I don't always pledge my financial support for projects on Kickstarter, but when I do, it's mostly video games. Here are the projects I backed this month... and this time it's personal! (No, really, I want those projects to happen...)
Dysfunctional Systems
I recently discovered my love for visual novels, when I first played "Analogue: A Hate Story" by Christine Love around christmas. I soon discovered the first episode of Dysfunctional Systems, "Learning to Manage Chaos", and I was hooked - and I really want to know how Winters story continues.
The world about a school for time/space travelling mediators from a utopian world, that learn how to fix conflicts in other worlds is really interesting. But the game didn't make enough money to fund development for the next episodes. That's why the team went to Kickstarter. I'd really like to see this happen.
Heart & Slash
I discovered Heart & Slash while aimlessly scrolling through the video games category on Kickstarter. It looks like a really fun, fast retro hack and slash action game. But what really sold me was the art style.
Koe 声
I watched a lot of Anime in the past months, and I watched them all in Japanese with English subtitles. Koe is a JRPG with Japanese words as a core gameplay mechanic. But it's not so much the gameplay itself, that got me interested, but the intention of the game to teach Japanese. We'll see how well it works in practice when the game comes out.
Voices from the Sea
Voices from the Sea is another visual novel. The story about "boy meets mysterious and cute girl with glitter all around her" seems anything else than interesting. But there are some other ideas, that made me back the project, for example that it will be fully voiced in English. (And I really just play every visual novel that seems even the tiniest bit interesting...)
Nothing to Hide
Nothing to Hide is an "anti stealth game", where you don't avoid but always have to stay in sight of the gouvernments surveillance cameras. The message is quite obvious. The game isn't funded on Kickstarter, but on its own platform, which allows for an interesting tiered model for using the pledged money.
The demo already shows an simple, but nice art style and a clever gameplay. The game, its art and its code will also be completely free - free as in free beer AND free speech. Isn't that something?