KickStarter Back From Hell - An upcoming ARPG by Photoplay Games

[HobGoblin42]

AND WE ARE LIVE! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1403822981/back-from-hell-a-classic-crpg-puzzle-adventure Please spread the word everyone

Backed, but please fix that link - it's totally messed up.

$100k USD is quite optimistic, but good luck !

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Backed, good luck.

 

[Photoplay Games]

Backed, but please fix that link - it's totally messed up.

Backed, good luck.

Thanks everyone The link is sorted now.

$100k USD is quite optimistic, but good luck !

I know its a big ask but to make the game massive and as detailed as I would like that is what it is going to take. The props and costumes and all materials ramp development costs up a lot.

 

[V_K]

 

[daveyd]

Backed. Fortunately there's already some backers with much deeper pockets than mine. I'll do what I can to spread the word.

 

[Merlkir]

Yeah, backed, but 100k seems like it will be a problem.

 

[The Fish]

Looks interesting but there's no way in hell it'll ever make the target.

 

[Photoplay Games]

Looks interesting but there's no way in hell it'll ever make the target.

Well I think your probably right, despite an initial surge in support the campaign has died a death. We have had a massive issue with the project being so low down the Kickstarter page, hanging with the deep dark scams and a single piece of concept art campaigns from the first second. This has killed any chance of passing traffic. Also we have had little to no press coverage and what has been written has been totally inaccurate (FMV game, Point and click game blah blah blah). So if things don't improve over the next couple of days I'm going to pull the plug.

Thanks everyone who supported us, the project isn't dead just yet. (don't get me started on Greenlight, a part of me wishes I'd got myself a copy of FPS creator and made a shitty COD clone)

I always knew that this would be a 'love it or hate it' kind of game. Reviving an unloved, long dead art style was always going to be risky. Nevertheless I like risk, creating another pixelated platfiormer was never going to motivate me. Going forward I have a few options.
Scale back the game and self finance but this will require some serious cutting back.

Scrap the land of the living and start the game off in Hell? This would save a bunch of money as populating the town is probably the most expensive part of the development.

Make the game episodic

Relaunch on Kickstarter or indiegogo in the new year, seems very busy on Kickstarter now and with the election coming up, nobody seems to be doing great on there at the minuet.

Or accept defeat and scrap the lot, maybe there just isn't enough love out there for digitized stuff.

What do you think?

 

[V_K]

Scrapping the land of the living seems a logical thing to do, given that the ending of that part is kinda spoiled by the title already.
One other obvious option (in addition to the above), though I'm not sure how willing you are to consider it, is to scrap the RPG/combat parts and make it a pure Adventure. Should save you quite a few animations and a lot of development time, theoretically.

 

[Photoplay Games]

is to scrap the RPG/combat parts and make it a pure Adventure

Actually that was going to be another suggestion and your right, that pretty much is the second most expensive part of development. It takes tons of time and tons of footage to get right.

 

[daveyd]

I think it was largely a problem of exposure, not that there's necessarily anything horribly wrong with your concept. Some KS games enjoyed ridiculous amount of success because they were given shoutouts by lots of big / previously successful KS game projects. Darkest Dungeon comes to mind; they made a really great teaser trailer which got them lots of exposure. Also the Cthulhu aspect probably didn't hurt as people seem to gobble up Lovecraftian inspired games lately. Perhaps that's what your game is missing?

Also, this is probably the worst time of year to launch a KS in general (holiday shopping season). People are saving their disposable income for gifts / travel so pledging money on a game that will hopefully come up in a year is something many won't even consider. (I think this may be a big part of the reason Deathfire didn't make it's goal a couple years ago). Wasteland 3 Fig was still a success but that's obviously a huge project that gets lots of press, Brian Fargo is a great (snake oil) salesman, and when you eliminate the investors and look at the actual backers it was actually their least successful crowdfunding project (though that might be partly due to the new platform or higher min. price for a copy as well). I'm sure the US election isn't helping either.

After all, most of the negativity on your Steam Greenlight page seemed to be focused on the "you'll never get funded", not "your game looks like shit". Take heart in that.

Anyway, seems you will need to lower your budget / scope, so I think ditching the combat is definitely the way to go. The combat was the least appealing aspect to me personally, as I generally dislike real-time combat. As long the choice & consequence aspect can be retained I think you will have something special. As far as I can tell, non-linear adventure games are still pretty rare. My interest in your game would actually increase if I didn't have to suffer though ARPG hack n' slash portions.

