After more than two whole years of toiling, sleepless nights, stiff fingers and dry eyes, i finally reached the point where i’m ready to show something more complete to the world and prepare for the crowdfunding campaign that will help me bring the game to a final release.

While Kickstarter clearly enables a wider audience, it is not available in my country so i didn’t have much choice of a platform for crowdfunding – IndieGoGo was basically the only way to gogo (sorry for the pun).

Preparing the campaign was a really tough process and i admit it took me a while with all the other things i have to do in my life. First of all, i had to explore the possibilities and limitations of the platform and how to fit them to my needs.

Albeit with a smaller reach, IndieGoGo has some clearly better features than Kickstarter. InDemand helps you gather the funds and build the community even when the campaign is over. Of course, you need to reach your goal before that, so you need to find a reasonable amount that will help you finish your product. Not too small, but not too large either. I had a lot of trouble in finding that sweet spot, but in the end i decided to ask for a bare minimum that will make me finish the game, no more, no less. Everything over that will be used for stretch goals. I have a lot of ideas and i can already figure out how much will they approximately cost, so i’ll see how the campaign goes and add them during the campaign.

Another interesting feature that IndieGoGo offers is flexible funding and you are probably wondering why didn’t i opt for it if i had to choose IndieGoGo. The answer is simple, i don’t want to have obligations of given promises if i don’t reach my goal, it would not be fair towards the backers. I need funds to make my ideas to become reality and acting in any other different way than being completely honest and transparent would be irresponsible.

Luckily, i already have enough experience (that costed a lot) and have gathered data to know how much will the rest of the game cost if i want to do it my way. So herе’s a breakdown that will be visible on the campaign page when it starts:

Backgrounds – You noticed that the teaser only has three backgrounds. To make the game more visually pleasing i need 20 backgrounds in 5 thematic colors (red, green, blue, purple, yellow), each costing 45-70 USD per piece, which comes to roughly 1.500 USD since, besides the regular artist hours involved for making them, some additional hours will be probably needed for fixes and adjustments. Additional gfx works – Additional graphics include finishing the Rokh Raiders sprites (the sixth faction that has not been finished), background elements, bullets, special effects, explosions and works on the Galaxy Database. I approximate that 1.000 USD is needed for all of that. It might seem much, but bear in mind that’s only 33 hours of more or less standard artist pay, or 4 eight hour work days, which is a really, really short amount of time when you look at it.

Translations – They cost around 0.1 USD per word for translating the basic user interface and options, but a lot more if i plan on translating the Galaxy Database. But for the basic translation into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese, i approximate that around 100-200 USD will be needed since the game does not have many words.

Fees and taxes – Steam Fee is 100 USD and Indiegogo takes 5%, and then there’s income taxes too, which will come around to 10-20% for this amount. Music and SFX – Music licenses are very expensive to obtain, but i am in contact with several musicians that are willing to let me use their music for an IndieGoGo and revenue cut. Still, it will probably come to around at least 10% of the funding. I have been a music producer for more than 15 years so the sound effects will be handled by myself. I could probably do the music too, but i don’t have enough time and there are a lot of people that do it better than me anyway.

When you add all that, it comes to about 3.000,00 USD, which is an amount that i’m frankly scared of. I invested a bit more than that in the game until now, and seeing that it was enough only for the half of the graphic assets that are needed for the game of this caliber is frightening. While the game itself is not a revolutionary product that will break the genre, i do believe it stands out a lot among lots of shmups that are out there at the moment. First of all, the graphics are reminiscing of golden age of Amiga 500 games, beautiful 16-bit pixel art with no rendered or pre-rendered 3D graphics, but with dynamic lighting. I haven’t seen it in a shmup for some time. Music in the game (at least the tracks i collected until now by Cryocon and Mlada Fronta) is damn fine and i plan to make it on par with the iconic soundtrack of Hotline Miami or old-school hits like Crusader, Unreal Tournament, Rollcage or Project X (you can listen to the tracks here:

