that's totally cool. (Just, uh, remember to remind me about it when the time comes, because I absolutely guarantee I will forget! But happy to offer that wiggle-room.)

Oh, and of course, if you need a great voice actress for anything, give Ivy a shout!

See you at the finish line!

 

[Dodo1610]

And it's funded


Apparently there are quite a lot of people that really believe in Nighthawks, so let's hope they are right in the end it it will be good.

 

[Dodo1610]

It's over they made 136.128 $

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/753131002/nighthawks-the-vampire-rpg-0/posts/2307738

Update Nr. 19

5. Okt 2018

Dawn Of An Endless Night...

Success! Never doubted it for a minute...
We did it! We're funded! And exhausted! But mostly funded!

This is the point where you're meant to say that you're 'humbled' by success, but I'm not going to do that because I'm a professional writer and so try to use words correctly. However, I know I speak for everyone involved in say that we're incredibly honoured by your support and your faith, both in directly pledging to make Nighthawks happen and in spreading the word until people were sick of the sight of the bloody thing.

Good job! Now go and rest our heroes!

There are enough people to thank to fill three entire Oscar speeches, but I'd like to throw some particular in-no-order shoutouts to Simon Canbäck, Jake Rodkin, the whole wonderful Failbetter team but particularly Haley Uyrus for her marketing help, Tobias Sjögren, Alexis Kennedy, Charles Cecil, Nina Roussakoff, Ivy Dupler, Ragnar Tørnquist, Danielle Woodford and the Disco Elysium team (when's that release date, folks?), everyone on our Discord channel, and of course my cat Humbug, who has been sitting patiently all day while his human stared at silly numbers without making too much fuss about his missing kitty treats.

And believe me, that's just the tip of the gratitude iceberg here. As tiring as this month has been, you simply don't get to do a $125,000 Kickstarter for an original IP in 2018 without immense backing from everyone around you, whether offering their advice, time, or helping with testing. I'm sure the second I send this, I'll be going "Oh, crap, I didn't mention...", but I promise I have not forgotten. Hopefully we'll be seeing some of you at AdventureX!

(Almost four thousand backers. Bloody hellfire...)

So, What Happens Now?
First, I need a very long sleep. After that, we head into pre-production. While there's a more complex timeline behind the scenes, the basic plan is that for this year I'll be clearing the current contracts on my slate while working on finalising the main design and code of the game, with the fingers-crossed goal of releasing a technology test version for PC, Mac, and if possible, Linux by the end of the year. This will be the same basic content as the demo version, but with much more polished up code and additional features, essentially built with the goal of making sure everything is running properly. That then frees up 2019 for writing and drawing the content, with the goal being for voice recording and beta-testing in early 2020. Development and slippage are obviously brothers in arms, but... that's the plan!

 

[Zombra]

I noticed there was an update. I didn't read any of this myself, anything interesting?

Update #25

Apr 27 2019

The Twisting Root Of All Evil
Posted by Richard Cobbett (Collaborator)

All hail the blood god. Richard here once again, whatever it might say at the top there.

This month, amongst other things, I’ve been experimenting with a couple of ideas. There’s enough of the game systems in now to get a feel for what works, and what worked better in my head. More to the point, there’s enough to start asking a few questions about what’s there because it ‘has’ to be there, and what actually suits the experience that we want to provide.

More than most, think of this developer diary as a ‘Things Being Pondered’ type look behind the scenes rather than an actual feature/design promise, because while the ideas work in my head, there’s a chance they just won’t work in practice and so I’ll decide to go back. However, I think it’s interesting to talk about this kind of thing as something living and being played with, rather than just pretending that every system emerges fully formed and perfect from the cosmic brain. So, just to be clear: this might not make it into the game. Right now though, I like the idea.

Specifically, I’m thinking of how money is handled.

Economics With The Truth
That might not seem like a big deal, but if you’ve played RPGs before, you’ll know that the economy is pretty much the first thing to break. The usual arc is that in the first chapter, you’re broke, then by about five hours in you’ve picked up enough crap to sell to vendors or done enough quests that you’re basically the richest person in the universe and money ceases to have any real value. This is why many RPGs offer what’s called ‘money sinks’, just to give you something to do with it - rebuilding a castle, say, or buying gold armour for your horse.

