I would update that thing ASAP. You were on the local news this morning so that is good I guess.
We need more information about combat, dialog, character progression, etc...
What is the game comparable to? How involved will some of these high profile guys be?
Agree 100%. I will try to answer as many questions as I can here and on KS and elsewhere.
Design team (which is more than just the public folks) is in process of posting things about this stuff today, they will be up within an hour or two and probably we'll see three updates over course of day on this. Everything runs through a couple of people and they are fielding an enormous amount of inquiries right now so we're just moving as fast as we can.
...and we based it on Star Citizen which obviously is the most financially successful by far...
Kinda like saying let's do an investment thing based on Bernie Madoff's model which was very successful. It's not even that what Bernie did was a scam, it's that it's the kind of scam that very few people can pull off.
Anyway, why Apocalypse Now? You really think the "brand" has enough pull to conjure almost a mil out of very thin air and drive the media into frenzy? I don't think it aged well. Plus, while the Vietnam war is a sufficiently interesting subject to explore, exploring it from within the movie might be unnecessary limiting. Still, looking forward to the updates.
Apocalypse Now is owned by Francis Ford Coppola and his family. So he can license it directly to our game team and we just work with them on the creative / licensor concerns. This is a HUGE difference from working with Paramount Pictures or Ubisoft or WOTC/Hasbro where there are big bureaucracies that are very costly and ineffective to deal with on the creative level. That's an executive motivation for sure.
Creatively, everyone involved just loves the movie and wants to make a survival and horror styled RPG in the world. SS1/2, DX, VTMB, but not just copy things (though iterating from things that work is always smart in games) but letting the motion picture itself drive some of our design and creative decisions. Bad movie games and bad game movies come from ignoring the fundamental things about the original story or game that were great in the first place. We have an opportunity not to ignore that.
On the financial front, I mean, I care to some degree because it's money but, if I just cared about money I'd work on Wall Street. If crowdfunding is a fad, it's a fad. I don't think it is. I think it's the new way of doing things and what we're going to announce and show not just in relation to Kickstarter but our own site will help communicate that message.
At the same time, we're just game producers, directors and writers who have an idea and a means to take that idea to the world rather than to companies and we want to do that for exactly the reasons stated. The same thing that draws us to working with Francis draws us to working through crowdfunding -- it takes video game development and makes design and creative more important that financial projections and political machinations.
We want creative freedom. We've designed a way to ask for it. Now the world will say whether this particular idea is an idea it wants or not -- and I think it's going to take a little longer than with most things for many people to decide how they feel about this -- if it was simple we would have made it with a publisher 7 years ago and it wouldn't be worth taking to the people.
