Last month, Dundee-based developer, Hidden Armada, debuted its crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to raise £25,000 for its new video game, Mutiny. The game is considered a “chaotic” multiplayer pirate brawler that allows you to sail the 77 seas with a crew of your friends, and you rule over them as the captain. You will battle your way through enemy territory to go down in history as the richest pirate of them all, as long as you can keep your crew from turning on you.
Although it sounded like a fun ride, the project fell short of its initial goal and only raised £5,868 from 164 backers. During the final hours of the campaign, the Hidden Armada team shared details about what went wrong.”We here at Hidden Armada are delighted to make one final update as our Kickstarter draws to a close, which with only 3 hours remaining, will be ending in abject failure. The only thing left for us to do is quit game dev, and cry our tiny little eyes out.
“The honest truth is, before we launched we knew we were a little ‘early’ in launching our campaign. We had a demo that was fun to play which was great, but we hadn’t taken the time to let the public play, or get the word out to press, but funds were needed so we decided to go for it anyway, we had 4 public expos lined up so we were sure to get some uplift, right? Wrong.
“Going to shows during the campaign seemed like a great idea beforehand, but ultimately meant we were away from the ‘office’ and the internet for long periods of time, which combined with the lack of traction from shows and the fatigue from travel + promoting meant updates and awareness suffered, and we finished at only 20% of our goal rather than 50%. We’ll be writing up a more detailed account of what factors were at play in a post-mortem of our campaign in the future, so keep an eye on social media channels if you want to know more. However! Going to all these shows and having around 3000 people playing Mutiny was utterly amazing.”
In regards to what’s next for the project, the team noted, “We are going to demo Mutiny at our final show of the year at Insomnia 53 in Coventry on the weekend of November 21st, and hopefully we’ll be ready to show a new feature or two. But we’re still lacking in funds, and we’ll be working to bring Mutiny a little further along so we can charge for an Early Access Alpha of the game and get out there for you all to buy!
“Those of you who’ve played the demo will know that the game looks quite polished already, but lacks some of the content and features we’d really like to have in a paid-for build. We’re aiming to have it out there before the end of the year, as per our original Kickstarter plan.
“As well as that, a number of opportunities arose thanks to our campaign/tour that we are now exploring, which will hopefully lead to some funding and allow us to continue development into a finished game. Very early days for all of that, but fingers crossed. 2015 is full of questions, and we might have to put Mutiny on the back burner and look to contract work to pay the bills, so if you hear of someone needing art/code/design skills, send them our way!”
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