For a while, I’ve worried about this being basically the deal with Nighthawks as well. It actually follows that economic arc almost exactly - you start broke, you become (spoiler) successful as a nightclub owner. Realistically though, that means you only really have cause to care about your bank balance right at the start of the game. By the end of Act 2, it becomes a non-issue. Either that, or it starts to become super-noticeable that you’re still struggling to buy a fancy knife at a point where you should be able to throw money around like Kiryu Kazuma in Yakuza 0. Or, conversely, you end up with the Grand Theft Auto 4 situation, where you’re roleplaying as someone without money, despite mechanically having about $30,000 in your pocket.

So, I started Pondering. Idea 1, which I swiftly got rid of, was to borrow from Zelda, with the idea that your money is limited by the quality of your ‘wallet’. This didn’t taste right. It meant that, in-universe, someone would be giving you money and you’d be “Nope, I’ve already got a thousand bucks, I’ll just put it into a shredder.” Not particularly satisfying, and a poor experience.

Idea 2, which is the one I’m currently trying out, is to just get rid of money.

Just get rid of it. Entirely.

…well, almost.

Stats and Statability
Specifically, it shifts the focus not to specifically how much you have in your pocket but a more general ‘wealth’ stat that represents your general situation. You start off Broke. Instead of being paid specific currency, you level up until you’re merely Impoverished. This level then determines what you can buy, and how often. For instance, if you’re Broke, you can’t afford to buy blood. It’s out of your price range. If you’re Impoverished, you can treat yourself once a week. If you’re Wealthy, you can call a blood doll to your sanctuary like most people order a pizza. As for quest rewards, you still get them. You still see progress, and numbers going up, to ‘pay’ for your time. In Act 1, that includes your hotel bill. It just becomes another tracker that increases whenever you get cash, so that mechanically, instead of having $200 when your landlord comes around (or whatever the number would be), you're essentially completing a quest which ticks towards completion whenever you earn money, with a deadline of the next rent day. Then you pay the rent, that quest tracker is reset, and you repeat the process for the next week's deadline.

Now, this of course adds problems and complexities of its own. Some of them aren’t actually as big a deal as they sound, but still have to be factored in. For example, does this mean you can go to a store and buy everything on the shelf? Well… yes. But the thing is, you can generally do this anyway - if not immediately, then after a few hours into the game. The solution is, firstly, not to worry too much about the basic level stuff. If the player wants to buy a knife AND a baseball bat, it really doesn't matter. They can only buy one of each, and wield one at once anyway. Fill your proverbial boots. Ideally not with knives.

For more advanced gear, things can be gated in other ways. For instance, a gun seller might show you their basic Tier 1 gear, but to access Tier 2, you have to meet some other standard, like having done them a favour or reached a reputation level. This is how things are generally handled in MMOs, money being basically worthless after a while. It also adds some interesting roleplaying elements in terms of working to access the good stuff.

Problem, Meet Opportunity
Outside of shops, things get more interesting. Fiddlier, but more interesting. For example, let’s look at the Wounds system. As implemented, the idea is that Vitality is your day-to-day health, and Wounds are the larger-scale representation of your health. Vitality restores itself, if you’ve drunk blood recently. Wounds have to be treated, usually by one character in particular - an outcast doctor named Samuel who hides out in a crappy hospital basement.

In the current implementation, this works as you’d expect. Pay $200 or whatever, he fixes your wounds, we have some suitably gory text, and then you walk away ready to get into more wacky scrapes. Getting rid of money… well, that immediately negates the economics of that.

Darn.

However, switching that currency for a favour-based exchange suddenly becomes more interesting. Firstly, the standard economic problem - after a while, that ceases to be a factor. You have the money. You just spend it, because obviously you do. Second, in-fiction… this is actually a bit silly. For reasons I won’t explain because spoilers, Samuel can’t actually leave his basement for the most part, so what use is money to him? He can’t spend it! It’s literally useless to him. What he needs, for himself and his patients, is blood. In large quantities.

