Second InSomnia Kickstarter a Test of Backer Devotion

InSomnia is a “brutal dieselpunk” RPG heavily inspired by the original Fallout games and Wasteland 2. It takes cues from other RPG’s and more modern gaming, but if you didn’t know better you’d think you were playing Fallout 4 as designed by its original developers, Interplay. The first campaign was funded in July 2014 getting over $90,000. Now, Studio MONO is back all these years later seeking another $80,000 to finish funding.

…you’d think you were playing Fallout 4 as designed by its original developers, Interplay

This time around they have a pre-alpha available free for anyone, not just backers. It’s actually a prologue to the game in which you play a potential companion in the main game. You can watch my let’s play/impressions video at the end of this article for my take on the game.

There will inevitably be complaints since this is yet another crowdfunding attempt for a once successfully crowdfunded game. According to the developers, “all parts of the game have been completed,” and all that’s remains to do is “put them together, polish it up and debug.” Studio MONO spending £12,500 a month, and have blown £100,000 of their own money since spending all the Kickstarter money.

While “all parts” of the game having been completed is pretty vague, it’s good to see them address their return to Kickstarter. A lot of work has gone into the game since the last Kickstarter, including the massive (and free) prologue. They also promise to be transparent about development for the rest of development.

“As transparency is important to us, we’ll make it possible to track our progress towards the finish line right here on this Kickstarter campaign, by way of project updates. Once the campaign is over, we’ll do an update every two weeks that will chart the various milestones we’re meeting.”

Previous backers will inevitably get angry, and justifiably so, about a second Kickstarter. Even Double Fine, who went millions of dollars over budget and used their own money for Double Fine Adventure, got endless hate. Double Fine Adventure, eventually renamed Broke Age, was split in two acts though, and the second act was more-or-less a retread of the first act though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ6Ue30u3YI

Studio MONO expanded the scope of InSomnia far more than what they could afford. It’s a common problem on Kickstarter. They should have known when to scale back their ideas so they could release on time and on budget. However, since they’re so determined to continue on this path, it’s probably for the better that they seek more funds on Kickstarter than go the Double Fine route.

We’re about to find out just how interested people are in InSomnia. Are enough backers willing to back the game for a second time, or will MONO have to rely on mostly new backers? Will new backers be turned off by the team launching a second Kickstarter? Only time will tell, and we’ll be there to cover it.