Hey folks!
We recently launched a kickstarter for our game called Cursed Crew, where you sail the seas during the golden age of sea piracy in a fantasy settings, trying to lift off the curse from your crew by defeating legendary sea creatures.
You can check out our Kickstarter here:
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cracklewockgames/cursed-crew](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cracklewockgames/cursed-crew)
I couldn't have been happier - we got fully funded in 19 hours. Now, it's all about unlocking those amazing stretch goals.
As a massive thank you to the community, we have added a brand new ship to celebrate smashing through our initial goal. A cog. This video shows how we've incorporated it from start to finish!
Thank you all for your generous support!
All three of us are modders for a game called RimWorld - with hundreds of thousands of downloads on each mod. I’d say a pre-existing fan base was a huge part of our success - after all people knew our product already and knew what to expect.
We’ve also been raising awareness of our game before the Kickstarter launches - newsletters, prelaunch page, youtubers making short videos etc.
If I could give one advice is: the more people know you and about your upcoming Kickstarter, the better.
I saw this game on Kickstarter. Knowing now it is from Rimworld moders has me seriously interested now!
Rimworld is beyond amazing and its mods that take the game to the next level imo
Hey, that's awesome! Stumbled across your campaign yesterday and shared with some friends. Very cool to watch the art come to life like that. Best of luck :)
I find it incredible how you can create such striking visuals with so few colours. I love the aesthetic and I will defiantly be keeping an eye on this project (maybe even funding!)
Did you have a specific process of picking out the colours or did you just go with what looked good? I'm really interested in trying out this style because I think it really helps games to stand out and I just generally love this theme
Well, what I often do is I colorpick from actual, real life photos to learn what makes the colors itself 'realistic'. If you look around in nature, not many things are vibrant - most colors you can see have many different hues within them, their primary color being 'broken' so to say.
So when choosing a color, I don't go for something super vibrant, but instead a toned down version with some other colors mixed in.
You don't have to answer this question if you don't want, but as an indie dev, I notice you're "fully funded" at like 34k. How is it that you can be fully funded on such a low amount of money? That's not even a decent living wage in the states anymore with a full-time job. Is it that you are banking on the stretch goals to really make that budget work? I've debated creating a Kickstarter for my own project, but to even function as a solo dev i would need at least 45k+ to "survive"
Oskar still works as a graphic designer, even though he puts in a lot of hours for Cursed Crew. Roel and I work full time on the game but have made sure we can still afford living expenses. I won't go into details since that's private but our Kickstarter goal is based on what will get us to Early Access. We've all made some pretty big sacrifices to make this happen so I wouldn't interpret the goal as us receiving a full living wage from here on out. What works for us won't necessarily work for other devs out there. Hope that clears things up, best of luck on your project!
Dude, this may very well be the next Indie masterpiece. Love the idea of the backstory, gameplay, and the Don’t Starve inspired design..
You guys should show up more of the gameplay in your video. In this perspective: If a schedule control most of the crew actions, and you only need to active play on “events”, what is the the tasks, as a player, that you perform in the other moments?
I’m a Web Dev and a Fan of RPG / Survival Indie games like this one, if you guys need a tester that is used to laugth on bugs just let me know! 😁
It's not, but we're all very aware that sacrifices need to be made to make sure the game is completed. We do it out of our passion, and if you put enough passion into something, money will come later. That's my opinion.
The game will be story driven with semi-random events that depend on your previous actions, crew composition etc!
But for now, we're nailing down the basics.
If you mean how it had such an outreach on day one, it's probably because we've made plenty of popular mods for RimWorld already, and we informed our subscribers before the campaign is launched!
Looks fantastic! One thing you could do is use a tiny bit of vertical parallaxing on the layers of the boat. That way it can rock on its "roll" axis. With a sin tween, it might look really nice. :)
I really like the art and pirate vibes here! Also, great success for you, guys, to finally starting your indie project. But I have one question, is 35.000$ enough to be fully funded? Because most of indie games require different budgets and considering you're a team of devs, it's quite interesting to hear how you budget your game.
Also, keep working on a amazing project!
