About this project
Castle Story
$702,516
UPDATE July 27th : We can't believe we reached our goal in under 5 hours. Heartfelt thanks to everyone and your amazing generosity!
UPDATE July 28th : CLARIFICATION - After a large amount of questions regarding the first reward, we'd like to clarify that for 15$ you OWN the game! You will never need to pay anything ever again. Unfortunately, we cannot reformulate the reward description.
UPDATE August 17th: Half a million dollars have been pledged! This is incredible! Ginormous thanks to everybody involved! \:D/
UPDATE August 18th : ADDED SPACE IN LIMITED TIERS - Premium and Elite backer tiers have doubled available space.
UPDATE August 22nd : ADDED DOUBLE BETA+PROTOTYPE for the Premium, Elite and ATOMIC Backers.
"Its promised blend of building and strategy looks great, the kind of thing to rekindle the very fondest of childhood memories..." - Kotaku
"... I’m having a nostalgia rush [...] Castle Story is the first new game that I shall be observing by means of a spyglass each morning throughout 2012." - Rock Paper Shotgun
"I am super excited about [Castle Story]! Looks like a game I'd really enjoy." - Notch
Castle Story is a creative voxel-based strategy game in which you can build castles one brick at a time using an army of little characters called Bricktrons.
Your goal will be to explore a vast landscape full of mysteries and dangers, and defend your castle against onslaughts of hostile creatures and possibly other players.
The world of Castle Story takes place on flying islands, high above an infinite ocean. The islands are made of voxels, cubes made of various elements, which means you can dig, carve and build anything you can imagine in the landscape. Digging underground to gather resources, stacking bricks on top of each other to build a wall or even tunnelling through a mountain is all possible and even necessary to keep your Bricktrons safe.
Carefully designing your castle not only requires creativity and imagination, but thanks to pathfinding AI and physics simulations, Castle Story has layers of strategy and depth on top of an otherwise free-form sandbox experience.
Castle Story will be released for Windows & Mac (with possible Linux support once Unity4 is released).
- Build any structure you can imagine! Using 2x1 blocks, create structures that are not only good-looking, but also functional. Your Bricktrons need to be able to navigate your castle to build it and to keep the monsters out!
- Physics! Watch a tower crumble to the ground realistically when its foundations can no longer support it. The entire world obeys to the laws of physics which means that you need to build cleverly so your castle can withstand attacks from projectiles and explosives.
- Sandbox! Build a huge sprawling fortress, a single impenetrable bunker or a network of underground tunnels. The choice is yours. Castle Story rewards imagination and ingenuity.
- Strategy! Command your Bricktrons as they build your castle brick by brick. Manage the way they work, what resources they gather, and the places they explore. Use your resources to build weapons and armor for your Bricktrons and all kinds of upgrades for your castle.
- Combat! Using shields, swords, bows and lots more, your Bricktrons can defend themselves against the hostile creatures inhabiting the world of Castle Story. Lead your Bricktrons through tough fights, and use your wits to gain an advantage. You can even build catapults to rain destruction on your foes!
- Magic! The world of Castle Story is permeated with all kinds of magic. Discover resources with magical auras and learn to mix them to create effects. Explore strange places and find mysterious artifacts left behind by unknown civilizations.
We've been working on Castle Story in our free time ever since we graduated from game design studies two years ago. We posted a video demo of our game on Youtube last January and received a flood of good comments and an amazing reception on the Internet. So we decided to quit our jobs and work on the game full-time.
Until recently we’ve been working heavily on creating the engine for the game. While most of what is in the trailer and demo video currently exists, it needs to be refined and organized into a cohesive whole. In other words, we have a prototype, but we want to turn this in a complete game.
We’re using Kickstarter to be able to fund the next stage of development for Castle Story, so we can build the single player and multiplayer modes. We’ll use the money for:
- Software Licenses : As a startup studio, we are missing several tools to help us get the job done. Software is expensive and the costs add up quickly.
- Hosting : Our website currently isn't capable of hosting large amounts of traffic. Bandwidth and maintenance for our website and forums as well as a server to handle traffic will be essential.
- Multiplayer : We've never done a multiplayer game of this scope before, so it's going to take a lot of time and effort to learn the ropes and get it right.
- Music & Audio : We hired two musicians to compose the music for the trailer and the results were pretty amazing. We would like to hire them back again to compose a full fledged soundtrack for the game. We would also hire a professional SFX artist to make the soundscape just as good as the visuals.
- Surviving : Paying rent for food and basically sustain the basic needs of three full time developers for a full year.
- Polish : If we reach our goal, anything past that will be put back directly into making the game more polished.
The game has already come pretty far in the last months. Here's what it looked like only 6 months ago, before we quit our jobs:
Kickstarter is great because it allows us to have a direct relationship with you. Instead of having publishers interfere with the game development, you can contribute to the decision process so we can take the game into interesting directions. That's one of the great advantages of "independent" game development.
Getting your name in the game:
Here is a video attempting to explain what we plan on doing with the names of our backers:
The Beta:
Everyone who contributes to the Kickstarter (enough to qualify for the first reward) gets an early version of the game and has access to any updates that come further down the road. The Beta will become the final game eventually so anybody who backed the Kickstarter with the minimum amount of 15$ gets the final game.
The Prototype:
Get access to an alpha build of the game soon after the Kickstarter is over. The prototype represents what we've shown so far that works. The amount of content and the replay value will be limited, and the build will probably be slightly broken. But we want people to test this version and give us feedback so we can make the Beta better.
TShirts:
We've designed a few t-shirts for you to choose from. Once the Kickstarter is over, we will contact you to see what t-shirt you would like and what size.
Posters:
During the 30 days that the Kickstarter is going to run. We are going to post several timelapses of the painting process behind our two posters. Afterwards, we are going to print limited-edition high quality prints for the backers who signed up for the posters.
Here's a preview of the posters. Keep in mind that those are only sketches. The real posters will be painted during the Kickstarter.
The Bricktron Plushie:
This hand-crafted plushie is made by one of our friend, a professional seamstress and fashion designer. Each plushie will be made one at a time, so every one will be unique. If you want, you can choose a name for it, or we can choose for you, and we'll sew the name on the plushie.
We call this one Randy:
More coming soon...
We're pretty busy working on the prototype. But once we see what kind of response we get, we have a few extra rewards that we would like to offer.
FAQ
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YES! We are going to update the Beta until we stop calling it a beta. You will still be the proud owner of a full license of the game. Everyone who backs our Kickstarter at at the least the first reward has a version of the final game.
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No, but since everyone who has the Prototype also has the Beta, everyone can happily play the Beta once that happens.
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Yes, we'll send you an email with a form so you can choose what name you want to appear!
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Unity already supports MacOsX and Windows. The next version of Unity plans to support Linux, so hopefully it will work on that too even though we cannot confirm yet. We do not plan on supporting tablet and mobile platforms in the near future due to system requirements, so iPad and Ouya won't be supported until further notice.
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Yes, we calculated the shipping cost into our reward prices, so you will not have to pay additional fees like shipping and taxes.
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Funding period
- (30 days)