Thinking further, this made me consider another economics issue - buying blood. Though early on it's easy to restrict that by cost, after a while the player will presumably be in a position to buy as much of it as they can drink, and thus have no reason to hunt any more. That means they’re not really Being A Vampire like they once were, or facing one of the biggest moral qualms about the whole experience. To some extent, that's okay. Part of your rise to power is developing options. But it still does have to be a factor here.

Combine all of this and suddenly we have an interesting new arrangement where an injured player might have to hunt in order to get blood for Samuel, even if they can buy enough to quench their thirst. After all, you’d need more than a glass of the stuff to do any good. And even if you have professional blood dolls and the like at your disposal, they’re not going to be keen on letting you take a couple of pints for a friend after having your fill. So suddenly, if you get wounded, you have a new interest in hunting - not to drink, but to drain your victims for a creepy vampire doctor. That also puts the player in an implicitly moral grey area where they have to commit acts for their own benefit, without the ‘out’ of just throwing money at the problem.

(Incidentally, unlike many vampire universes, animal blood doesn't work in Nighthawks. It used to, but I decided that was making things a little bit too easy, both morally speaking and on an industrial level of how to feed vampires in the modern day if you could basically just bottle abattoir runoff. So, no grabbing and draining rats or whatever. Not in this game...)

A Reminder That We're Pondering, Just Pondering
All of this is how it’s working in my head, anyway. It might not work in practice. I might just restore the classic cash system if there are too many problems, or if the solutions are worse. For instance, an idea I was pondering this morning was 'regenerating' cash, where you'd have your wealth stat, but a limit on daily spending. I didn't like this though, for a few reasons. Firstly, it felt like a crappy F2P mobile game kind of design decision. Second, it would be hard to represent that in the interface. 20% of your current spend rather than just $200? May as well just charge the $200. Third... well, you get the idea. Often an idea that initially seems to smartly solve an issue can sprout off a whole load of annoying edge cases and similar.

Either way though, I hope this has been an interesting look at behind-the-scenes thinking, and how elements of a game like this can combine and recombine in interesting ways. At the very least, I often think it’s interesting to play with these ideas. Stock genre mechanics like cash typically exist for good reasons, not least that they’re both safe and easy. Often, they’re the right call. Sometimes however, you need to kick out a foundation or two and see what happens. Especially when it's still early enough to prop stuff back up.

Nightbook Profiles: Alistair Wick

"I cannot deny being a monster. But a retired monster, if that makes any difference.”
Wick is the oldest vampire living openly in the City, though far from the most senior amongst vampires as a whole. He is the only millennial - an Imperial of over a thousand years old, many of them marked by cruelty, avarice and vice. But even sin gets old. With his record cleansed through the New Century Code’s amnesty for vampires, Wick now sits as a symbol of aristocratic undeath - a figure of culture, solemnity and respectability to act as a role-model for the more chaotic younger generations finding their way in the new world. Still, there’s a difference between absolution and forgiveness. Wick knows that one day, his crimes will find him, and entirely deserved punishment will follow. He just hopes it will, finally, grant him peace.

Endnotes
In the mood for a new adventure game? Perhaps Whispers of a Machine will fit the bill. I've yet to play it myself, and had nothing to do with it at all, but it's next on my hit-list and has been doing well in the reviews I've checked out. Closer to home though, and for full disclosure, you'll definitely recognise the main character as being Ivy Dupler, aka our own Madame Lux, with Dave directing the voices. It's also the first game I've seen in a while that offers a 'nudity' option along with things like volume levels, though it might be broken because I started the game and everyone was still dressed. Maybe I misunderstood.

Anyway. Until next month!

 

[baud]

I noticed there was an update. I didn't read any of this myself, anything interesting?

The idea to abstract money, replacing with a Wealth stat (start at broke, level up to impoverished and so on to wealthy) could be interesting. But there's not a lot of technical details, just some ramblings on how it could work.

 

[Yosharian]

It's over they made 136.128 $

They made 136 dollars and 12.8 cents?

wow, congrats

 

[Infinitron]

This is back:

Six months ago, you died and were reborn. A vampire. A predator. Not a mere creature of the night, but one of its masters. At least, that’s how things were supposed to be.