Anyway, back to the campaign. At first, i didn’t know what could i possibly offer to the backers beside the game itself. Ok, Early Access is something that i planned anyway, so i could give away that too. I plan on selling the soundtrack separately (all proceedings will go to the artists), so that’s a cool perk to add too, but what else? When i started making the game, i had illusions of grandeur, like every fresh gamedev out there. Rick Henderson as supposed to be a huge single player experience with levels and an intriguing story behind it. When reality struck me, i decided to drop the whole predefined levels concept and i had a lot of ships and weapons descriptions left behind unused. I got to an idea that they can be used for Galaxy Database, a small book of enemy ships and player weapons with their stats, description and a small backstory for each one of them. Lower tier backers will get it in PDF, while high tier backers will be getting a nice hardcover booklet. To further engage the potential community of backers, one of the perks will be the Community Ship Designer. Backers of that tier will have the exclusive access to hidden Discord channel where they will be able to create an enemy that will appear in the game together. Sure, it will be a challenge for me since it has to be in certain design boundaries (and maybe technically, who knows what people can think of), but i think it’s a rather cool reward. Name on a blimp is purely cosmetic. If you really like shmups and you got a lot of dough to spare, your name will appear on a space blimp with a large display on it (think Blade Runner). Finally, with only 5 available, you can design you own enemy (not a boss though) by working with me and a graphics guy. Might not seem as much, but creating an enemy that is interesting and balanced is quite time consuming, let alone 5 of them. Ok, i’ve got the amount i need, backer rewards and now i need to present the game in the best possible light. I hate punchlines and single sentence descriptions, but it needs to be done. Put your whole game in one sentence. It’s like an elevator pitch, but you don’t even have the time to ride to the first floor, just poke your head through the elevator door and shout one sentence. So i came up with Endless horizontal-scrolling shoot ’em up experience with infinite replayability. Well yeah, it’s infinitely replayable, but in a way that it will never get boring. I decided not to use terms like procedural or roguelike since, honestly, i believe players already have an aversion when they read those words. It is endless since it doesn’t end, you can only die. Obviously, it’s horizontal-scrolling shoot ’em up, and i like to call it an experience, since it’s an audio-visual experience made for connoisseurs of the genre and style.

I made sure to be perfectly clear how the game loop functions, how the weapons/armor relations work, even if it’s dead simple to understand and provide as much material as possible for the players to see how the game sounds and looks like. Screenshots were easy to take, but resizing images to fit in IndieGoGo’s predefined image sizes and remain pixel perfect was a pain in the ass. Preparing a small teaser took days of work and i can’t say i’m happy with the final result in terms of video quality. Unity’s inbuilt recorder compresses the video even on high setting and artifacts appear when there’s a lot of stuff going on on the screen, but i believe it’s good enough to be used as a proof of concept and let the backers know what’s it all about.

Unfortunately, i wasn’t able to provide the demo since i think it’s too early and i’m a bit of perfectionist. I regard that as the biggest flaw of my campaign and i hope it will do well even without it. One of the things that really makes me proud and that i want to point out is the dedication to inclusion. I want everyone to be able to play the game. I’m positive that colorblind modes will probably include more tweaking than simple filters implementation, but turning off shakes and flashes will mean a lot to someone who’s suffering from problems related to photosensitivity but like shoot ’em ups. High-contrast mode is going to demand quite an overhaul, but if all goes well i’m all for it. My fears? Shoot ’em ups are quite a niche of a genre so i’m scared how many people will be interested in a game like Rick Henderson. Deep inside i believe there’s a lot of folks that want to see something new that’s not a bullet hell or reissue of an old classic, but a modern envisionment of the classics that marked an era. You can find the pre-launch page here and if you had a good read and are interested in seeing this project come to life, subscribe to be notified when the campaign is launched or share it – every bit helps 🙂