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Why Kickstarter & Why YOU Should Back Us!

You should know by now that we are launching a kickstarter campaign to help with funding further development of the game.

Check out our Kickstarter profile, read all about the intended development, pledge levels & rewards and back us here.

As you can see, the Kickstarter profile is very long! So to reduce the length and allow us to add more details for stretch goals and the like later, you can find the reasoning behind launching a Kickstarter campaign for Radial-G : Racing Revolved and why we think you should back us!

Also included below is a breakdown of where the funding will go to show you how we’ve prepared to make the most of it in an efficient manner.

 

Why-KIckstarter

Whilst the genre of racing games is already well established and full of great examples, we feel that bringing Oculus and Android tablet support offers something new, with exciting control options and a greater sense of depth to the perception of the world. However, as Oculus Rift isn’t commercially available, it’s hard to get traditional games funding without showing investors the sort of solid data they want to see before committing to a project (i.e. return on investment, projected sales, concurrent user numbers etc.)

So we decided to come to Kickstarter to source the development funds from the crowd of VR and gaming enthusiasts (such as yourself!) to help raise the money we need to develop the rest of the game while offering you, dear backer, a way to be part of this great game concept.

We already have a small amount of funding that will allow us to start developing the single player demo into a multi-player experience. However most of that budget will be spent on converting the code to support multiple players simultaneously with a lobby system. More importantly, it will help us start the coding needed to make Radial-G a proper game, adding features such as collision, slip-streaming, weapons, a variety of ships and different handling models.

We’ve seen many Kickstarters for games fail for a variety of reasons, but the main one seems to be that the game is just a concept with nothing included to give backers confidence in the game actually being finished. We’ve spent a long time planning and scheduling the features and the development around our base and stretch goals. With our previous experience in delivering high quality titles on time, within budget and to a wide audience, we hope that you will be convinced that this is a project worth believing in too! We have the experience, the knowledge, the desire and passion for what we do, we just need you to help with the funding to help us deliver on our promise.

 

Why-YOU-should-back-us-on-Kickstarter!

This isn’t just a pipe-dream (*sic), we have the technology to create something great! We want you as a Kickstarter backer to be part of it too. Hopefully you’ve downloaded and played the single-player demo and had a glimpse of our vision and agree that playing a fully-fledged game with Oculus or further platform support will be great fun. If you haven’t, do so now!

We appreciate that there has been a rush of Oculus Rift-enabled games on Kickstarter of late. Since the news that Facebook purchased Oculus VR and with the announcement of the Sony Morpheus going public at GDC this year, VR has been shoved into the limelight.

We’ve had Oculus Rift development kits since Day 1. We were Kickstarter backers and we always knew it was destined for great things and we wanted to be a part of it.Now we are ready, after months of research, prototyping and testing to determine the best methods of developing for the hardware, to share our dream with you. Now, we feel really confident that we won’t create something that feels rushed or half-baked.

Our combined experience of designing and developing racing games and MMOs gives us the knowledge and understanding of what it takes to make a great multi-player racing game. Coupled with our background in serious simulators that utilise VR, we’re confident we can create a rock-solid experience for everyone and achieve the performance levels we’ve come to expect, namely low latency, high frame rates, detailed environments and good ol’ fashioned, high-speed fun!

Kickstarter Funding Breakdown

Drawing on our years of experience in development and project management, we’ve assessed all the design and development tasks before launching the Kickstarter to make sure we are:

  • Setting realistic goal values that will allow us to complete the base development tasks
  • Reducing estimated costs and budgetary needs as much as possible to increase the value of your backer investment
  • As clear and transparent about our intentions so you can be confident in the project from the get-go

Below are charts showing the high-level breakdown and more details:

  1. Development – The main element of where your pledge money will go – towards making the game! Whilst the two other elements are unavoidable, we’ve taken the necessary steps to ensure the majority of the money goes where it should.
  2. Support – During development and post-release we will have ongoing costs from hosting servers and providing bandwidth for downloads. This value has been set aside for the initial costs associated with these requirements, which will scale accordingly depending upon success.
  3. Admin – The costs of running the Kickstarter, the percentages that Kickstarter and Amazon take when a project is successfully funded and payments are processed, the PR and marketing around raising Kickstarter awareness and finally, the cost of creating and shipping the pledge rewards to backers.

Kickstarter_Development_Breakdown

intended_dev

We have already been hard at work on the single player demo, which you can download now and try out for yourself right now.

As mentioned, we have a small amount of funding already to start turning the single player experience into the multi-player demo to be released soon after the end of the Kickstarter funding period. We expect that this will be available by mid-September, in order to allow us to test and update the code based on the new SDK from Oculus VR for the DK2 HMDs which should (*fingers-crossed) be shipping in July.

Kickstarter_Development_Timeline

Next will come a longer development period using the funds raised from Kickstarter to develop the game fully with the intended features (depending on funding amount raised) and opening up access to the alpha testers as soon as we are ready. We expect the alpha test to start at the end of September 2014 and run until the 1st version release in late-November 2014.

Once the 1st version is released, we will switch to developing the updates and further content, depending on the amount of funding received and the additional income generated from sales outside of Kickstarter through channels such as Steam and Oculus VR Share.

Assuming we meet all of our stretch goals, we will revisit and review the schedule accordingly and announce when you can expect to get your hands on the tablet and PS4 Morpheus editions of the game (NB. We don’t know when Sony plan on releasing Morpheus to the public yet! It’s expected to be 2015 at present).

So that’s the whys and hows and whens. We’re confident we can achieve everything we set out to do, we would love to have you along for the ride too!

Thanks for reading, and many, many thanks for backing us on Kickstarter.

 

PayPal Pledges


We have been asked by a number of people whether they can pledge their support via PayPal instead. We’ve created a three tiered option to pledge for the game via PayPal for the unlimited rewards only; “Backmarker”, “Armchair Enthusiast” and “Apex”.

You can click the PayPal “Pay Now” button below – NOTE: If the kickstarter campaign is unsuccessful, all PayPal Pledges will be cancelled and refunded. We are only offering this option because it was requested, if administration detracts from development, we will have to withdraw the option to pay via PayPal.


Select Your PayPal Pledge Level – Values Include PayPal Costs




About Sam
Game Producer & Community Manager
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4 comments
  • Rob

    Looks amazing! Would the demo be updated with DK2 support (for at least the backers)? I can’t check it out in 3D currently as I do not have a DK1, but am getting a DK2.

    Thanks,

    Rob

    • Sam

      Hi Rob

      We are working on a DK2 build of the single player demo now. We are awaiting feedback from testing as it covers our Mac version too. Once we have the all clear, we will submit to Oculus Share to update the profile with PC AND Mac clients, both supporting DK2. We feel at this stage, it will be feely available to everyone

      Thanks!
      Sam

  • simon arne myklebust

    you have no need to make it a linux program… reason: i play this perfectly in the lates version of wine and it will run with play on linux… and if any other linux gamer or someone who wants to play this game most linux distros have wine preinstalled. so it will be possible to run this game acctually faster on linux since the wine has a tiny software boost and windows has many bacground programs that make the os run but linux is a low profile so it will give the game more memory space and i can run this game on my old laptop with a 2.0 single core proccesor and 2 gb ram without any issues…