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The Kickstarter campaign to fund Alas Vegas launched at 5pm on Tuesday 29th January, and reached its funding goal less than eight hours later. At the time of this entry it has been running for just over a week and stands at £7202 from 364 backers, averaging £20 per backer. Three stretch goals have been unlocked, with the fourth less than £800 away.
The project runs till 28th February and is projected to raise almost £25,000, or over 800% of its original goal. You can follow its progress here:
or you can visit the project’s Kickstarter page here.
Once the project is closed we’ll make a post with our conclusions about the process and advice to anyone thinking about using Kickstarter as part of a funding campaign. Or contact us directly.
An update on the previous post: Alas Vegas hit 100% of its Kickstarter funding goal in seven hours and 45 minutes. According to Kicktraq it’s likely to reach a total somewhere in the region of £52,000.
Spaaace has launched its first Kickstarter campaign, for the tabletop role-playing game Alas Vegas, described as ‘a horror RPG of bad luck, bad faith & bad blood’. You can see its webpage here.
The game has been two years in gestation. It’s a new format for RPGs, based on an HBO miniseries rather than the open-ended soap-operas that most RPGs turn out to be. We’re delighted to be working with two top-flight artists on the project: John Coultart, who rather delightfully won the World Fantasy Award a week after he agreed to illustrate the game, and veteran video-game artist Niki Hunter. And, of course, game design and text by James Wallis.
Obviously we want to get Alas Vegas funded and published, but we also want to explore the dynamics of running a crowdfunding campaign, to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s an exciting time, the shape of the industry has already changed, and the future is wide open for talented indies with a genius idea. Once it’s all done, if you’re interested in talking to us about our experience with crowdfunding and our advice for anyone starting a similar project, get in touch.
Back in December Spaaace’s glorious leader James spoke at Dragonmeet, the London-based games convention he chaired for three years in the early 2000s. They’d invited him back to lead a panel on the British Games Industry, looking at where it had come from and where it was going. He was joined by Simon Rogers of Pelgrane Press, Dominic McDowall-Thomas of Cubicle 7, noted freelance Phil Masters (GURPS Discworld), and Piers of London Indie Gamers. G*M*S Magazine videoed the panel, and you can watch it here.
James will be a guest at Warpcon in Cork at the end of January, where he will be showing off playtest copies of a couple of things he can’t talk about, possibly running a seminar called ‘How I Single-Handedly Saved The UK Roleplaying Industry From Certain Doom’, and auctioning off some rarities from his collection in the charity auction. Warpcon’s a good time. You should be there.
The third edition of the award-winning sui generis storytelling card-game Once Upon a Time is now out from Atlas Games. Meanwhile the game has entered its tenth language, with two more to come—not including the pirated Chinese edition from a couple of years ago.
We mention Once Upon a Time partly because it was designed by James Wallis, head of Spaaace, and partly because it exemplifies what we aspire to: integrating great narratives and great gameplay to create true interactive stories. If you’ve never had the delight of playing it, do check it out.
Spaaace has been in stealth mode for over a year, running silent and deep, but after a month at periscope depth we have resurfaced, and we’re ready for action. Projects are piling up already—almost all of them on the QT, but we can talk about the following:
- James has been working on two short-form RPGs, Cop Show and Alas Vegas and is talking to publishers on both sides of the Atlantic about them. His very short form RPG Here On Business (short enough that it fits on the back of his business card) was downloaded over 1500 times in its first 24 hours.
- We’re premiering a new game of trade and translation, Universal Exchange, as part of the Sandpit event at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on 13th October.
- James is speaking at the Story and Games conference in Vienna on 27th September, where he will be announcing something very cool. About stories and games, inevitably. You may remember that he published the first serious journal on the subject, Interactive Fantasy, back in 1994 so he’s got history in the subject.
And more to come. Stay tuned.
Spaaace magneto James Wallis has brought one of his 1990s projects out of mothballs, the never-completed parody-RPG FRUP, and is sharing choice excerpts from the manuscript and artwork on a new website, www.whatisfrup.com. Rumours that if there’s sufficient interest he will publish the game later this year have not been denied.
Spaaace is raising the funding to build a large-scale Facebook game designed to be mould-breaking and revenue-generating. Given the parasitic nature of Facebook game developers, we are saying absolutely nothing more about this right now. But watch this space.
With minimal notice, in mid-February Spaaace pulled together a team of experienced games script-writers to create dialogue for a forthcoming AAA console game from industry giant Ubisoft. Extremely tight deadlines were met and the work was signed off without a single rewrite. We’re a bit smug about that.
Work is underway on Legend, the Players Book for the Dragon Warriors RPG, published by Spaaace subsidiary Magnum Opus Press. Featuring expansions to almost all aspects of the game including three new character professions and a new way of refining character descriptions with additional skills, ‘Paths’, it’s the most hotly awaited Dragon Warriors release since 1985.
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