Since the advent of Kickstarter and sites like IndieGogo, Crowdfunding has become a common-place, popular thing. Indie developers are looking for new ways to revolutionize the Crowdfunding process, trying to entice potential backers into backing their latest venture. With Dark Flame, creator Warren Smith has not only teamed up with a stellar development team (After working on the game for over two years by himself, getting the game to its current completion level) to create his Metroidvania adventure; but one of the designers is also Twitch streamer Mr. Moustachio (Creator of Mr. Moustachio’s Great Streaming Show of Excellence) who in addition to providing PR resources and working on story content; is also offering stream participants incentives within the Kickstarter to hopefully reach a greater audience.
Dark Flame is a Metroidvania Action RPG in which the player is put in the role of Taharial; a crusader in the midst of the Batlic Crusades. Taharial discovers a plague of insanity amongst his brothers with a mysterious and unknown cause; with darkness at every turn Taharial must resist the darkness and fight back in the hopes of saving his brothers and the world. Dark Flame is a throwback to old-school retro action RPG’s and has been designed with skillful play and difficulty in mind.
Despite it being a throwback to the action rpg’s of yore; Dark Flame has a unique leveling system, a wide array of spells, weapons and armor to customize the player’s stats and appearance; as well as containing all sorts of secret rooms and content to satisfy players who want to explore. Dark Flame has 28 days on its Kickstarter campaign and has raise $2,085 of its $75,000 goal thus far, showing a somewhat promising start to the campaign.
In addition, the game is meant to be difficult, though thanks to feedback from the Alpha demo available on Dark Flame’s website; the developer has created a tweet that if it gains 300 likes will lead to a casual (easy) mode being implemented for those who may not want the higher level of difficulty.
The inclusion of the Twitch Streamer Mr. Moustachio is a brilliant marketing strategy, as elements from his stream are a part of the campaign. An example of this is the $120,000 stretch goal, which will enable a boss based on a character and prominent part of Mr. Moustachio’s stream.
Another example is the $5000 pledge reward, which allows the backer to fly out to spend time with Mr. Moustachio as well as Warren Smith, the creator of Dark Flame during a live twitch stream.
Mr. Moustachio himself commented on the Kickstarter, stating – “The origin came from talking to Warren, I wanted to somehow incorporate the idea that since I became the PR guy for this and have assisted on developing and creating the story and content of Dark Flame; I wanted to incorporate the idea of making sure that my viewers could gain an extra benefit for participating in this process. I knew a thank you wasn’t enough, so I settled on the idea of incorporating my viewers into the backer rewards; allowing my viewers to get extra bonuses for participating in making this Kickstarter (and my stream) a success.”
As for the fact that the integration of stream viewers is a new frontier for Kickstarter, Mr. Moustachio commented on being the pioneer of this as well –
“I didn’t originally want to pioneer this new way of integrating the audience with the Kickstarter; but I realized that it was strange that many developers weren’t utilizing Twitch properly; almost as though Twitch wasn’t getting the same respect from the indie community when it came to the power that exposure can give to a campaign. I saw the disaster with Nintendo’s resistance against YouTube and Twitch content, and thought “Why shouldn’t we try to integrate our audience with our development?” We already have viewers tweeting out our stream and utilizing social media, and there’s no reason that love and support shouldn’t be rewarded; especially if they take the time and energy to promote this project.”
Dark Flame has already been greenlit on Steam, and will release on PC as well as other platforms if stretch goals are met.
In particular the $100,000 stretch goal offers console availability, with extra content at further goals depending on the amount of money raised. There are also a variety of other incentives based on social media from twitter follows and retweets to Facebook page likes and Mr. Moustachio Twitch follows, all of which offer a variety of extra things at various thresholds.
When asked about his inspiration behind Dark Flame, Warren Smith answered with a simple and honest answer; he wished to merge concepts from various games in his childhood, concepts that he hadn’t seen being merged in the gaming industry thus far. He went on to explain that he felt as though if no one else would create a game that he would love to play, with elements that he knew would work well together; then he would just have to create the game himself and create a new sort of experience for gamers.
One thing that any potential backer should know is that just in talking with the developers and Mr. Moustachio himself, this project is definitely a labor of love and the passion behind the creation of Dark Flame is something that is admirable and promising for the project’s eventual completion. Check out the Kickstarter launch video below, and the official Kickstarter page for more details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz4rJSFQPic
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