Wasteland 2 Kickstarter campaign was succesfully concluded few days ago (making over 3 million total) so you can't bledge anymore. They already opened preorder page if someone missed kickstarter.

It can be anything! Anyone can type prose that tells you about the cool politics and whatever else that's being conceptualized, but unless you're a major hitter, you will need to show game assets, whether it's dialogue or quest lines. Even a video of whatever you have already converted is fine! The point is that you claim you already have a sizable part of the narrative done. Well, show it, instead of dodging advice and repeatedly asking the obvious.

I'm finding it hard to back this project because the vision of the team sounds so vague. This isn't like The Dead Linger, where despite having little in-game assets to show for it, they are able to market their game because they are sure of what they want to do with it. When I read your KS page, I get the feeling that the team is still stuck in planning limbo, and the only reason why I'm still giving a sliver of benefit of doubt is because it says on your KS page that you have LOTS done so far. Instead of making excuses like "Ohh nobody's going to like it!", why don't you put it up first before jumping to that conclusion?

lowyhong

Since a playable demo is out of question at the momentt, all I can do is making a video of running around in the NWN version, showing areas, talking with NPCs, probably doing some quests and the like. Would that help in your opinion? How long should the video be? How many areas, how many NPCs, how many quests do you think I need to present to be convincing enough?

Show the interesting bits with commentary. The whole point of such a video is to talk your audience through your design goals, to convince people that you have concrete ideas and therefore money should be thrown your way. You shouldn't be asking me how long I want the video to be, or how many things I need to be convinced. It doesn't work this way. Sit down with your team and work out how you're going to market this video.

SubBassman, at this point in time, with just a little over a week left to go, your kickstarter has not even reached 5% of its goal. It's fairly safe to say that the chances of it reaching its goal are pretty close to zero at this point. If you're serious about this project then you're still going to be looking for a way to move forward with it, and if you seek funding again you're going to need to do a better job of convincing people your project is worth funding. When I first saw your kickstarter mentioned here it set off a fair number of red flags for me, and given the kickstarter performance I think it's safe to say I'm not the only one who felt that way. I'm not saying this to be mean, but to preface what I am about to say- some things you should consider if you want to convince more people to fund your project.

The Project Itself
Your kickstarter contained a fair amount about ideas and concepts for the project, but ultimately those things don't count for much. Ideas and concepts are a dime a dozen, and on top of that a single idea can be executed in dozens of different ways, some excellent, some steaming piles of excrement. What you need to convince people of is that your execution of your idea is something that they'd be interested in. A way to potentially do this early in project development is to do an animated mockup of how you envision the game looking and playing once it's complete. This gives people a good idea of gameplay, art style, atmospheric elements (music, sounds, etc), and how it all comes together in your vision for the project. Intersperse around 2 minutes of mockup footage with one or more of your team talking through your planned design of the game and showing some of the work in progress. Show and tell. This accomplishes multiple things at once- it shows people your vision for the game (which they'll hopefully like), it puts a face (or faces) on your project, and the WIP bits hopefully show that your team is serious and professional about the work they're doing.

The Budget
The more money you ask for the more curious people are going to be about just what you plan to use it for. Unless you've built up enough of a reputation that people are willing to give you $300,000 no questions asked (and you don't have this kind of reputation, sorry) people need to be convinced that they aren't just handing you a large slush fund to play around with while you tinker on your pet project. What you need to present is a rough breakdown of where that money will be going. Licensing costs for the game engine or certain assets? Development equipment and software? Contract work? Salaries for you and your team? Basically you need to convince donors that the amount being requested is both necessary and sufficient for the work you have planned.

Ability to Execute
The last big question is whether you and your team actually have the ability to execute on the project you have planned. You should have a link to the portfolio of your lead artist, which hopefully includes some 3D-modeling work (preferably 3D-modeling work in the context of game development). You should have greater specifics on what games your lead programmer worked on, as well as what his specific roles were; hopefully he has some experience as a programming lead, and hasn't just been a code monkey for all of his jobs. And with regards to yourself you need to emphasize any project management and leadership experience you have that makes you qualified to head up a project with the kind of budget you're asking for. There have been many, many people who have thought that because they were good at their particular job they could run their own project, only to have it crash and burn because they knew nothing of project management. You need to convince people you have what it takes to plan out your project, keep it on track, keep your team working well together, and ultimately deliver a finished product.

Along those lines, greater information about the specific status of your human resources can show that you can engage in at least some level of effective management. Are your lead artist and programmer working for equity, are they salaried, some combination of the two? (In other words, how invested in the project are they). Will your core team be working on this full time, or do you all have day jobs? How about the company providing music and sounds? Are they working on a contract basis? If so, have the details of that contract been hashed out? How about the other "helpers" you mentioned? Do you have a specific plan on how they'll be contributing, or is it just a case of thinking you can run through your contact list and fire off some e-mails asking for help if you feel you need it? Ultimately you'll be the one responsible for bring all these people together and getting them to produce a finished product, and you need to give the impression that you're up to that task (and it's not an easy task).

At the end of the day, what you need to do is convince people that 1) you have a firm vision of what you want to make (and that it's something they'll be interested in) 2) that this vision realistically requires the $300,000 you're asking for to execute and 3) that you and the team you've put together are actually capable of executing on your vision. Unless you can convince people of all three of these things you're going to have a hard time raising any significant amount of money.

DarrkPhoenix

Thanks for your points.
This game is in a very strange situation since we can't show actual graphical content. Yet.

With that in mind, please check out update 13 (recently posted)

Your plan going forward has merit- putting together even a short demo will go a long way towards 1) showing people the vision you have for the game and 2) convincing them that your team may have what it takes to execute on the project. It will also likely be a very instructive experience for you team with regards to how much work making the game is actually going to take. You'll get to see just how much back-and-forth with your artist is required to get things looking the way you want, how much your programmer has to wrestle with the game engine to get it to do what you want it to do, and just what kind of work is actually involved in "simply" porting over the content you have written up in the Aurora toolest. You'll probably come out of the process with a much better idea of the resources and timelines that will be involved in completing your game.

This is taken from my RPGWatch forum post:

NWN has d&d combat, TH doesn't, that's why we completely ignored the combat aspect of the game, although most of the hostiles are created or for instance you can make someone angry. These NPCs have to be killed via DebugMode or using a cheat wand (quickest way). We focused all our efforts on creating the quests, writing the conversations, scripting whatever we could. The script commands will be replaced in Unity 3D but my own system uses a neat "interface" so that we could easily port it to any system (as xml's).
Let's take an example:
http://s1060.photobucket.com/albums/t451/ElidaVenn/

The NPC has these "interface" commands (2nd picture) stored on himself telling the program which commands to execute (give xp, add journal entry, create object, set variable etc). The numbers are channel numbers. If, say, a convo node uses Event_23, all commands with suffix 23 will be executed by the evaluator script. (1st picture). "Events" are the outputs, "Conditions" are the inputs, also channeled in the same way. So, if Condition_23 tests if you have an item, then Event_23 will take the item automatically (unless you tell him not to) and executes any other commands with suffix 23.
The greyed commands are the actual NWN script commands that have to be reimplemented in Unity 3D. However, I used only about 30-35 out of hundreds used by the Aurora Toolset to make our job easier.
If you have 500 NPCs and 100+ quests, you can have a picture how many of these lines are there…

3D concept of an interior scene:

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/529989_261828803912660_252801931482014_495977_1687834238_n.jpg


http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/529802_261852663910274_252801931482014_496013_444447531_n.jpg

New GUI mockup screen:

http://s1060.photobucket.com/albums/t451/ElidaVenn/

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