How do you balance an open-ended gaming experience with compelling gameplay? Hopefully we can do this while providing a fun, evolving, replayable game that our community wants to play and grow with for a long, long time.įreedom in a game can be fun, but it can also detract from the actual game itself.

We want this game to eventually be everything we've envisioned, even if it takes a little longer than expected. We are definitely taking a big page out of the playbook of other digitally distributed games like Minecraft and Dota2. Depending on the level of success of our Kickstarter program, we may not be able to hit every single one of our goals at launch, but we will continue to work on it afterwards to grow into the vision we have of the game. One last important point - the development of Project Awakened does not end with the launch of our game. Many other high profile Kickstarters have high funding goals because they are rolling their own engine, which we can avoid due to our great relationship with Epic Games. We are also starting with a big advantage given our expertise and usage of UE4. So, the base Kickstarter goal isn't 'what you'd need to make Project Awakened from scratch', it's the minimum that we need which, when added to our own funding, would allow us to put a dedicated team into finishing what we have already. Also, we are planning on putting additional funding into this project on top of the funds we get from Kickstarter. All of the footage you see in the video and the screenshots we've posted show a ton of content that we have ready-made, so we're pretty far along already. Sineni: We've already been working on Project Awakened for a while, so we aren't starting from scratch. How far along in development are you in this game, and will half a million dollars really be enough to finish? I had the chance to ask Chip Sineni, Phosphor Games Studio Director, a few questions about the game and where they stand in these last few days of Kick-starting.įorbes: Project Awakened sounds really neat, but I worry that when developers promise things that sound too good to be true, they probably won't deliver. With just four days to go, the project has only raised (and I say 'only' here rather loosely) $200,000 and change-well short of the half million dollar goal Project Awakened is shooting for. This all sounds great, but apparently the crowd-funding scene doesn't agree.

Phosphor beta 1 play