Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption Gets a Second Kickstarter Campaign

In order to secure some more funding for their upcoming adventure/RPG Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, Corey and Lori Cole and the small team at Transolar Games have launched a second Kickstarter campaign that seeks to add at least another $100,000 into their coffers for even more development wizardry. Since you likely already know about the game from our earlier posts, I’ll quote a bit about its history and why they chose to pursue more crowd-funding:

In November of 2012, we raised over $400,000 through Kickstarter toward the development of a top-down “rogue-like game with story” based on a previous project developed by our lead programmer. However, as we started to get feedback from our backers, we realized that the majority of them wanted a game more like Quest for Glory, the award-winning game series that Lori and I developed in the 1990s.

Hero-U has evolved into a much larger and more expensive project. While it is taking much longer than we originally planned, the result will be far more than we originally imagined possible. We think it will be a great game and one you will love playing.

Hero-U is a passion project for Lori and me. We have put two and one-half years of our life into it so far, and we will continue to do whatever it takes to make this a great game. That includes hiring the best programmers, artists, and musicians we can find.

How passionate are we? We are literally betting our house on the success of this game. We are currently funding development with a home equity loan, and we are not taking any salary or other compensation until Hero-U launches and we repay the debts.

We have made outstanding progress over the last two years, and expect to be in Beta by the end of this year. In order to complete the game without sacrificing content or features, we seek to raise an additional $100,000. This campaign will fund our final year of development.

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It is unusual for the same project to raise funds on Kickstarter twice, but it is not unusual for a game to need additional funding. We have talked to many adventure game developers, and nearly all of their projects went over budget. They have either absorbed the costs themselves or obtained venture capital.

We chose not to seek outside funding because we want Hero-U to be a game of, by, and for our many heroes. Kickstarter is where we began, and we would like this to be a wholly crowd-funded game.

In October 2012, we had very little to show, but many amazing fans pledged to support our vision.

We now have so much more to share. Check out the game art examples here, and try the combat and game play demos for yourself!

If you like what you see, please contribute to this project. We will use the funds to finish developing the game, add new art and music, and polish everything to a quality level where all of us can be proud of the game we made together.