If you're into JRPGs, here's a game to keep an eye on: Cosmic Star Heroine, a new sci-fi indie from the folks behind Cthulhu Saves The World and the last two Penny Arcade RPGs.
Those folks, Zeboyd Games, have just launched a Kickstarter for their newest project, which they describe as a turn-based sci-fi RPG inspired by the likes of Chrono Trigger (yes), Phantasy Star (yes!!!) and Suikoden (YES!!!!). The sprite art, which you can see both above and on the Kickstarter page, looks pretty damn awesome.
Zeboyd wants $100,000 to make this game happen. They've got a good track record, and a great outline, and perhaps best of all, no stretch goals. In fact, designer Robert Boyd is way against stretch goals:
What if the kickstarter gets overfunded? We don't know about you, but we hate it when kickstarters get a lot more money than they expected, drastically increase the scope of the game, and end up pushing the release date back months or even years. What's worse, some of these kickstarters drastically underestimate how much all those new features are going to end up costing with the result that they end up running out of money before they manage to fulfill all of their promises.
We don't want this to happen to us!
With the December 2014 fulfillment date, we've given ourselves a bit of leeway as far as development time goes. If we get enough money that we decide that we can spend a couple extra months polishing up the game, we'll be able to without pushing back that date. In addition to that, we could use additional funding to increase our audio budget and hire additional help so that we can get more done without noticeably increasing our development time.
And what if after all this, we end up finishing the game and still have a good chunk of money left over? How about using that extra money to develop some free post-release DLC? We've released some major free DLC for our previous games (the alternate storyline in Cthulhu Saves the World & the Epilogue scenario in Precipice of Darkness 3) so we'd be game for doing something similar with Cosmic Star Heroine. Maybe a separate mini-Roguelike mode ala Lufia 2's Ancient Cave...
I'm sold. You can check out the Kickstarter here.