I'd hate to say get rid of the land of the living altogether as I'm assuming from the title the idea was that your character will find a way to return... perhaps as a revenant on a quest for redemption / revenge. Seems like a good angle. I mean, a game where you're stuck in hell for the entirety seems to be lacking a goal... But yes the initial living world part could probably reduced or even removed entirely. Since you're obviously going to die that part may as well be a cut scene / tutorial segment. Also if the PC returns to Earth as some sort of undead creature, then perhaps he can only go out at night so that gives you a valid excuse for the city streets to be less populated.

Early Access is of course another option to raise funds. Many gamers seem to react negatively to the idea of an episodic release though (myself included tbh). But the only downside to EA is that some people (and the press in particular) often treat your Early Access release as if it were the game's launch... So you'll need to have it fairly polished and with enough content to justify the price as the initial impressions will stick with you.

I think you should try Kickstarter again next year with a reduced scope / goal. It is commendable that you asked for what you need and not what you thought you could easily get so I'm not suggesting you deviate from that, but I'm hoping that getting rid of the combat would be a huge reduction in costs and actually make your game better / more appealing to the adventure game crowd.

 

[Photoplay Games]

When I started the project there are two words I swore I would never use Lovecraftian or Roguelike, I'm aware they are both valuable in the world of Indie game marketing but they make me shudder, they are thrown around so much. Maybe I will have to dance to the tune of the marketeer :D

daveyd I do believe you are right, there are an unusually high amount of projects struggling or getting cancelled early on KS.

Honestly im relived listening to your opinions about combat, from the beginning the focus of the game was always going to be the interactions between characters, story and puzzles. I tacked on combat solely because I beveled that it would be what people would expect the game to have some kind of fighting. Combat costs money largely due to prop manufacturing, not to mention how tricky it is asking your actors to perform wearing all that equipment and the large amount of additional editing caused by reflective surfaces on armor and weapons. Chroma key hates shiny. Killing the combat would lighten the financial load considerably and make me a real happy camper.

I probably will still feature maybe a little, something like casting a fireball to activate a switch or something and say a one off turn based thing based around a puzzle. Basically very very infrequently, reserved for special little moments rather than blasting demons etc.

It would kill me to ditch the village, it took me so long to put that all together and without giving too much of the story away what plays out in Hell will decide whether you get to see the village again or not. I wanted to create three different locations for the final steps of the game to play out. Ill have a think about what I can do to cut it down in scope a little. In the KS video I was trying to show the living world much brighter and airy, a real contrast to Hell. Returning in the dark certainly makes sense.

Truthfully I don't like the idea of an episodic release myself, just feels like a way to extract more money out of people. The last episode always seems to cost more money. Also not that keen on Early Access. I will do my best to avoid this, im going to spend the next couple of weeks seeing where I can cut back on things and start prepping for another launch.

I'd like to ask your opinion on KS reward tiers, personally what I would like to do is cut back on these. It would save me time and money for sure. What I was thinking is as follows.

Donate anything

48 hour limited game price £6

digital game after £12

hard copy £20

And that's it, really cut them right back. It would allow me to sell the game cheaper, more time to concentrate on the game and not have to finance a ton of rewards im not sure anybody wants. What do you think?

 

[V_K]

I'd like to ask your opinion on KS reward tiers, personally what I would like to do is cut back on these. It would save me time and money for sure. What I was thinking is as follows.

Donate anything

48 hour limited game price £6

digital game after £12

hard copy £20

And that's it, really cut them right back. It would allow me to sell the game cheaper, more time to concentrate on the game and not have to finance a ton of rewards im not sure anybody wants. What do you think?

Given that at least 60% of the money your current campaign made comes from the 1000- and 500-pound tiers, I'm not sure it's such a good idea. I'd keep the digital rewards (except the manual - having it as a higher-tier reward instead of default package looks awfully shady) and ditch the physical ones, including the hard copies (or make them an extremely limited edition for a much higher tier).

It would kill me to ditch the village, it took me so long to put that all together and without giving too much of the story away what plays out in Hell will decide whether you get to see the village again or not. I wanted to create three different locations for the final steps of the game to play out. Ill have a think about what I can do to cut it down in scope a little. In the KS video I was trying to show the living world much brighter and airy, a real contrast to Hell. Returning in the dark certainly makes sense.

Another alternative would be not to make the village a fake - another Hell's realm masquerading as a village. It would be thematically fitting, I think, to have the Devil screw the player up.

Honestly im relived listening to your opinions about combat, from the beginning the focus of the game was always going to be the interactions between characters, story and puzzles. I tacked on combat solely because I beveled that it would be what people would expect the game to have some kind of fighting. Combat costs money largely due to prop manufacturing, not to mention how tricky it is asking your actors to perform wearing all that equipment and the large amount of additional editing caused by reflective surfaces on armor and weapons. Chroma key hates shiny. Killing the combat would lighten the financial load considerably and make me a real happy camper.