We all had to make sacrifices, and it's purely a passion project. I'm well aware 35 grand is not going to pay for the year of hard work we already put in, nor will it pay for the next year, but it will be enough to covers any expenses we might have. We do it because we love to do it, and who knows, maybe once the game is completed we will all be paid for it!
I still do graphic design jobs on the side to put food on the table, and any spare time I put into Cursed Crew.
Congratulations on getting funded so quickly! Now let's see how many stretch goals you reach in the remaining 22 days. How difficult was it to decide on those goals?
Not to sound rude, but i watched 1 minute of your kickstarter video and i didnt see any gameplay at all? just semi-pretty graphic of characters running around aboard a ship, then i gave up. Was it other players? looked like AI players, but i dont know. What do you do in the game, run around... i guess? items? skills? levels? characters dying and having to be replaced? combat? quests? bosses? c'thulu? I should atleast get to see some of that in 1 minute.
Well it’s a trailer of our Kickstarter campaign, not the game release trailer itself. I do recommend you read through the campaign as it will definitely shed some light what the game is about!
That makes it even worse.
And asking the user to read, when you couldnt catch his attention with 1minute of the video? Thats not how things work.
But best of luck to you
Well it's certainly different per person. If the video didn't catch your attention, you're free to look elsewhere. The game is still in development so much of the gameplay is still being worked on, but what is shown in the video is essentially what we have so far. That's why we launched a Kickstarter! You asked for details about the game, and the description has that. But if it's not up your alley, then hey I'm sure there's something else out there for you. Thanks for the feedback :)
\- Phil
I was just trying to be helpful, you have to catch the audience early by showing different gameplay, what you can do, within mere seconds. Now i dont know if you have any other gameplay than just walking about, but i assume you do. So show some combat, or atleast what you envision the combat will be like, and skills and loot and death and betrayal and so on. Just walking around for the first minute showing of your graphic (which sure, it looks good, but unless its stellar its not the reason one would play the game) doesn't convey what the game is about (something something ship something something pirates).
There's some combat footage at about the 1min mark. As for other mechanics in the game, there are many things that are not yet finished, and thus never made it into the trailer. We'll continue posting more footage on our patreon if you're still interested in checking it out. The posts are accessible to everyone.
[https://www.patreon.com/cracklewockgames](https://www.patreon.com/cracklewockgames)
Doesn't mean at all that it couldn't work better.
Edit: Its like having a trailer for the first harry potter movie being about harry living under the stairs and how old he is and what his interests are and what the names of the other members in the family are and their ages and whatnot for one minute, rather than telling "he's no ordinary boy" WHAM hogwarts WHAM magic WHAM monsters WHAM love and adventure.
How is that supposed to happen when most of those things are actually implemented?
I'm sure that will be in the final release trailers but that's the point of the Kickstarter... to get enough money to actually get the game to a playable state
I disagree. Kickstarter is supposed to show a slice of a game you want to create, not just merely some sprites moving around.
Along the lines of "With a limited budget, our artist/soundguys/programmers has managed to create this slice, showing off our art, the soundeffects/music, voiceover, game mechanics, scene-transitions, skilltrees, combat, itemgeneration, icons, what have you. Now we just need more money to do more of everything to get a complete game"
Hey folks! We recently launched a kickstarter for our game called Cursed Crew, where you sail the seas during the golden age of sea piracy in a fantasy settings, trying to lift off the curse from your crew by defeating legendary sea creatures. You can check out our Kickstarter here: [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cracklewockgames/cursed-crew](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cracklewockgames/cursed-crew) I couldn't have been happier - we got fully funded in 19 hours. Now, it's all about unlocking those amazing stretch goals. As a massive thank you to the community, we have added a brand new ship to celebrate smashing through our initial goal. A cog. This video shows how we've incorporated it from start to finish! Thank you all for your generous support!
Looks great! I'd love to hear more about your Kickstarter details - did you have a large number of prelaunch signups or an existing fanbase?
All three of us are modders for a game called RimWorld - with hundreds of thousands of downloads on each mod. I’d say a pre-existing fan base was a huge part of our success - after all people knew our product already and knew what to expect. We’ve also been raising awareness of our game before the Kickstarter launches - newsletters, prelaunch page, youtubers making short videos etc. If I could give one advice is: the more people know you and about your upcoming Kickstarter, the better.
