Kickstarter

Clout is a satirical political simulator game I've been making from scratch mostly by myself over the last few years.  It's a game built to run within facebook, written in PHP with a mySQL database backend.  It's been up and running as a facebook application for a couple years now.  If you aren't easily offended by political humor, you can see it in the current alpha release form at http://apps.facebook.com/cloutthegame .  I tried to avoid all the annoying BS in other facebook games.  The number of friends you invite means nothing, and it won't spam your wall with stuff.  There are small social aspects such as inviting friends and the "cronies" system, which gives minor bonuses and lets you see what your friends are doing (capped at 6 cronies for all players).

The game may give you an SSL warning if you normally use facebook with SSL.  SSL certificates cost money, which is part of what I intend to use any donated money for, as it seems many people prefer to browse using SSL.  If you wish to see it as-is, you'll have to temporarily disable facebook's SSL browsing option.

I intend for the game to operate on a free to play micropurchase system.  You can view the details of this in-game, though you can't actually use the system yet.  I don't want to activate this system until the game is out of beta.  I think it's really bizarre that a lot of micropurchase alphas/betas expect people to spend real money just to have what they bought wiped out upon release.

So I'm asking for funding here instead.  Seemed a bit more appropriate.  The money will go to pay for an SSL certificate, probable necessary server upgrades concurrent with a higher volume of players, fund creation of some simple art assets, and to free up time I would spend doing odd jobs for money to instead build the game.

With this level of funding, I could easily push the game into beta testing, through beta and to a final release with a high potential for monetary self-sustainment of the game all within 1-2 months.  Without funding, it'll probably take another 6 months or more for me to do that work in the little spare time I currently have between trying to make ends meet.  So if you think the game is promising and want to see it happen faster, that's what this kickstarter page is for.