Dungeons the Eye of Draconus 3-player co-op arcade brawler #Freethegames

[SuckerFreeGames]

Hi All,
I noticed people talking about our project a bit on this forum, so I thought that I would chime in.
I'm William McDonald, Project Manager/ Lead Designer / Co-writer / Foley Artist / Animator for Dungeons the Eye of Draconus. I'm willing to answer any questions you may have about the game, the production, or our Kickstarter, etc.




http://kck.st/14YQvak

Basic Facts:
Dungeons started as a script series Danielle and I wrote for Dead Gentlemen productions during an internship. Our rights were returned to us after they changed company heads, canceled our green light and lost all interest in our series. After few years I met John, who wanted to make a game as a senior project in college. I showed him my script pile and he thought Dungeons was hilarious and would make an excellent video game. I Contacted my co-writer, Danielle and we immediately set about turning the scripts into a design document.

Dungeons has been over five years in the making. Having originated as a college project it has only run on the XBOX 360 for our class demonstrations as a proof of concept. It was never put on the 360 for sale. We got a lot of positive feedback, enough to convince us we were onto something good. So we invested heavily into the project via sweat equity and of course actually money. After finishing a smaller side project, Kobold's Quest, for the Xbox 360 and seeing less than spectacular sales, we re-orientated our main platform back to the PC. This changed when the OUYA was announced. We immediately saw the opportunities in Ouya having a smaller, but more indie friendly market. We thought our game might shine a bit brighter there. If nothing else, we thought it would make an excellent exclusive for a few months and drum up some publicity. We did some test builds with our current incomplete version of the game through Mono and found that most of the game worked. There were of course a few issues, specifically with the cut scenes and some things would need to be tweaked, but nothing too drastic. We estimate 2 months' work on porting, tops, if the hardware proved capable and our optimizations adequate.


Backgrounds:
William McDonald - BA in Video Production / Screenwriting, BA in Business Administration / Marketing
Talents: Screen writing, designing levels, video editing, acting and 3d modeling

Danielle Dorsey - BA in Video Production / Pre-Med / Business Administration
Talents: Screen writing, story writing, drawing concept art, sewing , cooking and gaming

John Norman - 5 credits shy of a BS in Computer Science (He got a tech job so he didn't need no stinking degree)
Talents: Programming, scripting and being a game wizard.




Is the game ready to ship?
No. Every level past level 2 is missing some kind of art asset. Releasing now would be entail the game having black boxes as enemies or some random object being a giant missing texture error. The game is mostly done code wise, we have been working on it for five years after all, but many art assets are missing. That's what the $10,000 is primarily for, just enough to hire our artists to plow through the remainder of our sprites / illustrations and polish some of our older assets to really make them shine.
Of course, as the game was developed we had to cut features due to our general lack of funds and the cost of hiring artists. The game we've developed, while awesome is not the same level of "epic" we originally envisioned. If we reach our stretch goals, we could afford the extra GUIs/sprites and dedicate the time needed re-integrate those features. These inclusions would help our game appeal to a larger demographic and stand out from the rest of the brawlers that have so recently burst onto the scene. If we, through some miracle, made it to $50,000 and got the OUYA funds we'd have more money than we need. It would enable us to do something crazy like hire assistant programmers, support multiple languages (FIGS), and actually be able to travel to cons / afford some marketing!



Is this our first game?
No as I mentioned before, we've previously released Kobold's Quest on Xbox 360. Check it out, anything past the 1st level is gold, especially when it's played with 3 other friends. It was a Kotuku pick back in the day. We lost money on it, due to launching at the same time as summer uprising which had a link that circumvented the new release list. Everyone who released that month, that was not part of Summer Uprising, had the worst sales in XBLI history.

Well that's about all I can think of to write, please check out our Kickstarter. Pledge if you like it or pass the link on to someone else who you think might. Thank you for your time, I look forward to hearing from you.


http://kck.st/14YQvak

[DrunkPunk]

The gnome riding the mech is sweet! Going to be watching this and hoping for funding.

[shaminy]

Game looks already great.

Sent from my GT-P5110 using Tapatalk 4

[Jakenut86]

Hope this gets funded

[DanTilly]

I loved Golden Axe as a child. If any project should get funded, it is this one! I'm pretty biased however...

Have missed a month of work so currently lacking funds but will pledge before the campaign is over. Hope either way the game gets completed because it looks absolutely amazing. Great work.

[airforcewriter]

Backed! That game looks very promising!

[SuckerFreeGames]

Thank you all for your kind words, support and encouragement!

We've been working hard at getting noticed over the past week. We even went so far as to put up some inexpensive radio/podcast ads. We're hoping to at least meet our first goal and being able to finish the game. If we manage to make it to the $50,000 you will see quite the indie epic.

Even if we fail we're not going to give up on its development, we'll just keep working on it a nickel and dime at a time.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how we might further promote our game / get pledges? I see the Elementary My Dear Holmes team and Grid Iron speeding past the 50K and it kind of boggles my mind. LOL.

[DanTilly]

Well, I can't speak for everyone but at least with Gridiron Thunder that it appears they are pledging themselves money or getting friends/invenstors to pledge through KickStarter. Think about it, borrow $25k from a rich friend, OUYA matches their money so you can pay him back and you made 25k in the process! Looking through their pledges they have a bunch of people who have pledged 10, 5, and 25k at a time -- but if you look at the "real" $5-50 pledges, they actually don't have that many backers.

I'd suggest writing a little cool press release with images/video and try sending that to indie game websites. By doing that I helped a band meet their goal on a similar website. Find other relevant blogs/messageboards and spread it on there as well. Get word of mouth out there and have more people aware of the project.

Good luck

[SuckerFreeGames]

@DanTilly
Man, I've been trying so many things to gain attention, just finished an interview with the Jace Hall Show, put together and submitted 4 radio ads, basically been writing my fingers off to different podcasts/websites trying to get a bit of attention and now it's apparent that I completely forgot to do a press release. *face palm* Well I will fix that tomorrow. I was also considering using: crowdfundingpr.org and contacting Small Dev talk. Hopefully that will get me somewhere, today our funds moved forward $10 and then backwards $5. Apparently someone canceled their pledge for unknown reasons. 90% of my PR is scheduled to launch between August 31 and September 3rd, so hopefully that will help get things moving again.

[DanTilly]

If you wouldn't mind, when you release your press release post it here or email it to me at danieltilford @ yahoo.com (no spaces obviously) and I will try to get it onto some websites.

I know you're busy but wish you guys all the success possible!