Kickstarter Archives - Kill Screen

Turns out that 11 to 14-year-old girls can make the cutest games

Let’s be frank: it’s not easy working as a woman in games. The past few years have been particularly tough for us. But as women in games, each of us feels a responsibility to help and support each other while working in this space. Especially when it comes to helping young women enter the field. Whether as designers or artists, programmers or journalists, we want to put our experience to use and give aspiring women the tools they need to pursue their interest in videogames. Girls Make Games is one initiative that fulfills that goal. Hosted by LearnDistrict, Girls Make Games…

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Sausage Sports Club, because sports need more wiener animals

Chris Wade is a night owl. He typically won’t start doing his contract work for other games (Manifold Garden and Battle Chef Brigade, among others) and on developer tools until 1 or 2AM, when the rest of the world is asleep. But if Chris Wade wasn’t a night owl, maybe there’s a chance Sausage Sports Club—now funding on Kickstarter—wouldn’t exist. “Often when I’m up that late and I’ve been working on side projects, I’ll find my mind wandering from the project and onto weird places on the internet,” Wade told me. “I feel like that’s probably pretty common.” He’ll watch…

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The Girl and the Robot unveils its fairy tale very, very soon

Ever since The Girl and the Robot’s interactive fairy tale first showed up on Kickstarter, it stood out amid a sea of games about shooting stuff as an earnest attempt to be sweet. Take a look at the protagonists or the old Europe inspired castle they wander around in, or listen to a clip of the recently-released soundtrack, and it’s clear that Flying Carpets Games isn’t so much going for the Brothers Grimm appeal as it is their defanged, happy-ending younger cousins. Obviously, The Girl and the Robot does take inspiration from the classics, which is evident after a quick look at the trailer…

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A wooden book filled with puzzles is the coolest new toy

The Codex Silenda is a set of intricate wooden puzzles that quickly reached its funding goal on Kickstarter many times over. It’s the kind of object you’d expect to be hand-carved by a slightly eccentric artisan, but it’s laser-cut, and one of the reward tiers gets you the pieces, which you would then assemble into the puzzle yourself. As it turns out, the laser-cutter can do for the mechanical wooden toy what the printing press did for books. There were books before the printing press: painstakingly hand-copied manuscripts with margins full of knights jousting snails, but hand-written and hand-bound books…

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American politics are imploding so you better back Trump Cards

The Republican National Convention, in the midst of the chaos that has been this election, has officially nominated Donald Trump as their candidate for President of the United States of America. This isn’t a Simpsons joke, though it was, once. It’s the world we live in, somehow. While you contemplate that, biting your nails and staring across the room at the drawer you’re pretty sure your passport is in, consider this: there may still be a way to make this election fun and games. Not the actual election, of course, because this election is a nightmare, we live in a…

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Direct all your love for Shadow of the Colossus this way

No Matter, a small team of three, began working on Prey for the Gods in 2014 for two reasons: to work on their own thing, and to make games similar to the ones that drove them in this direction in the first place. It’s clear which games inspired the team, or at least, which single game had the biggest impact on them. Upon first looking at Prey for the Gods, the first thing anyone familiar with it is sure to think of is Team ICO’s Shadow of the Colossus (2005). That’s not an accident by any means; in fact, the studio itself cites…

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Tahira, a sci-fi epic that will question our violent histories this August

Before the imperialism of the 19th century, or the World Wars of the 20th, there were the Crusades: a series of military campaigns in the Middle-East between the 11th and 15th centuries. During these campaigns, various Christian European powers sent large numbers of well-equipped men to what was dubbed the Holy Land to fight against local inhabitants, as well as the largely Muslim Turks, who would eventually become the Ottoman Empire. They were fought for a number of reasons: to capture Jerusalem, to help the Byzantine Empire maintain control of its lands, arguably to attempt to reunite Eastern Christians with…

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Get ready for more gay sci-fi adventures in your videogames

The creator of the incredibly named My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant is currently funding a follow-up: Escape From Pleasure Planet. Escape from Pleasure Planet follows the story of Captain Tycho Minogue as he battles the devilish (and dangerously handsome) criminal Brutus, who he must track down. For Luke Miller, the creator of these gay-themed science-fiction adventure games, there was an easy connection to be made between the nature of both narratives. wants to touch on issues relating to the gay community “I was looking for gay and science fiction themes that were complementary to each other,” Miller says. “In the…

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Kologeon, the new roguelike-like-like for you to marvel at

The term “roguelike” was originally derived from the game Rogue (1980), a dungeon crawler that popularized procedurally generated levels and permadeath. Rogue spawned an entire genre of likeminded games. In the 2000s, game makers lifted inspiration from old roguelikes to craft wholly new generated experiences. If Derek Yu’s cult classic Spelunky (2008) was one of the first roguelike-like games to fiddle with the rules of procedurally generated levels and the notion of permadeath, then perhaps ChillCrow’s impending Kologeon is a fitting step forward, a roguelike-like-like. Resurrection retains a sense of progression within the game’s world On the campaign page for…