That's a really interesting story - def a unique approach to bringing an audience to Kickstarter! Do you feel that Jellop helped much?
I feel like advertising companies are the cherry on the cake, but the bulk of advertising still comes from within :)
I saw this game on Kickstarter. Knowing now it is from Rimworld moders has me seriously interested now! Rimworld is beyond amazing and its mods that take the game to the next level imo
Your waves look so amazing! It all does!
And once again you make making art look so easy. Congrats again on reaching the needed funding that fast.
It is weird that the perspective on the ship looks totally wrong until it is in context and the waves cover most of the bottom part
Sometimes we have to cheat perspective! Haha
This has such don't starve vibes to it, I love it so much
(WO)MAN OF CULTURE DETECTED
Thank you U_U I see I'm not the only one
Hey, that's awesome! Stumbled across your campaign yesterday and shared with some friends. Very cool to watch the art come to life like that. Best of luck :)
I find it incredible how you can create such striking visuals with so few colours. I love the aesthetic and I will defiantly be keeping an eye on this project (maybe even funding!) Did you have a specific process of picking out the colours or did you just go with what looked good? I'm really interested in trying out this style because I think it really helps games to stand out and I just generally love this theme
Well, what I often do is I colorpick from actual, real life photos to learn what makes the colors itself 'realistic'. If you look around in nature, not many things are vibrant - most colors you can see have many different hues within them, their primary color being 'broken' so to say. So when choosing a color, I don't go for something super vibrant, but instead a toned down version with some other colors mixed in.
really love those wave graphics, so simple but they look so good
You don't have to answer this question if you don't want, but as an indie dev, I notice you're "fully funded" at like 34k. How is it that you can be fully funded on such a low amount of money? That's not even a decent living wage in the states anymore with a full-time job. Is it that you are banking on the stretch goals to really make that budget work? I've debated creating a Kickstarter for my own project, but to even function as a solo dev i would need at least 45k+ to "survive"
Oskar still works as a graphic designer, even though he puts in a lot of hours for Cursed Crew. Roel and I work full time on the game but have made sure we can still afford living expenses. I won't go into details since that's private but our Kickstarter goal is based on what will get us to Early Access. We've all made some pretty big sacrifices to make this happen so I wouldn't interpret the goal as us receiving a full living wage from here on out. What works for us won't necessarily work for other devs out there. Hope that clears things up, best of luck on your project!
Dude, this may very well be the next Indie masterpiece. Love the idea of the backstory, gameplay, and the Don’t Starve inspired design.. You guys should show up more of the gameplay in your video. In this perspective: If a schedule control most of the crew actions, and you only need to active play on “events”, what is the the tasks, as a player, that you perform in the other moments? I’m a Web Dev and a Fan of RPG / Survival Indie games like this one, if you guys need a tester that is used to laugth on bugs just let me know! 😁
Thanks <3
Excellent video
It is so cool to see how it's made!
That’s awesome! Thanks for taking us through your process!
Cool video :)
I love your rimworld mods, I look forward to this game.
The game looks a lot of fun congrats!
Co-op stretch goal? Shut up and take my money! ;)
The art style gives me strong don't starve vibes. Congrats on the funding i look forward to trying it out.
The way the waves moves is rather hypnotizing. Kudos to the artists and good luck with the game.
I’m not surprised would do it just don’t have the money it’ll be amazing if there is multiplayer
The ram point of view is completely wrong, it looks like you're are looking at it from the side instead of above like the rest of the ship.
Correct, we cheat perspective. The entire ship side is a side view artwork while the deck is top view.
€20k is enough to make this game? Seems low
It's not, but we're all very aware that sacrifices need to be made to make sure the game is completed. We do it out of our passion, and if you put enough passion into something, money will come later. That's my opinion.
You’re doing great work. I think you’ll find success. Can’t wait to play your game!
Looks fun! Are you all planning on adding any narrative elements to the game or are you focusing on mechanics first?
The game will be story driven with semi-random events that depend on your previous actions, crew composition etc! But for now, we're nailing down the basics.
