Help with funding

[piranha]

Here is your chance to support Warbarons. We have launched a kickstarter campaign.

Kickstarter is a way to fund projects by offering various levels of "awards". You can be drawn as hero unit in Warbarons or design something with us. Our campaign will end on February 28. If we don't reach $6.000 by then we won't get anything at all so we need all the help we can get.

All the money will be used to improve the game in various ways.

Open the url in a new tab (or it will open in the iFrame) : http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1499327409/warbarons-a-classic-turn-based-strategy-game?ref=email

[Negern]

Hope everything goes well. Just wondering what happens to the money if it doesn\'t reach 6.000? I want to send some money, but want to be sure it goes either to you or no place at all - not to that other page.

[LPhillips]

Yeah, I'm not down with sending my money to some site that isn't you. What's the low-down?

[ezras]

Kickstarter is incredible and does great things for creative minds across the world.

If 100% of funding is not reached no money is ever transfered. So we pledge our money and when time runs out if the funding goal is met then the "funders" transfer their monies. If the funding goal is not met then no money changes hands. The rationale behind this approach is that it allows a developer or creative mind to test out an idea and wait for appropriate funding to try and implement it rather than limp along with one donation here and another there. It tests the demand for a product before the product hits the market.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/f ... rter/all/1

[LPhillips]

Oh, I see. Is there a breakdown of how many active players are on Warbarons? If you can do that, it would be easy for us to know what to give. If you have 300 players each, you could ask for $20 each and start from there.

[kenc80]

I would agree. I've donated to two other kickstarter campaigns and its an awesome site and an awesome way to support creative projects. Very good website. Good luck Snotling & Piranha! I am definitely going to be donating!

[Jeremy]

Upper corner of your screen. "Active players: 221" (or whatever the current number is.)

But you have to presume that half of them will not donate, because they either don't want to, don't know about it, or are broke. So that's $6000 divided by 110, or $55 on average for each donor. Seems a little challenging, but not impossible. In reality, most will give somewhat less, and some will be quite generous and give more.

[piranha]

Just like some of you pointed out, you pledge, and if we reach $6000 the money is transferred to us, otherwise they never leave your account.

We don't expect our current active player count to do all the funding. We are going to work as hard as we can to reach the goal. By the way we have $200 now so only $5800 left to go .

[ezras]

From what I can gather from the campaign notes there will be a suscription or monthly fee after the game leaves beta? or is that after the kickstarter campaign ends. If that is the case it is all the more reason fund the campaign now, right?

[piranha]

Ezras: There is going to be something like this: Free account with a limitation in how many games you can have running at the same time, but you can keep playing for free for as long as you want.

Silver account which will remove the number of games limit.

Gold account which will have a couple of interface features. Nothing that will give you an "cheating" type of advantage, but helpful interface stuff.
There is also going to be a limitation in the number of AIs you can host depending on your account to not overload the server with AIs .
It will be subscription based.

This will be implemented in 2012 Q2. Warbarons have costed more than we planed from in the beginning and now we have the server that is costing money so we need to make it self financed in 2012. The kickstarter campaign is because we want to add more heroes, new items, new terrain and things for the game and we can't afford the graphics for it. New heroes in particular is something we really want.

About the new real time activity window that we have added, we are using the same system that EA used in battlefield 3. Their battlelog service. Its a company here that have created a really good way to do real time web. But every message that is sent is also costing a tiny bit of money so there is going to be a cost involved with using that too. The reason we are using it now is to test it a bit because we want to add simultaneous turns for all players. To do that we need to have information in real time or it will look as if you are attacking neutrals when in fact another player have already captured the city. If we combine that with speed game you can really sit down and play a game of warbarons turn by turn an evening against human players. And normal games can progress much faster if all players are doing their turns at the same time.

So I think there is a lot of interesting things that we will be able to add to the game, but we are in a pretty tough economical situation so I hope we can get the kickstarter project funded.