Games RPG/RTS Hybrid on Kickstarter

Hey guys, I thought I'd see what you thought of my project. This is a unique hybrid game concept that is now live on kickstarter.
The initial prototype work was done in Unity.
The game will feature a persistent world for large scale multiplayer activity, voxel based terrain editing (which will be limited to "dominions" claimed by a particular PC -so you can edit the area around your own base/house etc), and the ability to found dungeons or other settlements that will run like an RTS game. If you can imagine one player playing Dungeon Keeper and an MMO raid group trying to raid his dungeon in real time, that's the basic concept.


There's a lot to this game, and it's been in development for quite a while. Networking, client-server, etc etc are all nailed down. I used Unity to showcase some example level designs. Obviously, there will be a lot more to do. Minimal viable product for the game will have basically one, single "zone" (called a Hex), some (very procedurally designed) PvE elements, and a good number of nodes for players to found settlements and dungeons. Game mechanics will encourage players to control a dungeon live against a raid group (better rewards), but player dungeons will also be findable on a "raid finder" type menu and can be run as instanced versions of the dungeon with lower reward levels against the computer AI (so if you are offline, people can still find your dungeon; they just can't permanently damage anything).

Lots of cool features will be in the final version of the game (which may come after the MVP: I'm planning a soft launch). I was heavily inspired by SWG (Star Wars Galaxies) for the RPG aspects of the game. Economics, crafting, player housing, and flexible classes and skill trees will be baked in from the get go. I have spent a LOT of time designing a stable game economy...

This has been very much a labor of love, but I still have a long way to go. I am very confident that I can get there though. I happen to work on enterprise software development for huge government projects for a living, so I have a lot of highly technical (and bored) co-workers to lean on for help.
So what do y'all think? (More on the kickstarter page.)

 

This sounds very interesting and definitely looks like a lot of work has been put into it.

You mentioned doing the original prototype in Unity... curious what you are using now and why you switched?

I think you should drop all development right now and focus 100% on getting coverage if your Kickstarter. Try for the game review sites. I don't think your $10k goal is unrealistic but I do think you need to be prepared to work hard to generate that much in a month. And that is the way to look at it IMO. Don't expect it to magically happen instead make it your job to get the message about your game kickstarter to as many people as possible starting NOW. Which you are doing a bit with this post but you need much more.

Good luck!

 

Thanks!
Yeah, the prototype work has been done in Unity. The ease of use and getting up and running has been great. I also love having access to all the assets on the asset store. Unfortunately, networking is not Unity's strong suit. I have experimented with a couple different networking frameworks for Unity, and I ended up going with an MMO emulator project re-skinned and totally redesigned as the basic project framework. The rendering and physics engine are going to be what is compatible with the networking framework, which makes it a little hard to stick with Unity because they are closed source. (I also got a bit irritated by the "Wordpress" effect where Unity updates, all my existing plugin assets stop being compatible, or an asset is updated and suddenly stops being compatible with something else). Basically, for a reliable, production, persistent-world game of this (eventual) scale, I need total control of the source code for the engine.
I totally hear you about getting the word out. As of right now, that is what I am doing 100% of the time.

10K is just enough for an MVP in my judgement. It will be tight, but I can deliver the basic, core gameplay that makes this unique. It will just be in a small world by necessity.

 

Here's the video...
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