Kickstarter to Kickfinish

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Today we made SuperGenius history and kicked off our first Kickstarter project.

Disclaimer: This is a totally self promotion-driven blog post. I will not tell you anything interesting that you can put to use in your professional life. There are no interesting industry anecdotes. There are no life lessons. There is nothing educational in this post, whatsoever. This is a shameless, balls to the wall, call to action to help us finish our game. In our defense...it's a really good game. Now, please resume reading.

For those of you who don’t know what we’ve been doing the last six months we have been hard at work on our first co-developed title, Forge. www.playforgewar.com.

We are developing it alongside San Diego developer, Dark Vale Games, and New Zealand programming house, Digital Confectioners. SuperGenius is doing all the art, from concept to ship. We love this game. We have put everything we have into it and after playtesting it two weeks in a row, I believe this was a good call. It’s amazing. It’s addictive, fun, gorgeous, unique – everything we could ever ask for in a multiplayer PvP PC game.

However, we need help finishing it. We are developing this independently from a publisher and have been lucky enough to get privately funded up to this point. We are turning to the gaming public now to show their interest and help us polish it, add a few more features, and ship it.

You can check out the Kickstarter page here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/166522941/1815022210?token=98b5cde0

As you can see we have a fancy fancy video, thanks to the team at Funnelbox and a collection of gameplay footage, screenshots, and concepts. The KS page says it all but I will not be completely lazy and wait for you to read it there. It is too important, so I’ll describe the game best I can in as few words as possible so I can only be accused of going half lazy. Never go full lazy.

Forge is a multiplayer, Player versus Player PC game set for digital distribution on the top online gaming stores. It is a 3^rd person game that plays like a 1^st person shooter. It is class based, so you play as one of 5 unique character classes: The Assassin, Warden, Pathfinder, Shaman, and Pyromancer. You also have the added benefit of animal and supernatural companions that assist you in battle. There are no guns, but for those of you who only believe in playing games that feature dangerous, flying projectiles there are characters with arrows, spells, fireballs and more. It is fast paced, tightly designed, and totally addictive.

The goal was to build the perfect PvP game that allows you to jump in and play for 30 minutes and jump out. There is no grinding for better upgrades or even buying upgrades. Everyone is on a level playingfield from the day they start to the day they die. Forge is based on skill and how well you get to know your character’s abilities.

Have I mentioned that it is gorgeous? Of course SuperGenius did all the art, so I’m a little biased, but man, it is awesome looking. We went into it with the goal of eradicating clichés in the fantasy genre. This isn’t your typical knights and sorcery world. We mashed up Norse and Native American culture, took some liberties and embellished it, creating a unique world that we have never seen the likes of. We are very proud of it and want it to see the light of day.

We did not have a lot of funding to get to this point, but we got here anyway. SuperGenius is an incredibly frugal studio and we have produced easily seven figures worth of art production for a fraction of that. We knew that in order for Forge to be the game it aspires to be, it needed Triple A love all the way. And we gave it all of our love. Every inch of it. That’s a whole lotta love. Oh.

And that’s just us. This is Dark Vale’s design and they have proven themselves to be a developer to be reckoned with. And Digital Confectioners knows how to code a multiplayer game like nobody’s business. Combined we have formed a Tri Force. A holy Trinity. A Three’s Company even. If everything goes well, we will be making a lot of Forge for many years to come.

So that’s our story and we’re sticking to it. At the time of this writing we are at 131 backers and it just launched a few hours ago. I think this is a good sign. We have been cultivating a community ahead of time on the forums at www.playforgewar.com and we have over 10,000 dedicated members of the community. Everything tells us that this game will be a raging success if it makes it to launch. If you agree, and would like to play Forge yourself, I recommend you come and back the project. We have all kinds of crazy awesome rewards for different levels of contribution and beyond that, you will relish in the joys of killing your friends in creative, savage ways. Virtually of course.

We are hopefully about to make SuperGenius history again, thanks to fans like you.

Much Love,

The SuperGenius Team