The team behind the Crowdsourced Hardcore Tactical Shooter is pushing hard to make its Kickstarter target with a new video, more clearly-defined goals and a name that doesn’t suck.
The Crowdsourced Hardcore Tactical Shooter Kickstarter is having a tough go of it. The idea is solid and the guys behind it knows their stuff, but with just five days left it’s not quite halfway to its funding target of $200,000. What happened?
In an article on Kotaku entitled “I Messed Up My Videogame Kickstarter,” Christian Allen explains that the project stumbled on three big points: Allen doesn’t have the name recognition of Tim Schafer or Brian Fargo, the promotional video was dull and the breakdown of the project was too vague, didn’t show off any assets and failed to differentiate itself from other shooters already on the market. “Oh, and the name SUCKED,” he added.
But instead of throwing in the towel, Allen and team have put it to the floor with a new video, solid concept art, details about what the team is actually trying to accomplish and, of course, a new name: Takedown, which doesn’t score any points for creativity but sure sucks a whole lot less than CHTS.
“Will we be successful? Time will tell,” Allen wrote. “We’ll write a postmortem for other game developers to learn from, so no matter what we hope to make the landscape better for others. But no one will be able to say we gave up.”
The video still isn’t as engaging as those for the Double Fine Adventure or Wasteland 2, but at least it looks a little more professional than the previous “guy with a camera in his phone” effort. It’s a long shot at this point but I hope it makes it, and even if it doesn’t, it’s a good lesson for future Kickstarters: some things, like not being Tim Schafer, can’t be overcome, but for everything else, professionalism, good humor and an attention to detail are a must.
