Tradewars Rising Kickstarter project : first few days

We see a lot of Kickstarter projects floating around.  Some are truly amazing innovations, some are really cool game concepts, and some are.... well, less cool to me, and others are just bad projects (or bad presentations).

In a nutshell, Kickstarter is a great way to get the word out to populations and allow them to pledge their support for money, for which they get cool swag, rewards, thanks and all manner of good stuff.



The OLD Tradewars2002 game

Tradewars is an old brand that has been around since the mid-70's when Bulletin Board Systems were being dabbled on by geeks.  It was a text-based space strategy game where you could play with/against several dozens players using up turns every day, over a number of days, until one spaceship captain came up on top with more points than the others.  The experience for the license owners (called SysOps in the day), was that they could modify the game and differ the experience to their own BBS crowd, which made every instance of Tradewars unique and interesting.
Sylien Games, my games company, has been developing a modern version of the game, called Tradewars Rising on top of a super game engine, for a number of years and we've started a Kickstarter campaign to fund the last bit of development that will allow us to:
- Finish the game (debug session, user experience polish, and some fixes)
- Enhance, augment and polish the web site community experience
- Debug and seriously improve the underlying game engine.



Player checking out another's base

Check out the Kickstarter and get involved!

What's most exciting about Tradewars Rising is in face the engine because, just like the old days and NEW for today's game makers....  The engine allows players to create their own game elements and ultimately their own full game (called whatever you like), running on our servers, no hassle, without the need to write any code. 

Yep, you heard me... our tech if finished, would eventually allow players to create their own games without using code.  Only forms and images, and you have our very own browser-based strategy MMO you can then monetize.

So far, we had really strong and heavy supporters early on in the first 5 days or so bringing the first milestone to complete most of this stuff at 38% of funding amount. 



Front art for the Kickstarter project

We need volume of visitors to the Kickstarter site to bring it up to the next level to get it all funded and beyond as we have plans to do the following on stretch goals beyond the needed $89k to finish the game off:
- Get the "Make your own full game" code fully in place
- Put in the TyphoonLand game that he have as a prototype phase (fleet combat and MMO player strategy, with great brush art use)
- Full 3D game viewer right in your browser
-  And more improvements to the game and engine that we can't list here.

We've had great comments and feedback from being showcased at the #AccelerateOTT event last week, and the Post-Mortem with #Microsoft we did this week, but we need people to drive this out into social and popular.  We need massive spread. 

Can you help us?  Sure.. Visit the page, and Share, Tweet and pledge, even if its only $1, its fine.  :)

Let make this project a huge success together and usher in a new era of game development on multiple platform browser for all to enjoy!

I'll definitively take the time to write a blog after this is over as a post-crowdfunding effort.  These things DO NOT happen on their own.  Takes a lot of effort.

For now, see you all on the other side of the wormhole!  Fly safe!