I probably will still feature maybe a little, something like casting a fireball to activate a switch or something and say a one off turn based thing based around a puzzle. Basically very very infrequently, reserved for special little moments rather than blasting demons etc.

If you go this route, you could also market it as a combat-free RPG, the innovative aspect should get you at least some publicity.

 

[daveyd]

If you go this route, you could also market it as a combat-free RPG, the innovative aspect should get you at least some publicity.

I'm a firm believer that RPGs do not require combat (I enjoyed "pacifist" playthroughs of Age of Decadence and I'm looking forward to "No Truce With the Furies"). But to be an RPG it still needs, at a minimum, to have some stats / skills which can be improved as you progress, IMO. Obviously this could be done with skill checks, but I don't think that was ever part of the plan for Back From Hell. Unrest was marketed as an RPG (with only a few optional fights) and to some success as they raised $36K from almost 2000 backers. But what we got was what I would call a "puzzle-free" adventure game. Choices with consequences aren't enough IMO to qualify as an RPG. It may be niche, but there is definitely still a market for old school adventure games, so I don't think developers should be afraid to market their games as one if that is what they really are.

Photoplay Games as far as rewards go, perhaps you could up with some somewhat higher priced rewards that would not consume much of your time or resources. Something along the lines of limited tiers for naming an NPC, getting a tombstone in the cemetary with a brief epitaph, etc. (And you could have a disclaimer that you reserve the final say in what's appropriate for the setting / tone so you don't end up with some Codexer putting in a dick joke that doesn't fit) And I think you should probably keep the Designer Grandmaster (design a puzzle) reward tier possibly at a slightly lower price point. There might be some backers who might enjoy that sort of thing and it wouldn't cost as much as tiers that require you to make more props / hire more actors.

 

[Photoplay Games]

Thanks for your feedback, feeling pretty happy that all that has been suggested I have considered at some point and is pretty straightforward to change. In hindsight I should have come to you guys for advice earlier.

Feels like I was almost heading in the right direction and that it would be better to concentrate on the games strengths rather than trying to do too much. I do need to put more thought into the rewards and I really would like to get the cost of the game down too. I was kind of rushing to hit my date, I seriously underestimated the time it would take to build the campaign page.

I'm going to regroup and tweak the game. One other thing that has been bothering me is the game name. It seems after I had picked my title another game called Slain decided to relaunch with Back From Hell as a subheading. I've had a lot of confused folks emailing me. Do you think I will lose some followers if I change the name at such a late date or should i risk it to avoid confusion.

 

[daveyd]

Ah yeah, Slain does come up on Steam when I search for Back From Helll. When Googling it I can also see that there have been movies and albums with that title which might not be ideal. Your game's site is on the third page of results.

I think you're still early enough that you could still change your game's name. I don't know what kind of traffic your website is getting, but I'm assuming that you could at least temporarily have backfromhellgame dot com redirect to a new URL. Unless you're about to get Greenlit on Steam I can't really think of any problems with changing the title.

Perhaps someone here can suggest a good name for your name (you could ask the current KS backers for suggestions, too). Choosing a good title is tough. Obviously you want something memorable that hasn't really been used before. Perhaps use one of the less common names for Hell. Or "Mortal Sin" Or a reference to Dante's Inferno. Anyway, I'm sure someone can help with that if you don't already have ideas.

The good thing is you can still post an update for the current Kickstarter once it is over to keep any backers updated about the game & when you relaunch it. There's only 28 of us but hopefully most would back again so you'd be off to a great start if you do a new KS with a lower goal. I'm guessing you might be thinking about canceling the KS but I'd actually recommend leaving it up and just let it end. While it would require a miracle to get funded at this point, there's still a chance a few more people will still come along and back it and then you have more potential backers to update for next time

 

[Baron Dupek]

First review is out

 

[Photoplay Games]

East of Berlin?

 

[daveyd]

"Back From Hell" is back from failed Kickstarter purgatory for a 2nd attempt w/ a lower goal.

 

[vazha]

So its an adventure now? and with puzzles to boot. Disappointed. :/

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

The animations remind me of Mortal Kombat.

 

[daveyd]

So its an adventure now? and with puzzles to boot. Disappointed. :/

It's an adventure game with puzzles and ARPG elements. This was the case since the game was first announced. Only thing that has is the game may be a bit smaller in scope, hence the lower funding goal this time.

 

[Don Peste]

Condemned to fail miserably? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1403822981/back-from-hell-a-classic-adventure-game/comments

 

[Master]

The animations remind me of Mortal Kombat.

I keep expecting him to do that kick. And a MK rpg sounds like a good idea. Too bad...