Crush your enemies in this original action role-playing game from Gas Powered Games
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9,235
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$504,120
pledged of $1,100,000 goal
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Crush your enemies in this original action role-playing game from Gas Powered Games
About this project
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Wildman delivers an action-role-playing experience that only a developer like Gas Powered Games can deliver. Think of it as a spiritual successor to our classic PC game Dungeon Siege, with a twist.
This is what Wildman is all about:
Explore the World: Go on RPG Adventures in amazing and epic environments; discover secret dungeons; fight battles against rampaging hordes of monsters; find and equip new weapons and armor.
Evolve or Die: Steal technology from your defeated opponents and use it against them in future battles.
Smash and Destroy: Advanced physics and destructible environments deliver highly visceral (and bloody) combat.
Go to War: Build your army and fight against opposing champions armies for great rewards in hand-crafted War Zones.
Imagine a game where you control a single hero—the “Wildman”—dropped into the middle of a War Zone. The battle starts. Your own army begins to engage the approaching enemy.
You support your troops with your own combat abilities and skills. You shape-shift into new forms that grant you new abilities. You upgrade your armies with new technology. You construct defenses. Your opponent switches tactics; you reconfigure your army to counter.
You push the enemy back to their citadel, their home base. You face your opponent’s champion. You each rally your troops for support. You execute your special abilities with precision. Your opponent is devastated.
You survey the battlefield: the bodies strewn on the ground, the trees burned down and smoldering, the buildings turned to rubble. You collect your rewards. You evolve.
Victory is yours. For now.
Now imagine that between these War Zone battles you can go on role-playing adventures. You can explore fantastical environments. You can discover ancient dungeons full of mystery and treasure. You can earn new skills. You can discover and equip new weapons and armor. You can collect materials. You can craft new items. You can fight relentless onslaughts of men and monsters.
Wildman has fast-paced combat and deep role-playing that rewards strategic thinking. The more you play, the greater your power.
Wildman will feature a score from the legendary Jeremy Soule, composer for Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander, Skyrim, Morrowind, Oblivion, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, Dawn of War, and pretty much every other game with an epic score.
Wildman represents the union of our experience working on pure RPG and RTS games, and we’re pulling some of the best features from our past games into the Wildman experience.
From Dungeon Siege: The core action-RPG experience. Equip weapons and gear, cast spells. Fight monsters. Level-up. Find loot.
From Supreme Commander: The core RTS experience. Create armies. Explore a tech tree that lets you customize your hero and armies. Adjust your strategy on-the-fly.
From Demigod: You don’t fight alone in Wildman. Waves of allies fight alongside you in the War Zones as you push the battle ahead, seize key control points, and destroy the enemy citadels.
Wildman is exciting because it’s something new, but it’s also reminiscent of these games we’ve made and loved. We want to make this game, and we have the right people to do it.
Chris Taylor founded Gas Powered Games in 1998. We’ve been an independent developer for our entire history.
“Wait a second, you’re no indie,” you might say. “All of your games have been from publishers.”
This is true. We’ve chosen to partner with publishers in the past to get our games into your hands, but it’s equally true that we’ve maintained our independence working within the system. We’ve made a number of original games, we’ve worked on sequels, and we’ve worked on other people’s games. Members of the GPG family weren’t just contributors to classic games like Total Annihilation, Dungeon Siege, and Supreme Commander: We were the lead designers, the lead engineers, and the lead artists.
For Wildman, we’ve assembled a team that includes:
Project Lead/Lead Designer: Chris Taylor got his start in the industry working for Distinctive Software as a programmer and designer on Hardball II. In 1991, he began to refine his interest in designs based on complex simulations and technology with the first 3D polygonal boxing game, 4D Boxing. After spending multiple years developing the first Triple Play baseball for Electronic Arts, he decided to join legendary industry figure Ron Gilbert at the fledgling startup Cavedog Entertainment to design and engineer the hugely influential and innovative real-time strategy game Total Annihilation (1997). Its combination of complex simulation, UI control, and deep strategy remains unmatched to this day.
He left Cavedog to found Gas Powered Games, where he immediately started work on the action-role-playing game Dungeon Siege (2002). It featured an enormous streaming world with no loadscreens—an innovation that’s now become standard for open-world games—and supported multiple character parties. Next up was 2007’s Supreme Commander, which was considered by many the spiritual sequel to Total Annihilation and introduced a replacement for the standard RTS mini-map in the form of “strategic zoom.” Its 2010 sequel added a new technology tree that let players re-configure their armies during the heat of battle.
Design: In addition to Chris, some of the other designers working on Wildman include Brian Fricks, who got his start modding Dungeon Siege before joining us to work on all of our games since Dungeon Siege II. Eric Williamson has worked on systems design and tuning and balancing for Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, Demigod, Supreme Commander 2, and Age of Empires Online. Steve Bauman was the editor-in-chief of Computer Games Magazine for over a decade before joining GPG in 2007 to contribute to the design of our most recent games.
Engineering: The Wildman engineering effort is led by James Loe and Chad Queen. James got his start working with Chris at Cavedog on Total Annihilation before moving over to GPG to work on the Dungeon Siege team. Chad Queen has been his partner-in-code since the earliest days at GPG, and they’ve worked on (and re-worked) engines and architectures for Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander, and Age of Empires Online.
Art: If you’re a fan of Total Annihilation, you’re probably familiar with the legendary Kbot. What you may not know is that it was named after one of our artists, Kevin Pun, who followed Chris to GPG and has since worked on the art for most of our games. Stu Rose spent 12 years working at a small, unknown upstart called Blizzard Entertainment, making art and stuff for equally small and unknown games like WarCraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and World of WarCraft. He also designed the Blizzard logo and was the voice of the peasant in WarCraft. For reals.
