Now that the buzzwords are out of the way... As some of you might have noticed, I'm a bit of an AoE II nut, which is what led me to find this project, which... well, I think it's awesome, but I'll stick a bit of info here and point you at it and you guys can exercise your free will. 
Pointing at it: (in case you just wanna look at the site, although that seems to have lost everything except the mailing list subscribe...)
Feudal WarsKickstarter (Yes, there's a KS, but
don't panic:
click here to skip to a bit of explanation)
Resonance22 talks about Feudal Wars (If you don't know, he's a pretty well-known AoE II streamer/YouTuber/commentater, with generally solid opinions (in my opinion!)). If you're skeptical about this project, at about 7:45 he covers a couple of the reasons he's helping them out.
You can access one of the minigames built in the engine here. It's a kinda tower-defensey thing where you use towers and various archer units to defend a castle against waves of enemies. Mainly proof-of-concept as regards using the engine to make a game.
So their basic premise is to make an RTS game in the good ol' style of AoE, Starcraft 1, etc. - you know, concrete damages and armour, 2.5D graphics, and so on - but built on a modernised engine so they can do
pretty 2.5D graphics and have hundreds of units without it turning into a slideshow and so on.
That modernised engine is coded in HTML5 using WebGL, which is a thing I'm seeing around more and more. It basically means that whilst the game is browser based and that immediately made me go 'Wait, what?' it's hardware accelerated and actually runs really nicely. Once it's fullscreened, it's basically like any other game. Except maybe don't reflexively hit Escape to pause it.
Okay, so, Kickstarter. I don't know if anybody still loves KS, since I'm woefully out of touch with the zeitgeist, but it seems like an instant abort for some people, so here's some general stuff.
The goal is
$30K (which they've made 7% of thus far, on day one). I've mentioned being woefully out of touch, but I
think that sounds reasonable. I'unno. If you've jumped to this section, you know better than me.
If we are funded, most of the money will go towards art. Chris Scott (developer/creator) is fortunate enough to have saved in preparation for making the game, so development costs (usually the biggest expense) won't be an expense for at least the first year. Art will always be a big expense because Feudal Wars is a very art-centric game (as you can see from the screenshots).
Server costs will be another large expense. Feudal Wars is built in the cloud with Amazon Web Services for scalability. All of the files are served with a CDN to assure everyone from anywhere around the world can access the game. It is a highly scalable architecture but can also be costly if the player base reaches a critical mass.
We also want to hire a UI person because we, as a team, are particularly lacking in that area. Other expenses include the cost of producing original music, voice acting, kickstarter fees, credit card fees, legal fees and taxes.
So,
TL;DR:
- The main coder has savings. He'll still be working anyway.
- They want to make it pretty, so they want to pay artists.
- Gotta pay for hosting. It's a big drawback of their browser-based model.
- They want a UI designer because no-one on the current team has ever done it.
- Other odds and sods like legal fees.
Stretch Goal stuff:There are a bunch of stretch goals. Some of them are pretty far-out. However, they're planning on implementing everything there regardless of how the KS pans out - they're just hopeful they can get it done more quickly if they make the cash dollar.
The last point regarding KS: they want to make it Free-to-Play. Yay, more hot-button abort words! In this case, though, at least one of their designers (Resonance22) detests Pay-to-Win. Since it looks like currently the premium content is likely to be civilisations, and he's in charge of game balance, it likely won't turn P2W. Never know, but that's how it stands right now.
State of the game:Much of the engine stuff is done, but it's still in a pretty incomplete state. The map designer is I think close to fully functional, but they're still in relatively early development. Essentially, a lot of the core engine (attacking, hitpoints, unit control, graphics, basics like that) is done, but content (tech tree, upgrades, and so on) is still in short supply. What's there is a good footing though, so it's not like they're going to KS with a half-baked idea and no implementation plan.
There's probably stuff I've missed, but I think that's most of it. I know a bit more, so I might be able to answer questions. I'll also see if I can get hold of Res to answer some as well.
On the plus side, I’m better than I used to be!
