About this project
The Fall: dark, story driven exploration in an alien world
CA$ 38,155
1,189
Update:
You can now support The Fall via PayPal.
Update -- Read about our design stretch goal here.
Update -- Gameplay videos! The first one covers story and puzzle solving, and the second is a brief gameplay teaser.
Update -- The Fall will be coming to the Wii U. Over The Moon is now an official Nintendo developer. That means you can expect to see this:
Wii U launch will happen just shortly after the initial PC/Mac release.
THANK YOU to everyone who helped us reach our base goal! The Fall only gets better from here! Stretch goals are designed to be safe and focus on polish. Let`s make them happen! They are:
"...a big step up from the outdated, pixel-hunting tedium of the kind of point-and-click adventure games from which the game takes inspiration." -Chloi Rad, Indie Statik
The Fall has been featured on:
- Rock, Paper, Shotgun
- Kotaku
- PCGamesN
- Nintendo Life
- Pure Nintendo
- Indie Statik
- Eurogamer
- The Jace Hall Show
Are you interested in featuring The Fall? Check out our press package.
The Fall is:
A fresh mix of genres - The Fall integrates point and click adventure games, platformers, and shooters into a very unique experience. Drawing equal inspiration from games like Super Metroid and Monkey Island, The Fall is humbly inspired by the greats that came before it.
A fresh narrative experience - The Fall has a story that focuses on "doing" rather than "watching". As players work their way through challenges, they organically find solutions that imply a larger narrative as the game progresses.
Episodic - The Fall has been designed from day one to be a manageable project, requiring relatively little in development costs, and able to sustain itself by providing players with reasonably sized, affordable episodes. This project will be finished on time!
Indie - Up until now, the fall has been developed by one person: myself! The Fall represents a long personal goal of mine to have a sustainable career making fantastic, meaningful games as an indie. You can make that happen!
More than anything, however, The Fall is about exploration; it's all about that feeling of curiosity that pulls you forward. "What is this world? What happened here?"
Come explore the world of The Fall!
The Fall needs you to make it great! I believe strongly in the importance of minimizing risk when planning a game development project. For that reason, the base goal for this project is the absolute minimum required to finish The Fall, Episode 1, to a great level of quality. Here's the basic breakdown of where the base amount is going:
However, The Fall really needs your help to truly shine. This base amount does not include important elements such as voice acting, a complete sound track, or professional animation polish. That being said,
Stretch goals for The Fall are safe.
Stretch goals for The Fall are designed more around refinement and less around tacking on frivolous features. The Fall was designed to be episodic and budgeted in this way as a strategy for reducing risk and gauging interest. That means that your support can really make this game great! Also, any additional funding will go towards future episodes, so you can be assured that nothing will be wasted.
I'm committed to getting The Fall on as many platforms as possible, and will be pushing hard to make that happen shortly after the initial PC/MAC release. Linux support will come with an upgrade to The Fall's game engine, Unity3D, and if that stretch goal is reached than Linux support will come on or around the exact same time as the PC/Mac release. Additional platforms will come after that, depending on this campaign reaching it's stretch goals, or The Fall generating enough PC/Mac sales to pay for platform expansion. Thankfully, console manufacturers are making it easier than ever to launch on their systems, but there are some fees associated with using Unity on consoles that are cumbersome.
The Fall is a story about ARID, a virtual intelligence integrated into an armoured combat suit, who's activated when the human pilot inside the suit is rendered unconscious. ARID awakes in a half-initialized state, with very little control over the suit and its functions. Somehow however, it must find a way to help its human pilot, even though it can barely help its self.
The Fall's story is designed to be integrated with its gameplay. As players work their way through challenges, they organically find solutions that imply a larger narrative. Through exploring their environments, players will help ARID overcome its own self limitation, unfolding a unique story of self-actualization that's driven by the player.
Gameplay in The Fall is a combination of exploration and combat. Most of the game has players exploring the world's mysterious environments, picking up and using items, and solving puzzles in a more traditional adventure-gaming style. The Fall allows for this level of interaction by using the player's flashlight to explore and interact with the environment.
This is surprisingly smooth and solves common adventure game issues, like having to repeatedly scan the screen with a cursor. It also creates a seamless blend between exploration and combat.
Combat in The Fall is centred on a cover-based mechanic and is geared around timing, patience, and strategy.
The goal with combat is to use it mainly to build and maintain tension, without bringing it too close to the forefront of the player's experience. It is designed to be simple and fun, and add to player engagement, not to pad the game with repetitive combat sequences to artificially expand the game's play time.
As a backer of The Fall, you've got a few cool options to chose from:
Official The Fall t-shirt.
Official The Fall, Episode 1 Art book. Actual book may vary.
Your personal style and face on an enemy NPC. The basic premise here is that there are a number of domestic droids in the world of The Fall. To make the humans around them more comfortable, they use an adaptive camo system that can project imagery over top of their skin. These domestic droids need you as a role-model!
These rewards will ship at the end of the project, to ensure that I have as much content for the art book as possible, making it a solid addition to your collection.
Risks and challenges
Indie game development in particular is all about managing risks, because planning and finishing a project on an indie budget is inherently a risky endeavour. For that reason, I think that indies who survive have to learn how to make realistic project plans with safe development schedules. In The Fall's case, I made sure to Iron out the major challenges before I created this Kickstarter page.
The Fall, Episode One has:
- No dependencies -- Up until now, I have been the sole developer and I have all of the hardware, software, and ability to finish this project.
- A clear plan -- The first episode has been precisely planned out to avoid the possibility of running into creative blocks during development.
- A proven pipeline -- The art style was designed to make producing content simple, and has been proven to do so.
- A proven design pipeline -- The "back end" of the game has been almost fully written. All I need to do is produce content.
- Established support - I've gotten my hands on a great sound designer! He`s responsible for the audio on my promotional videos, and we will begin working together on The Fall if this campaign is successful. A voice actress for the main character has been found as well.
In other words, every major development risk has been mitigated at the time of this writing.
That being said, The Fall is episodic and future episodes will be dependant upon the financial success of Episode One, unless of course this campaign greatly exceeds its funding goals. For that reason, getting solid distribution is important and failure in that area is a risk. I have a plan to distribute The Fall on various digital store fronts, and a Steam Greenlight campaign is currently on the go. I am confident that I will be able to land solid distribution for The Fall.
Of course, the #1 risk to this project is funding. With your help, we can make The Fall a reality!
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Funding period
- (30 days)