We’re giving you a chance to be at ground zero of this game's development, to contribute to the next big thing from Chris Taylor and Gas Powered Games. We will give you frequent updates from programmers, artists, and designers. We will produce fun videos, chats, podcasts, blogs, and lots more.
We’ve already started work on Wildman, but we need your help to finish it. We want to follow more closely the examples of companies like Valve and Blizzard, who iterate on as many ideas as possible before settling on the "right" features.
With that in mind, we have intentionally left some areas of the game’s design wide open. This isn't to say we don't know what we want to do, or that we lack direction or focus. Instead, it's an indicator that we're hoping we get to make Wildman a bit more organically, with your feedback.The beauty of Kickstarter specifically, and crowdfunding and crowdsourcing in general, is that we can tap into the creative power of our community to help us make the right choices. You’re not just backing a project; you’re becoming an active participant in its creation and have a chance to shape its direction. Your support is vital, and we're excited to explore this new way of making games with you.
Wildman is an all-new game that needs to be created from the ground up. We are creating a new world, a new RPG system, and it requires new art, characters, animation, and sound. We need to develop engines and servers.
We’re looking for a little something… extra from you to make Wildman an even better experience. In other words, we want to add more… stuff for you.
The game’s design is flexible enough that we will be able to add new features or contents if we reach certain funding stretch goals. Examples include:
More: A bigger, richer world filled with even more enemies, more player characters, more visual customization, more animation, more diverse landscapes, more music, and more multiplayer options. Basically, more.
Languages: We intend to support English at launch, but through a combination of your support and crowd-translating, we can add more languages: German, Spanish, Italian, French, Russian; if there’s enough interest in playing the game in that language, we’ll do what we can to get it translated.
Modding: We want to release “friendlier” versions of the tools we use to make the game, with Wikis on their use. With additional support, we can get these in your hands faster, letting you get started making your own worlds and game modes that you can give away or sell from within the game. Get paid for your own hard work!
We've also joined the Kicking it Forward initiative, and will be pledging 5% of Wildman's profits to other projects in the Kickstarter community. Learn more at http://kickingitforward.org.
We're a company of experienced developers with years of experience working on projects like this. Everyone here is fully committed to delivering an awesome game. This is going to be a blast!
We know there’s some risk for us to using Kickstarter at this stage of a game’s development, but we also feel it’s an ideal time to influence and change its direction based on your feedback. You get to help decide the final shape it takes.
Thank you for checking out this project, and feel free to tell us what you do and don’t like about the concept or the Kickstarter. If you’re interested in Wildman, please spread the word to all of your friends. Let’s make this happen!
Risks and challenges
Making games is inherently risky, with unseen challenges that inevitably spring up over the course of development. But we’re an experienced team, and we’re using our own proven technology and tools. We’re confident we can address these issues.
Most of the costs of a computer game development project are in the salaries of the people working on it, so significant delays in its release could require an additional influx of capital. Without this additional money, the release date could be in jeopardy. Mitigating that risk, however, is our history of delivering projects on-budget and on-time.
The design challenge is to blend two familiar genres in a satisfying way, and do it in a very short amount of time. We will only release Wildman when it meets our quality bar, and we intend to release in within a year of this Kickstarter. This is an ambitious goal, but we’ll have a lot of help…from all of you. Let’s do this together!
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
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We currently support Windows. However, we are currently in the process of making our underlying technology more platform-agnostic. Specifically, we’re switching out the renderer from Windows-only Direct3D to the multi-platform OpenGL. This opens the door to other platforms.
Currently, Linux and OS/X support are stretch goals. We'll be announcing the specifics of those goals as we get closer to our initial funding goal.
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Yes! You can find a Paypal link on our website http://wildman.gaspowered.com.
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No, PayPal donations don’t count toward the Kickstarter funding goal. We’d prefer you use Kickstarter, with PayPal as a backup for those unable to fund via Kickstarter for whatever reason. You can also use Paypal to pay for international shipping, if you missed paying for it via the Kickstarter. This will all be handled down the road.
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Yes. At the end of the campaign we will add all funds together to determine which goals we have met.
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Right now, the only goal is "fund the game." As we get closer to that milestone, we'll unveil additional goals.
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We haven’t set a final price yet, but its initial price will be higher than what we’re offering to Kickstarter backers. We got your back.
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There will be no DRM.
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Yes. We will have an offline mode, as well as an online mode that stores character data.
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We like Steam. We’ve made multiple games for Steam. We know where Valve’s offices are. They even answer our e-mails. But to sort of answer the question, we want to get the game to as many people as possible, and Steam is a great way to do that. However, we’re not quite ready to divulge our digital partners; regardless, we’d need to go through an approval process. We can say that it won't be GFWL, since so many of you specifically asked about that.
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We are going to be offering both compressed MP3 and lossless FLAC formats for the soundtrack when it becomes available for download. The 720P version of the movie will be available in MP4 format and the 480P version will be in VOB format for direct burning to DVD.
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English initially, with other languages dependent on funding. We may also crowdsource some localization, which could be awesome or terrible, or terribly awesome.
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It's too early to say, but we plan on having persistent battle damage, which is a fancypants way of saying "gore." So, think Mature or 17 to 18.
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All extra copies are the base Digital Edition, which will be available when the game launches. They don't include any extras, beyond the download code.
Rewards
Funding period
- (32 days)