Game News DEMIURGOS, an alternate history RPG-adventure set in a modern Ancient Greece, now on Kickstarter

[ArchAngel]

I really hope more websites pick up on this.

When this game gets popular and journos and hipsters starts blabbering about how this game is "proof that videogamez can be artz" you are going to take back your words.

Maybe we should help to spread the news?
Creator is so inept at marketing that he even did not think about coming here, I doubt he contacted other sites.

So this is another Pierre .. makes awesome game , sucks at marketing and people skills and nobody knows about his game

Who is Pierre?

Guy that made KotC.

 

[Harry Easter]

I don't feel the magic. The video is too long and there isn't much gameplay. It does sound interesting on paper though, but the video bores me. I'm getting old.

 

[Zanzoken]

Double pretentious points for all the bad spelling and grammar.

 

[twincast]

The video narration triggers me. Start out happy with obvious but for a change not cringeworthy German accent, only to get whammied by multiple words he's clearly never (consciously) heard spoken out loud...

Also, it's irrational, but south-up maps make me uncomfortable. And I ain't keen on combat systems with random options. Anyway, the "pre-mice" is unusual and interesting, and if they manage to implement them well, the mechanics (cards' randomness aside) sound cool, too, so I guess I'll back it on the Agitator level.

 

[Daniel Bill]

Wow, thank you so much for your kind words...
I am really happy that the premise is beeing conceived so well here. Many people I have shown it to considered it too complicated and too confusing; specifically the scenario...
Actually I am not surprised, but I sure am releaved that essentially all of you, especially the OP, nailed it perfectly.
In the course of the campaign we will definetely show and explain more features; if there is interest this can additionally be done here!

The last few months have been an incredibly intense time for us.
We knew that - as newcomers - we would have to not only promise but actually prove, that our vision could become reality.

You probably can imagine that it is easier to develop a game in the way you would build a house.
In the last few months we had to construct a facade, having most pillars, but nearly no walls.
It was a major effort.

Now with the structure standing, not only were there multiple private and job-related issues that had suffered, but also a great exhaustion.
It was of great importance to me to use the day after the start of the campaign to regenerate; and I was finally able to start playing the Breath of the wild DLC.

However, us not instantaneously starting to contact media has a different reason:
As absolute newcomers we wanted to make sure that a certain interest was signaled, if a blogger or a website opened our kickstarter campaign.
Without a fanbase, an immediate rush on the project was not to be expected.

Lastly something regarding social media.
It seemed mighty awkward to twitter into the void of the ether or blogging to a handfull followers, bragging about the great areals and gameplay we have developed.
Maybe this sounds unorthodox, but I think at least some of you can relate. The plan was to post an update twice a month after completion of the kickstarter campaign,
especially because only then we will be able to exactly determine what has to be outsourced or cancelled, for example.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you personally and in the name of all participants for your interest and your kind words.
Reading your comments really made our day. I will most definite make a habit of checking by here once in a while.

Best regards,
Daniel Bill

 

[Tigranes]

At a personal level I'm sympathetic to those sentiments. It feels odd, and often disingenious, to set up new Twitter accounts, tweet incessantly, email 80 different journalists, all before a Kickstarter campaign has even begun.

The problem is that, time and again, it has been shown that that is exactly what you have to do, or your Kickstarter will fail - or at least miss out on 90% of the fans who would patronise it and also find the premise worthwhile if they only had a chance to see it.
This is incontrovertible; I've spoken personally to a number of folks who ran smaller video game KS, and they spent literally every waking hour of every day, days leading up to the KS launch and during KS, emailing people and replying to comments.

KS is not something you work hard to launch, then sit back and watch the results. It is more like an old school telethon, where you work for thirty days to sell your vision.
And it is not something where you 'prove' your project deserves to exist, and then you ask for media coverage as a reward. You cannot prove your project deserves to exist, if nobody can possibly find your Kickstarter page to begin with.

Perhaps your project, especially with a very modest goal, will somehow succeed nonetheless.
I say all this as someone for whom the premise alone was enough to pop down a fair amount of money. But if I weren't on the Codex, I'd never ever have seen the KS.

 

[Daniel Bill]

1. If you don't tweet, nobody else can retweet. Retweets are how word spreads.

Well, I obviously need to do my twitter-homework! Now.

Really hope you have a native speaker on staff to edit, because this was incomprehensible.

Yes! We have an american guy who does all the translation.

KS is not something you work hard to launch, then sit back and watch the results. It is more like an old school telethon, where you work for thirty days to sell your vision.