Totally get it - can't wait to see it!
I hope this doesn't mean you're going to stop creating Rimworld mods!
I never will!
Good because Samuel Streamer's livelihood depends on it.
Congratulations 👏👏👏. How did you market your Kickstarter campaign so well?
If you mean how it had such an outreach on day one, it's probably because we've made plenty of popular mods for RimWorld already, and we informed our subscribers before the campaign is launched!
Looks fantastic! One thing you could do is use a tiny bit of vertical parallaxing on the layers of the boat. That way it can rock on its "roll" axis. With a sin tween, it might look really nice. :)
I really like the art and pirate vibes here! Also, great success for you, guys, to finally starting your indie project. But I have one question, is 35.000$ enough to be fully funded? Because most of indie games require different budgets and considering you're a team of devs, it's quite interesting to hear how you budget your game. Also, keep working on a amazing project!
We all had to make sacrifices, and it's purely a passion project. I'm well aware 35 grand is not going to pay for the year of hard work we already put in, nor will it pay for the next year, but it will be enough to covers any expenses we might have. We do it because we love to do it, and who knows, maybe once the game is completed we will all be paid for it! I still do graphic design jobs on the side to put food on the table, and any spare time I put into Cursed Crew.
Ahhh the style~~~ congrats!
Congratulations on getting funded so quickly! Now let's see how many stretch goals you reach in the remaining 22 days. How difficult was it to decide on those goals?
Not to sound rude, but i watched 1 minute of your kickstarter video and i didnt see any gameplay at all? just semi-pretty graphic of characters running around aboard a ship, then i gave up. Was it other players? looked like AI players, but i dont know. What do you do in the game, run around... i guess? items? skills? levels? characters dying and having to be replaced? combat? quests? bosses? c'thulu? I should atleast get to see some of that in 1 minute.
Well it’s a trailer of our Kickstarter campaign, not the game release trailer itself. I do recommend you read through the campaign as it will definitely shed some light what the game is about!
That makes it even worse. And asking the user to read, when you couldnt catch his attention with 1minute of the video? Thats not how things work. But best of luck to you
Well it's certainly different per person. If the video didn't catch your attention, you're free to look elsewhere. The game is still in development so much of the gameplay is still being worked on, but what is shown in the video is essentially what we have so far. That's why we launched a Kickstarter! You asked for details about the game, and the description has that. But if it's not up your alley, then hey I'm sure there's something else out there for you. Thanks for the feedback :) \- Phil
I was just trying to be helpful, you have to catch the audience early by showing different gameplay, what you can do, within mere seconds. Now i dont know if you have any other gameplay than just walking about, but i assume you do. So show some combat, or atleast what you envision the combat will be like, and skills and loot and death and betrayal and so on. Just walking around for the first minute showing of your graphic (which sure, it looks good, but unless its stellar its not the reason one would play the game) doesn't convey what the game is about (something something ship something something pirates).
There's some combat footage at about the 1min mark. As for other mechanics in the game, there are many things that are not yet finished, and thus never made it into the trailer. We'll continue posting more footage on our patreon if you're still interested in checking it out. The posts are accessible to everyone. [https://www.patreon.com/cracklewockgames](https://www.patreon.com/cracklewockgames)
According to all the comments and upvotes, it seems to work quite well!
Doesn't mean at all that it couldn't work better. Edit: Its like having a trailer for the first harry potter movie being about harry living under the stairs and how old he is and what his interests are and what the names of the other members in the family are and their ages and whatnot for one minute, rather than telling "he's no ordinary boy" WHAM hogwarts WHAM magic WHAM monsters WHAM love and adventure.
How is that supposed to happen when most of those things are actually implemented? I'm sure that will be in the final release trailers but that's the point of the Kickstarter... to get enough money to actually get the game to a playable state
I disagree. Kickstarter is supposed to show a slice of a game you want to create, not just merely some sprites moving around. Along the lines of "With a limited budget, our artist/soundguys/programmers has managed to create this slice, showing off our art, the soundeffects/music, voiceover, game mechanics, scene-transitions, skilltrees, combat, itemgeneration, icons, what have you. Now we just need more money to do more of everything to get a complete game"