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Demo Mortis - Death Inc. Demo Is Kicking On Kickstarter

This article is more than 10 years old.

Remember the good old days? You know, those hazy, lazy, crazy days of about a year ago? That was when Double Fine Adventure launched on Kickstarter, and immediately received more more money than Switzerland from gamers desperate for a return to the pointy, clicky goodness of Grim Fandango.

A game which, had they bought it at the time, might not have been the swan song of the golden age of adventure gaming.

But let's not go into that now.

I have so much anger.

After that, the Kickstarters flowed thick and fast. From Brian Fargo to Chris Avellone in the US, and Peter Molyneux to David Braben in the UK, giants of classic gaming have turned to Kickstarter to seed their sequels, passion projects and too-cool-for-AAA art games.

However, this creates an interesting challenge if you have a less famous name - or, indeed, if your famous name is not quite as famous as you thought. Kickstarter's gaming section has gone from Etsy to Amazon. How does your hand-knitted game project hold up?

Celebrity endorsements provide one possible approach. The advantages of a great video should not be underestimated. But, ultimately, the former is a group of your friends telling people that a game they have not seen either will be awesome, and the other is often a series of rostrum camera shots of concept art and non-interactive 3D renders.

Ambient noise

Ambient Studios have some lovely concept art, and no shortage of potential endorsers - with staff from Media Molecule (Little Big Planet), and experience from Lionhead (Fable) and Criterion (Need for Speed, Burnout), they represent a seasoned team from Guildford (or, as it should be known, Silicon Traffic Jam).

Furthermore, their game, Death Inc., sounds like the sort of retro-bone twanging concept that works well on Kickstarter, also. The player controls a new-in-the-job Grim Reaper, spreading misery and plague across 17th century England. This is achieved by recruiting victims of various kinds (peasants, archers, knights and so on) and using them to spread the infection, while deploying special attacks using rats, pigeons and other pestilent varmints to weaken the defences of the worried well, all done from a god's eye view on an 3D map.

Then, between levels, the souls of the dead harvested in the action can be spent to upgrade your grim reaper's office, hire staff, upgrade troop types and so on, adding a level of strategy.

So far, so Bullfrog. However, there are a lot more Bullfrog-inspired games fighting for your dollar on Kickstarter than there were, including recent appeals by Simon Roth's interesting-looking Maia and Godus, by Mr Bullfrog himself, Peter Molyneux. So, how to persuade folks to part with their hypothetical money again?

Halfway through their campaign, Ambient have released a brief preview demo, to show potential backers where they are, what they are doing and, importantly, that they have at least some of the skills to do it. This is an interesting step - and represents a raising of the stakes on walking the Kickstarter walk.

The demo itself, downloadable from their Kickstarter page, is brief and basic - there are three unit types and one big boss, no audio, very rough graphics and some pathing issues (the way your controlled Infected climb onto each other to form a human tower if you hold down the "attract to this spot" button may be unintentional or intentional - either way, it's hilarious, and should be kept). However, it shows the control interface for the game - where drawing on the map with your mouse leaves trails for different classes of Infected to follow, allowing for flanking attacks by axe-wielding warriors while your archers pick off enemies hacking away at a meat shield of peasants - and some of the possibilities of the engine. Although pretty basic, it does suggest the Persuadertron-style fun to be had.

How much one can tell about the final product from a ten-minute demo is limited - Ambient are promising a finished game, with a campaign based around deposing the evil King of England (Charles II, by the looks of it, which seems a bit harsh - the man invented the waistcoat, for Heaven's sake!) in October, if funded. However, in releasing it Ambient are raising the bar, potentially, for the verification standard on Kickstarter. This could lead to some interesting, and appalling, pieces of downloadable code attached to future appeals.

Infect me with horrible diseases on Twitter. Actually, please don't. That would be horrible.