Back to Back: Indie RPGs to fund

I’ve managed to go a whole two weeks since our last Back to Back, and that means I have actual news on projects that have ended! Since our last overview, Band Saga, Ironcast, Star Traders 2, and Warlocks all hit their funding goals. Celestial Tear and Hipster Town Tactics ended without hitting their funding goals; The Secret Testament was canceled.

For every project that ended, we seem to have a new one springing up to take its place. Here is the current slate of indie RPGs seeking crowdfunding:

• Battle Chef Brigade — this 2D action-RPG-cum-Iron-Chef-sim has long since risen past its funding goal, and is now inching toward 200% funding with 11 days to go.

• Battlestation — A strategy roguelike-like inspired by Babylon 5 in which you build and manage a space station. You can outfit a fleet of defensive ships, research new tech, and engage in diplomacy with the game’s 5 alien races. Battlestation also features character creation and advancement as you gain experience, so it’s more of an RPG than it might sound at first blush. This has to raise about $32,000 in the next 22 days to hit its funding goal.

• Bedlam — Bedlam, the erstwhile love child of The Banner Saga and Mad Max, is still chugging along toward its goal. It is still about $43,000 shy of its $130,000 goal with 8 days remaining, but something tells me this one might make it. Call it a hunch.

• Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King — A 2D Zelda-alike with a capricious child narrator who alters the game as you play. I picked on this one a bit earlier in the week for doing a terrible job of explaining what it’s actually about–a shame, because this actually does look pretty cool. Its prospects are rather dim at this point, however: Blossom Tales has a little over $25,000 left to raise, and a little more than one day left in which to do so.

• Border: Remembrance — a 2D action RPG that practically screams “low-rent Hyperlight Drifter.” The similarities in aesthetics, setting, and basic mechanics are so prominent that it’s hard for me to think of this project as anything but an attempt at cashing in. This one is about 1/6 of the way to hitting its £3,000 goal with 19 days left on the clock.

• Dark Drive — a sci-fi 2D side-scrolling Metroidvania from a 7-person Thai team, Dark Drive looks more like an actual Metroid title than most of the “Metroidvania” titles I’ve seen. It looks promising, though the team needs a native English-speaker to do some proofreading for them rather badly. There are 17 days left for this to raise another $32,000 or so.

• Fortune’s Tavern — the tavern management sim / action RPG / would-be successor to Recettear that I mentioned in our last Back to Back, Fortune’s Tavern is fully funded and has hit most of its stretch goals with 3 days left on the clock.

• Golden Hour — a 2D side-scrolling Metroidvania with high-resolution pixel art, Golden Hour promises a variety of ways to destroy your enemies through the interaction of environmental hazards and physics. It also promises 30 spells, equipment to buy and sell, a variety of side quests, and procedurally generated biomes and dungeons. The game is being developed by a 5-person team consisting entirely of dudes whose last names end in “-ic” (which I can only assume means the devs are Eastern European). 24 days remain in which to raise $28,500.

• Graal Seeker — an Arthurian fantasy strategy game with procedural world generation and real-time battles. There are 18 days left for Graal Seeker to reach “the holy goal,” as it were. It needs a little over €8,000 ($10,240) to do so.

• Graywalkers: Purgatory — a post-apocalyptic strategy RPG with an Action Point-based combat system and an angels-versus-demons motif. I got a chance to try out an early pre-alpha demo for this, and I think the developers are on the right track. You can download and try the demo yourself right here. Graywalkers is now more than halfway to its funding goal; there is about $18,000 left to raise, and 18 days in which to raise it.

• Hartacon Tactics — poor Hartacon; this 2D strategy RPG has raised only €50 out of its €20,000 goal. Here’s hoping the developer can find a way to get this thing on Kickstarter and have a better go of it next time. 5 days are left, in case you happen to have €19,950 lying around.

• Immortal Empire — a 2D isometric strategy RPG with time units and other mechanics straight out of the original X-Com, Immortal Empire features turn-based battles with 5 characters under your command and up to 4 armies on the field at once. The game has already been released as a browser game–the devs simply want to spiffy it up with nicer audio and other goodies in anticipation of a proper release as an executable. Immortal Empire features a single player campaign as well as multiplayer PVP and gauntlet modes; but annoyingly, you’ll have to sign in to an account and maintain an active internet connection to play the single player portion. The game has raised almost $2,000 Canadian out of its $8,000 funding goal, with 16 days on the clock.

• Legena: Union Tides — this 2D jRPG (previously covered here) is now a mere £331 (read: about $530) away from its funding goal with 12 days remaining, in case you wanna give it a boost.

• That Which Sleeps — hot damn. This grand strategy / jRPG / Cthulhu sim (previously covered here) is now almost 500% funded; it hit every single stretch goal it had, and so the devs created more of them. If you want to help the game provide more graphical representations of the state of the game on the world map, you have 6 more days in which to throw money at it.

• Voxel Quest — an isometric, voxel-based, turn-based roguelike. The devs provide very little to substantiate their claim that the game will feature a “heavy emphasis on tactics,” but I am highly intrigued by their claims about the game’s AI. They state: “AI has full emotional profile and temperament, and every character has their own set of motivations. NPCs will lie to you, betray you, fall in love with you, try to steal from you, defend you, and many other things.” That, and those graphics sure are damned pretty. Voxel Quest is now halfway funded with 22 days remaining.

• Weedopia — a 2D RPG Maker jRPG that is very, very, very heavily marijuana-themed. Your hero is named Roach; the bad guy is Lord Nohemp. You have a pet named–and I am not making this up–“Tokachu.” The game has a weed crafting system, for Christ’s sake! Suffice it to say that I really want this to get funded. Weedopia has 13 days to raise about $6,000.