Divekick for PC Kickstarter Opens, Experiences from CEO 2012

Keits and the recently renamed One True Game Studios have officially opened a Divekick Kickstarter, or a Divekickstarter if you will, for the extremely popular indie fighting game they’ve shown off at both Ultimate Fighting Game Tournament 8 and CEO 2012. For those of you unfamiliar with the Kickstarter process, your donations net you some interesting prizes depending on how much support you throw behind the project. They range from a copy of the game at release at the lowest to the team designing a character of your very own creation at the highest. The initial $10 investment is basically a pre-order for the game, but once you reach higher tiers you also get everything offered below that tier as well.

Funding this project will help the team overcome the high cost of releasing the game, as well as make the dream of a widely-available Divekick a reality. And after the initial project is funded, the team plans to shoot for higher goals in order to implement things like a story mode, additional characters, and netplay.

For those of you who are surprised by their goal, Keits has included a short run-down of details that have contributed to that number in the Kickstarter’s FAQ:

For such a small project, the cost seems unrealistically high, can you give an itemized breakdown?

The biggest expenses are the following three:
Licenses – we have to pay for licenses on the software we use, like Adobe Photoshop. This will cost a few thousand alone.

Legal fees – we want to release on steam, but we need our laywer to handle the contract work there. We also need him to handle other typical issues for us, and as I’m sure you know, this is also going to cost thousands.

QA Firm – The big one. steam isn’t going to let you release until you get your game tested on a huge number of different PC configurations. For this, you hire a QA firm. This will probably cost us 15k minimum.

The rest – Our team has been working for free in their spare time for 7 months. We’d like to pay them so that they can work full time to finish the project so that we can get it out the door sooner than later.  We are not done with the game at all and strive to release a product worth buying.  Any kickstarter money that doesn’t go to the above will be spent improving the game as much as possible before release.  The team is making serious financial investment themselves, as well, so at the very least if you just want to buy a copy of the game, buy it now for $10 and support the cause.

If at this point you’re still asking yourself, “What is Divekick and is it worth my support?” check out the latest batch of footage from CEO 2012, which showcases the experiences attendees had with the game.

Feel free to visit the One True Game’s website for up-to-date information on this and other projects that may arise in the future, as well as the Mizuumi wiki for more details on the game’s mechanics and characters.

Source: Divekick Kickstarter, Keits, One True Game, Mizuumi