Grim Dawn Kickstarter Project Update #2, $142,000 and Counting

We’re only four days in with Grim Dawn’s Kickstarter funding drive but the title is already 50% funded ($142,819 as of this writing) and the team at Crate Entertainment has issued a second update where they detail their intentions in case they should manage to reach $450,000. More content seems to be the priority so far, and here’s what they mean while using those two words:

The most critical thing that I know everyone wants is more content. There are some aspects of content development that are difficult to increase without extending our release, like class development. However, most of content development can be laterally expanded with the help of more developers and art outsourcing, without impact the release date. At $450k, we could bring on an additional designer, an artist and increase our outsourcing budget for equipment.

The artist would primarily help us to increase the number of unique enemies, items and more effectively manage the expanded art outsourcing. We have around 200 items in-game now, which covers most of the common equipment but we have barely any unique item art. We’d really like to get our item count up over 400 and hopefully even higher. I mean, 1oot, isn’t that why we’re all here? We expect to be adding a lot of additional items in expansions but we feel like everyone would be a lot happier waiting for an expansion if they had more loot to collect in the first release.

The designer would be helping to expand the world, creating quests and doing quest scripting. This means a larger world with more quests, side-quests and unique locations to discover – including some hidden ones! We don’t want to just create a big expanse of bland world for you to hack your way through; we want to fill it with unexpected encounters, mysterious locations that are outside of the main story and untold horrors lurking in the farthest, darkest corners of the land. These details are what really give the game some soul.

For me, part of the magic of older games, thinking all the way back to stuff like the TSR AD&D Goldbox games (for those of you who were alive then) is that they often included mysterious locations and side-stories that were entirely outside the main story and areas of the game. I remember playing Pool of Radiance and thinking how cool it was that the town was surrounded by all this wilderness that the main story wasn’t directing you to go out and fully explore but yet, it was there, with tantalizing little features in distant parts of the map that could be nothing or could represent the location of some cool point of interest. I liked how developers back then weren’t worried about forcing the player to see all of the content they created; they were okay putting some stuff in that players might not get around to seeing. I tried to this on Titan Quest with the extra enemies in epic and legendary difficulty but I wasn’t too involved in the world-building, so I was limited in what I could do in that area. In Grim Dawn, we want to have a more open world that is littered with all kinds of hidden, out of the way locations that you can stumble upon. One of the most important aspects of this for me is that the world shouldn’t be crafted for the sole purpose of telling a single story. The main story shouldn’t take you everywhere in the world and the events taking place in it should go far beyond that. We really want to instill the game with that feeling of magic and wonder that I got out of games as a kid but haven’t experienced very often in recent years.