Unfortunately, the world has changed. The secret is out. Vampires have finally been exposed, and though your existence is tolerated, your new thirst is not. You came to the one city willing to promise a fresh start, only to find suspicion and starvation waiting on its dark streets. But death could not hold you, and fear will not hold you back. When the sun goes down, outcasts *rise*.

It’s time to seize the night by its throat.

WELCOME TO NIGHTHAWKS

Enter a twisted, darkly comic city where humans and vampires are struggling to live together. Take over a failing nightclub on the wrong side of the tracks, and turn it into your personal empire through seduction, intimidation, and careful use of secret supernatural Gifts. Befriend and recruit fellow outcasts, digging deep into their stories and harnessing their skills. Explore a fully voiced, lavishly written world of dark shadows and bright neon, where your every decision will push the world towards a bold united future, or forever destroy any hope for peaceful coexistence.

FEATURES

• Climb from rags to riches as a modern Vampire
  
• Build your nightclub into a true nocturnal empire
  
• Meet a cast of off-beat, fully voiced characters
  
• Indulge your inhumanity— but be home before sunrise
  
• Engage in strategic combat against humans and vampires alike

MEET THE TEAM

Nighthawks is written and designed by Richard Cobbett (Sunless Sea/Sunless Skies) with art by Ben Chandler (Unavowed, Technobabylon, the Blackwell Series), and produced by Wadjet Eye Games. Made possible with the generous support of 3,934 Kickstarter backers, and many others who have contributed their faith and assistance.

 

[MRY]

Should be “hold you down” or “keep you down” for death, for better parallel structure. Otherwise slick video and copy writing.

 

[Aemar]

It looks like any other dime a dozen titles of this kind one can find on Steam nowadays.

 

[Darth Canoli]

So, that's a vigilante wannabe with a boring invasive story and lesbians?
If the combat is top notch, might be worth a spin, otherwise, it's another useless turd.

Back in the days, you could at least use the CDs for target practice ...

 

[Infinitron]

So, that's a vigilante wannabe with a boring invasive story and lesbians?
If the combat is top notch, might be worth a spin, otherwise, it's another useless turd.

Back in the days, you could at least use the CDs for target practice ...

The "strategic combat" is probably menu-based, no?

It's funny how this game looks like a ripoff of Coteries of New York now despite being announced way earlier.

 

[MRY]

I feel bad that Richard doesn't list the project on which he was writing lead (TLJH); I know how excited he was about finally having a lead role, and it's a shame that complaints over the game's controls have made him uncomfortable associating with it. I don't think he's even a credited team member on the Sunless series.

 

[Infinitron]

Nighthawks on the Escapist Indie Showcase:

 

[Zombra]

Hobknobling RaggleFraggle

Don't get too excited for Nighthawks to be the next great vampire game. Aside from the very dull premise that I complain about upthread, responses to the demo have not been encouraging. One or two cute goth chicks in the artwork aren't going to be enough to make this worth anyone's time.

 

[Yosharian]

I don't think anyone was getting excited

 

[Sacibengala]

Why is this even covered here? It reeks bullshit for miles. Even the new V:TM excuse of a game is better than this.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Meh! :/

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Hobknobling RaggleFraggle

Don't get too excited for Nighthawks to be the next great vampire game. Aside from the very dull premise that I complain about upthread, responses to the demo have not been encouraging. One or two cute goth chicks in the artwork aren't going to be enough to make this worth anyone's time.

Beggars can’t be choosers. The Paradox games are worthless. I’m already soured on Red Embrace: Paradisus regardless of its objective quality because the dev banned me from their discord server for walking on eggshells (which aggravates my social anxiety btw, so fuck those guys). This is my last option short of making my own game (ftr, I am trying that too because I’m sick of waiting). If this doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t work out. I’ve been waiting two decades for a decent vampire game, what’s another decade or three?

 

[Herumor]

I’ve been waiting two decades for a decent vampire game, what’s another decade or three?

Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen exists.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I’ve been waiting two decades for a decent vampire game, what’s another decade or three?

Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen exists.

I’m well aware of BloodNet, Blood Omen, Redemption, Bloodlines, DARK, Vampyr, V Rising, etc. I played a vampire in Shadowbane back in the day.