Thank you very much for your unsparing support and your trust. You can be sure that sitting back for the next month wasn't our intention at all, I may not have expressed myself very well regarding this, since we are already 100% back to work!

 

[Grumpy Grognard]

Wow, thank you so much for your kind words...
I am really happy that the premise is beeing conceived so well here. Many people I have shown it to considered it too complicated and too confusing; specifically the scenario...

I've been playing RPGs since the late 80s - and I'm really happy to see an interesting new concept & setting in an RPG. There used to be a lot more experimentation than there is these days - bravo, and keep up the good work. I find it pretty inspiring.

It's not too complicated or confusing at all - it's just original, and that results in some people having brain farts, because they've been fed a lot of rubbish over the years =)

I've pledged at the socialist level. Good luck!

 

[SausageInYourFace]

Wow, thank you so much for your kind words...

Just a heads up, Codex is usually far from being kind, in fact, its usually very rough, just so you are aware before someone starts calling your game shit ~

Another thing in case you weren't aware, here is a second thread for game discussion (since this here is just the news section) where people might ask questions and stuff.

So, whats the next update going to be about?

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

considered it too complicated and too confusing; specifically the scenario.

How the fuck can a mundane hostage situation be too complicated?

However, us not instantaneously starting to contact media has a different reason:
As absolute newcomers we wanted to make sure that a certain interest was signaled, if a blogger or a website opened our kickstarter campaign.
Without a fanbase, an immediate rush on the project was not to be expected.

Lastly something regarding social media.
It seemed mighty awkward to twitter into the void of the ether or blogging to a handfull followers, bragging about the great areals and gameplay we have developed.
Maybe this sounds unorthodox, but I think at least some of you can relat

You are both a decent person and an idiot. You kickstarter is jeopardized now. Kickstarters which does not get a big chunk of initial goal in the first 3 days usually fail. Better try to contact as many journalists as you can and hope that some get hooked by the artsy premise.

 

[Harry Easter]

Thank you very much for your unsparing support and your trust. You can be sure that sitting back for the next month wasn't our intention at all, I may not have expressed myself very well regarding this, since we are already 100% back to work!

Ich schreibe mal auf Deutsch: überarbeitet auch das Kickstartervideo noch mal. 20 Minuten sind wirklich zu lang. Fünf Minuten, nicht länger, mit soviel Gameplay wie möglich. Den ganzen Storykram kann man man später noch lernen.

Wichtig für den Backer ist:

- Was spiele ich?
- Wie spiele ich?
- Wie lange spiele ich?

Den Rest kann man ja nachlesen. Und die anderen haben Recht Vorankündigungen vor der Kickstarterkampagne wären besser gewesen, also promoted, promoted soviel wie ihr könnt! Es wäre wirklich schade, wenn ihr euer Ziel nicht erreicht.

 

[Infinitron]

RPGWatch post: https://www.rpgwatch.com/news/demiurgos--alt-history-rpg-on-kickstarter-38084.html

 

[Harry Easter]

Ich schreibe mal auf Deutsch: überarbeitet auch das Kickstartervideo noch mal. 20 Minuten sind wirklich zu lang. Fünf Minuten, nicht länger, mit soviel Gameplay wie möglich. Den ganzen Storykram kann man man später noch lernen.

Wichtig für den Backer ist:

- Was spiele ich?
- Wie spiele ich?
- Wie lange spiele ich?

Den Rest kann man ja nachlesen. Und die anderen haben Recht Vorankündigungen vor der Kickstarterkampagne wären besser gewesen, also promoted, promoted soviel wie ihr könnt! Es wäre wirklich schade, wenn ihr euer Ziel nicht erreicht.

Because the ratings for this post are all over the place: Whom of you does speak or read german? I'm really curious, because I wrote this in german.

 

[fireoak]

Hi Daniel Bill, game looks really interesting. I'm wondering, however, about the budget - 8k euros doesn't seem like enough for a ~2 year development. Do you have another funding source or something like that? Would hate to see this be funded and then fail to make the distance.
As for the campaign, I'd suggest splitting the last minute or so of your video (the part with the voice acting) into its own video - it's much more attention-grabbing!

Still, the setting is really unique, so backed at dirty Imperialist tier.

 

[Sizzle]

Backed.

Best of luck, Daniel Bill, we need more projects like this.

 

[twincast]

Wait a moment, the social media accounts have been up for well over a year? And left empty?! All that time to build up interest for the game/campaign by (semi-)regularly tweeting dev blog updates utterly wasted... For His Noodliness's sake, it isn't 2012 anymore! (...Five years ago already? Yikes.) How can any Kickstarter hopefuls still be this inept?

