Last summer, Stunmason Games tried to bring their sci fi adventure, StarFlint to life through crowdfunding. Ultimately, they were unable to reach their €40,000 funding goal, but they promised that backers hadn’t seen the last of them. Now, they’ve launched an updated, more polished Kickstarter campaign which they hope will bring them $38,127 closer to releasing their game.
Similar to their first attempt, the money raised through crowdfunding will go towards paying artists and contractors with the developers forfeiting their share. A bold move that only further demonstrates the passion Stunmason has for their project. Since passion alone can’t pay the bills they’ve also hit up Steam Greenlight and the Square Enix Collective prior to launching their new Kickstarter campaign.
The new campaign features a more gameplay oriented trailer and demo access. Rather than parse things out episodically, the team plans to release Starflint the Blackhole Prophecy as a complete story with multiple choices and options. Players gain bits of insight, secrets, and more lowbrow humor as a reward for fully exploring their environments. Standard point-and-click flair.
To make StarFlint stand out, the devs are aiming for mature and complex relationships between their cartoon-styled 2D characters. Certain choices can even lead players to view “mature scenes,” although based on the screenshots and trailer I have a hard time imagining these feeling particularly serious.
Overall, the campaign looks okay. It’s still plagued by some of the same issues that held it back the first time, mostly snippets of information that appear garbled in translation. Some of the “jokes” from the trailer also feel a bit forced, but definitely in-line with the crude humor of the game.
See How Far We’ve Come?
Aside from that, my primary criticism with the new campaign is that it doesn’t give much information about how much of the project they still need to complete. It’s difficult to tell if they’ve continued developing and adding to StarFlint over the past year or if they’ve just rushed forward to include a demo this time around. Old backers from the previous campaign will notice that this one is better, but it may not be enough to entice new backers to join them.
