Double Fine asks crowd to lift 'Massive Chalice' game

Video game studio Double Fine is kick starting another new project.

The campaign to raise funds for a new game Massive Chalice begins today on the Kickstarter crowdfunding site.

Last year, the San Francisco-based studio responsible for games such as Psychonauts and Brutal Legend, was among the first to bring game development projects to the site. Double Fine raised $3.3 million, more than eight times its original goal, for the game Double Fine Adventure. The game harkens back to those such as The Secret of Monkey Island that studio founder Tim Schafer helped design at LucasArts.

This time around, another Double Fine designer Brad Muir, who worked on games such as Iron Brigade and Brutal Legend, is taking the lead. "We wanted to have a project that was completely new," Schafer says, "one of our young fresh faces coming forward and bring out a brand new game that has not been seen before.

Massive Chalice is a fantasy strategy game that mashes up XCOM and Final Fantasy Tactics with a dash of Game of Thrones family values. "You take the role of this immortal king and you are defending this realm against demonification," Muir says. "Our real twist is this the invasion takes place over hundreds of years. So you are going to have heroes that fight these battles for you. But you are going to have to make these decisions like do you want to keep them on the battlefield or do you want to retire them so that they will have children who will be heroes of the next generation?"

Players will manage their heroes' blood lines using an epic timeline, during the top-down simulation aspect of the game. When demons attack, the point of view will sharpen, Muir says. "You have to respond by dispatching a group of these heroes and you will go into this smaller scale tactical view where you will be directing your heroes to fight the demons that have invaded."

The studio hopes to secure at least $725,000 for the game, which is being developed for PC, Macintosh and Linux computers. They hope to have the game finished by September 2014.

Visit the project site on Kickstarter here.

Should Double Fine be successful that could help secure "the Idea of making crowd-funding repeatable," says the studio's vice president of business development Justin Bailey. "It could potentially transform the game industry and how things get financed in the future."