On the plus side, the smaller the campaign goal, the more (but nonetheless few) exceptions there seem to be to the structure of a short initial rush, a long middle slump and a short final rush with each of the three phases adding up to about a third of the final tally, and (more importantly) the less critical people are about second tries.

Some spelling mistakes (and one long video - with some odd pronunciations - covering several topics instead of multiple short ones ideal for updates) aside, the campaign page is actually pretty good, if maybe a bit spartan (heh), but without any aggressive marketing at launch, nobody's gonna see it. (One crucial error, though: Going by the tier descriptions and the rest of the "Vote the Truth" section, you clearly don't mean to say in the latter that "all backers, starting with the "opportunist level", will vote" but "...starting above the..." as one way of phrasing it.) And without an apparently realistic chance of success, despite Kickstarter's ever more prominently displayed all-or-nothing system few latecomers will risk throwing their money at it.

To be perfectly - and brutally - honest, if I were you, Daniel Bill, I'd mentally prepare myself to cancel (!) this campaign about two thirds through and retry better prepared in about half a year or so. And seriously improve your logo while you're at it. Also, I know what Ilion is, but how many do? Not clarifying - in the campaign, not necessarily in the game - that those dirty barbarians just took Troy, one of the few cities of antiquity almost everyone has heard of, feels like a colossal waste of an opportunity to connect with potential backers.

 

[MRY]

I am sure more learned men than I can clarify, but I find something weird about the use of "leviathan," a Hebrew term (apparently later a Latin word). I sort of assumed that in this setting Christianity never happened, so I'm not sure how the term would've come into general usage. The Greeks had their own word for, and legend regarding, a massive sea monster -- ketos -- the one that tries to eat Andromeda, and I believe that is the word that the Septuagint uses in lieu of "leviathan," so even if Greco-Christianity arose in this setting, I'm still not sure you'd get "leviathan."

This is obviously pretty persnickety, but it just feels off, particularly when considering twincast's point that you are forgoing the use of "Troy" in favor of the more obscure "Ilion" -- if you're going to go for verisimilitude, it seems like you ought to go all in.

 

[Hellion]

Protip: the game's map (as seen at about 3:40 of the alpha video) is an inverted map of Greece.

Backed it faster than you can say "total economic collapse".

 

[Tigranes]

I am sure more learned men than I can clarify, but I find something weird about the use of "leviathan," a Hebrew term (apparently later a Latin word). I sort of assumed that in this setting Christianity never happened, so I'm not sure how the term would've come into general usage. The Greeks had their own word for, and legend regarding, a massive sea monster -- ketos -- the one that tries to eat Andromeda, and I believe that is the word that the Septuagint uses in lieu of "leviathan," so even if Greco-Christianity arose in this setting, I'm still not sure you'd get "leviathan."

This is obviously pretty persnickety, but it just feels off, particularly when considering twincast's point that you are forgoing the use of "Troy" in favor of the more obscure "Ilion" -- if you're going to go for verisimilitude, it seems like you ought to go all in.

I'm assuming, re. the pitch, that this isn't just about extrapolating Greeks/Persians a thousand years on, but a weirdly anachronistic crossover - not 'what would history have been like if Persians/whoever ruled supreme for a thousand years' (which is always a pretty silly premise) but testing out different historical themes and crossroads. Maybe we have a Hobbes-equivalent.

 

[MRY]

Wouldn't he have called it Ketos, not Leviathan?

 

[Tigranes]

Probably. It could be any one of many gigantic monstrous entities that populate Antique mythologies, if we presume that Christianity never developed at all and this world has simply extended the reign of older, overlapping, multiple paganisms. I thought more of Hobbes when I first saw the subtitle, in which case the hypothetical Persian Hobbes could take from any number of candidates.

Is it one place where the creator bowed to accessibility? Leviathan has a great deal of cultural cachet, and I imagine that extending the alt-history to flush out Christian concepts and language would be an enormous task that ends with confused gamers wondering where all these strange Greek neologisms have come from.

 

[Hellion]

"Leviathan" has evolved from its strictly biblical definition and has come to mean "something extremely large and/or powerful" in general, be it a creature, a country or even an organization. I guess it is much more recognizable (and powerful/imposing) a word compared to Κήτος/Ketos/Cetus.

