The folks at Procedural Worlds have a new interview-slash-testimonial from Crowfall Lead Environment Artist Jon O’Neal, in which he talks up that company’s enviromental design tools as employed in the service of building the Crowfall world, but he also talks a bit about the game’s 2015 Kickstarter and the point of the platform. O’Neal opines that the game’s Kickstarter was not about getting money and then making a game. “That’s not really what Kickstarter’s about; it’s to show interest to the real investors,” he says, since whatever Kickstarter brings in presumably won’t actually cover the game, just a “proof of concept.”
We reached out to ArtCraft about the statements for clarification, as we were unaware that the Kickstarter was intended to fund a proof-of-concept. That’s because it wasn’t. ArtCraft’s J. Todd Coleman told us that O’Neal simply misspoke on camera.
“The goal of the Kickstarter wasn’t a ‘proof-of-concept’,” he told us. “We already had a proof of concept: That is what we showed in the campaign’s video. The stated goal of our Kickstarter campaign was to build a ‘core module’ of the game. A proof-of-concept usually includes a fair amount of throw-away work, whereas the core module is the foundation of the actual game. It was created using parts of the PoC + a ton of new systems and content.”
Currently, the final game is estimated to cost close to $12M, up from the original $8M, as a result of what ArtCraft called development missteps, new features, design changes, and localization.
“Fast forward a few years, and we’ve done exactly [what we said we’d do in the Kickstarter]: signed a foreign licensing agreement with Travian Games and taken more equity investment,” says Coleman. “And while it’s absolutely true that we missed our dates, which inevitably means increased cost, I believe we did so for the right reasons: We listen to our community and take their feedback seriously (we spent an extra 9 months on combat because they didn’t like out first iteration.)”
Most recently, the studio’s been talking up its nifty “action harvesting” features. The video is down below.
