Project Gorgon has raised a quarter of its goal on Indiegogo as of today and has tweaked a few pledge tiers, a new update on the platform says.
The Indiegogo is not Elder Game’s first attempt to raise money for Project Gorgon. Eric Heimburg and Sandra Powers raised nearly $75,000 on Kickstarter last year following two previous and unsuccessful crowdfunding efforts. Critically, the Kickstarter allowed the studio to contract much-needed art assets. The $20,000 Indiegogo campaign, they’ve said, is primarily intended to allow PayPal payments, pay for hosting, and oh yeah — pay the developers who’ve continued working on the massive indie sandbox as a labor of love for several years.
Heimburg, who’s well-known to the old-school and sandbox MMORPG community for his long work on the much-beloved Asheron’s Call, told us in an interview that Project Gorgon is “the most ambitious thing [he’s] ever attempted,” which won’t surprise anyone familiar with the broad and sometimes bizarre scope of the game. (Skills include, for example, art history, calligraphy, compassion, cheesemaking, iocaine resistance, phrenology, vocabular, and “the art of living and fighting as a pig.”)
“We have a different design philosophy than the average MMO,” he explained last year. “Most MMOs are made with a design method called gameplay loops” — that is, designers sort out what players will be doing every 30 seconds or so, determine why it’s fun, and make it more fun, eventually increasing the length of the loop. In fact, he said,
“Many of the best AAA games in all genres are designed around gameplay loops. However, when used in MMOs, gameplay loops result in a game that’s very much like World of Warcraft: a directed, straight-forward experience without a lot of distractions. […] But that’s not what we wanted to make. So instead of asking, ‘What fun thing will the player be doing over and over?’ we asked, ‘How many different things can we let the player do?’ A lot of the resulting ideas aren’t very fun by themselves — they’re just little pieces of a fun experience. And the game isn’t very directed at all. A common complaint among new players is: ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.’ The answer is ‘do whatever strikes your fancy!'”
The game is currently expected to fully launch in late 2017.