 

[MRY]

Obviously I know that, but when you are trying to worldbuild through name/word choice (e.g., Ilion instead of Troy, Anthenai rather than Athens, Demiurgos rather than Demiurge, etc.), things like that matter. To be sure ketos is not going to be that familiar, but "titans" or "giants" would probably have served. Indeed, "Leviathan" seems like a somewhat strange choice for land-based empires, and "Path of the Leviathan" is odd, too, since I took the trailer to be indicating that the leviathans were Persia and the Reich. Anyway, it's a very small point. :D

 

[Galdred]

The game setting sounds interesting indeed, and the scope (adventure + tactical gameplay + stealth + faction system) is pretty ambitious, so I backed, but 8000 seems really small for a country like Germany.

Lastly something regarding social media.
It seemed mighty awkward to twitter into the void of the ether or blogging to a handfull followers, bragging about the great areals and gameplay we have developed.
Maybe this sounds unorthodox, but I think at least some of you can relate. The plan was to post an update twice a month after completion of the kickstarter campaign,
especially because only then we will be able to exactly determine what has to be outsourced or cancelled, for example.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you personally and in the name of all participants for your interest and your kind words.
Reading your comments really made our day. I will most definite make a habit of checking by here once in a while.

Best regards,
Daniel Bill

It is awkward indeed, and I hate this part, being in the same boat, but there is no way around it. You have to blog to your 3 followers and your grandma, and tweet so that it does not look too much like a ghost town. I say that, but I also don't do that nearly enough.

 

[Daniel Bill]

Thanks to EVERYONE who backed us!

Another thing in case you weren't aware, here is a second thread for game discussion (since this here is just the news section) where people might ask questions and stuff.
So, whats the next update going to be about?

Thank you for the link!
Our next update will most likely focus on the great personalities one can encounter in the game.
Due to a lack of time (21 minutes is obviously already very long), we were not able to cover them in the video.
Nonetheless I consider them to be one of the most exciting features the player can expect.

überarbeitet auch das Kickstartervideo noch mal. 20 Minuten sind wirklich zu lang. Fünf Minuten, nicht länger, mit soviel Gameplay wie möglich.

Now it is too late to change the video. It was a difficult decision, but I think it might have been the right one.
The game is multifaceted and complex; explaining it takes some time.
What we will do, is upload the story-trailer seperately, as has been suggested.
I had the feeling the trailer by itself would be too confusing and that you needed the preview to fully comprehend who and what you are seeing. Any opinions on that?

Hi Daniel Bill, game looks really interesting. I'm wondering, however, about the budget - 8k euros doesn't seem like enough for a ~2 year development. Do you have another funding source or something like that?

We chose the Kickstarter goal to be 8000€ because that is the minimum we need to fulfill our tasks.
Of course, we have alternative (obviously limited) funding sources that have helped us get to the level we have reached so far (although living like spartans...).
The important question is, if I will be able to work on the game full-time or am forced to work another job from time to time to cover my expenses.
Ideally, the additional money will be used to pay for the additional time it takes to enhance and further enlargen the game-world.
But for now, our main objective is to reach our set goal.

This is obviously pretty persnickety, but it just feels off, particularly when considering twincast's point that you are forgoing the use of "Troy" in favor of the more obscure "Ilion"

Larger parts of what the narrator in the trailer says are nearly 1:1 quotes of Herodotos himself:
"The Persians for their part say that things happened thus; and they conclude that the beginning of their quarrel with the Hellenes was on account of the taking of Ilion."
"Also, sagen die Perser, sei es gekommen, und sie finden in der Eroberung Ilions den Anfang ihrer Feindschaft mit den Hellenen."
Herodotos: Histories (1,5,1)

I'm assuming, re. the pitch, that this isn't just about extrapolating Greeks/Persians a thousand years on, but a weirdly anachronistic crossover - not 'what would history have been like if Persians/whoever ruled supreme for a thousand years' (which is always a pretty silly premise) but testing out different historical themes and crossroads.

Thats it. Quote from website:
"[...] the famous philosopher and social analyst Walter Benjamin believed that the Christian based understanding of history and time, the concept of temporality as a segment with genesis and apocalypse, is misguided. In Benjamins opinion history is to be thought of as a historic continuum, out of which historicity – the narration of history – is to be entirely disengaged." Demiurgos: Path of the Leviathan”, uses this logic as its fundamental premise. Historicity has been disintegrated, its parts rearranged."
If you are more interested in this concept, I could elaborate. But not without my american guy translating it! People seem to be very serious when it comes to grammar and spelling mistakes (I propably can understand this a little...).

In general, because spelling and grammar mistakes are the strongest source of harsh criticism: I want to emphazize, that the english version of the game will be just as important to me as the german version is and that I will not "just let it be translated".