Spiludvikling.dk

So Project Temporality is the game we at Defrost Games has been working on for the last three years. What started as a simple idea of taking time as a concept and play around with it quickly evolved into what we call the Time-Line concept.

The Time-line concept is central to our game-play it means that you can have multiple parallel existences virtually without limits so if you can figure out a way to do it with the games input system you can create new existences at almost any point in time and you can go to any of these points in time to see what happened.

Because total freedom made it hard to make interesting puzzle designs we had to add in some limitations, the biggest one is that there can only be one timeline that you control at the moment and it's the newest one. And only the time-line you control can spawn other time-lines, this is because we wanted to focus on puzzle solving and not juggling a huge number of parallel timelines.

In fact in actual game-play even most of the complex one stays within 3-4 timelines because we want the important part of a puzzle being figuring out how to solve it and not fighting with the game to actually perform it. So once you solved one it should be easy to do it again.

The project started really small with just me and my wife working on it but as people who tested the game loved it we decided to grow and evolve it to a more polished version which has taken a lot of time and a lot of late nights but we feel we have reached the right amount of polish and are buckling down to finish the game.



It's a great game and we're proud of it, but there are some final polish required, and it's the kind of polish that requires money. We can't just do voice acting by ourselves, and we don't have the resources to create the final pieces of art we need and to finish the game while still paying rent on our office.

That's why we need your help! Also, the clientele on indiegogo seems to have a higher ratio of creative people than other crowdfunding sources, and that suit us, as we want your help.


We want Temporality to be your project too. We want you to feel that you are able to contribute to it and look back and say "I was a part of that. I made that."

To facilitate this we will have a number of perks that allows you to either just participate in the game by, for example, giving in-game characters your name. Or even Create parts of the game like in the flower perk, where you design a flower and we build it and put it into the game and give you credits under the Artist section.

For any questions about this please just ask here and for general game questions there is also the games showcase page.

nice!

You forgot your trailers and links in this post

IndieGoGo
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/project-temporality

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Thanks Jonas,

I skipped it because it's at the top of the indiegogo page I really did 2 separately written posts, even though they share some part in explaining the game, just so that I wouldn't be spamming. but if it's ok by you guess I would love to have it here. Not to used to forums as I always have to decide to spend time writing to a forum or working on the game, I lurk a lot though because that doesn't take as much time. Indie life is hard, at massive there was more time for forums

You should probably for the sake of readers just have kept it in one post. Less confusing. It's not a big deal.

I do have a few mindful concerns about your crowdfunding approach though.

Why did you go for IndieGoGo as oppose to the more dominant Kickstarter? (I know Kickstarter requires having a friend in the US / UK with a bank account)
Your timing might also be a problem.. right in summer vacation time. Not lot of people around the interwebs... more hanging around the pool.
Also a thought on the video. You should consider putting more of a human side to the video. Where you the developers talk on video and present yourself to the world. Crowdfunding is not just about the game. But also how well you sell yourselves as developers. Just talk with the same passion as you do when you present it live.
Your higher tiers seems a bit too 'digital easy to maintain and deliver'. Guys in the high end tiers want's all sorts of goodies besides all the other stuff.. t-shirts, dolls, signed prints/posters.. and what not merchandise stuff.

hehe.. yes! I know by heart.. indie life is super BUSY! But also a whole lot of fun.

Best of luck to you guys Niklas!

I just wanted to keep the anouncement seperate from any discussion on the game. About indiegogo we have some good reasons actually tying it more to the Creative part of our perks and it seems that indiegogo on average has a higher number of people going for interesting/creative perks than kickstarter that people seem to treat more like a pre order system. Besides indiegogo reached out to us and offered help without any hassles which is what made us considering crowdfounding in the first place.

About the video we do know but it's also a matter of time and we just didn't have enough before the day we had to launch on so we did the best we could. About physical tiers we looked at them but there just didn't seem to be much interest in that anywhere we look so we instead went with the Co-Creator idea that could be really really cool if it works out and definitely will not be low maintenance we will have to model/art direct supply feedback etc to all those co creators they are probably to cheap compared to the work we will need to do :/

Launching on the evening the third of july is out biggest problem right now cause it meant non existing press coverage in the US :/ For the summer the statistics for indiegogo showed it to be a no issue when we asked them about it.

You are really good at selling the game. It sounds very interesting. I love playing around with time

However, I have to say that the trailer seems a little neutral and "meh". There is too much focus on "just flying around and showing off the 3D environment" in my opinion. Would like some more action and puzzles. And, as Jonas said, some voice over that describes the game would be a good idea.

About the Indiegogo vs. Kickstarter: So far, I am yet to see any "bigger" game project becoming a success on Indiegogo. The community/target group just seems smaller compared to Kickstarter. Also, in general I think it is harder to get out the word about an Indiegogo campaign, since a lot of people have no clue what Indiegogo is. Kickstarter, on the other hand, has a very known brand and many people associate it with success and interesting stuff.

Personally, I don't like Paypal and the way that they automatically charge money from you, even if the campaign isn't over yet. However, I can see that you chose to use a "Flexible Funding campaign", which is probably a good idea for you (even though I don't know much about how successful that campaign type is).

Of course it is different for each project.

Here are some links that could be useful to you guys:
http://thirdeyegames.net/my-impressions ... ckstarter/
http://mindsense.co/blog/comparing-crow ... platforms/
http://crowdfundingpr.wordpress.com/201 ... e-and-why/
http://bridgestarter.com/
http://www.guenthertax.com/blog/2012/08 ... -campaign/
http://crowdfundingdojo.com/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... iques_.php
http://gamasutra.com/blogs/TroyLonergan ... _A_lot.php
http://www.incomediary.com/ultimate-gui ... r-campaign
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226555
http://nofilmschool.com/2011/09/how-i-r ... ckstarter/
http://mashable.com/2012/05/13/kickstarter-tips/
http://99u.com/articles/7143/kicking-as ... er-project
http://nintendoenthusiast.com/15245/kic ... -avoid-it/

(I recently helped a Kickstarter project; I used many of the resources above to make the best campaign possible)

If you are able to do it, you should seriously consider sending a prototype/demo to the various games sites (e.g. Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, Destructoid) - it'll increase the chances of them writing about your game and Indiegogo campaign!

Good luck with the game! It will get my vote on Steam Greenlight, and I'll also try to spread it around via Twitter etc.

We have sent out a ton of demos to those sites, but no response yet we guess it's due to it being the Independence day weekend still in the US. We also have narrated trailers etc coming up and a lot of youtube players playthrough's of the demo. Our biggest problem has been not getting coverage on the sites this time for some weird reason (since we have had no problems before) and were hoping its a independence day weekend thingy.

Flexible funding made sense to us as the game would ship any way it's just a matter of quality so even at relative low amounts of money the game will see a sizable improvement.

Thanks for all the articles we have read quite a few of them but some were new too. About successes at indiegogo there has been a couple of game campaigns around 1 million $ and we hoped not to get caught in the anti kickstarted media attitude at the moment with all that said this is an experiment and we hope to learn a lot for our next project

About the trailers different people are responding very differently, we had hoped to have narration but run out of time, but are planning to patch that in during this week

Thanks for helping to spread the word.

Wikzo if you have time I wonder about what you found good about our text as I find our indiegogo text quite bland and was gonna rewrite it. Or did you mean the text here ?

I meant this forum text, yes. Haven't read the campaign's description on Indiegogo (I rarely do ... and I think many people feel the same which is why IMAGES and VIDEOS are very important ... also, animated GIFs can be a huge help!). I think it's the personal touch in your post that I like