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Game dev story: The final, agonizing moments of a Kickstarter campaign
When a Kickstarter campaign enters its final seconds, the page begins counting down in real-time. The widget that normally displays the number of days remaining for a project switches to read out seconds, starting with 100, 99, 98, 97 .... "Two minutes to go," says Steve Swink, the creator of Scale, over a Skype video call. "I just want balloons to come down – oh. It transferred to a second count. It's counting down 100 seconds. That's weird." Swink started the Kickstarter campaign for Scale on October 17 from his house in Tempe, Arizona. He watched the project's final seconds tick down on November 16 from an exchange house outside of Stockholm, Sweden, where he and his fiancee, Gravity Ghost developer Erin Robinson, were staying to teach a three-week college course on game development. Though he'd just spent more than 20 hours traveling across the world, Swink stayed awake to watch his Kickstarter page, pointless as that was. "I've been up for like 30 hours, I think," Swink said, with 15 minutes to go on the Scale Kickstarter. "It's pretty gnarly. Actually, I feel happy. I just have the Jurassic Park theme running in the back of my head the whole time .... There's not really anything I can do at this point. It's like Pinewood derby: I feel like I got my car all ready and everything, I sanded it down, and I just pushed it down the hill a while ago. I've kind of just been blowing at it and I don't think it's doing anything." Scale is a puzzle exploration game starring a genius ex-con with a gun that can shrink and grow everything, with the talents of Ashly Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'?, Sarah Elmaleh of Gone Home, and music from FTL's Ben Prunty and Super Meat Boy's Danny Baranowsky. It ended up raising $108,020 of a requested $87,000, so whatever Swink did (or didn't) do worked.
Adventurous sizing puzzler Scale tips past funding goal
Imagine Portal, but in a whimsical dreamscape, and with a gun that can make anything larger or smaller at will. You're getting closer to imagining CubeHeart's Scale, a game that will transcend imagination and enter reality after achieving its $87,000 Kickstarter goal this week, with just days to go. That means the ambitious-looking first-person puzzler is on its way to PC, Mac, Linux, and Steam Machines. Scale is based around a prison break, admittedly a very bizarre-sounding prison break. The game's heroine is Penny Prince, the inventor of a powerful resizing device who accidentally uses it to destroy the entire east coast. She's convicted on more than 9 million counts of "Depraved Heart Murder," but manages to construct a makeshift version of her invention and use it to escape. The game seemingly follows her exploits as she searches for freedom - and her confiscated cat. There's still time for CubeHeart to hit some stretch goals, with the $100,000 target for Oculus Rift support looking eminently realistic. At the other end of the Scale, the $200,000 goal for a PS4 version looks out of reach.
Scale reward tiers just got bigger: $20 gets 5 extra indie games
Scale has raised $41,000 in three days on Kickstarter, almost half of its $87,000 goal, and its reward tiers keep growing. A new $20 tier called "Friends of Scale" offers a copy of Scale developer Steve Swink's LA Game Space project, Inputting, along with Steam keys for Incredipede, Osmos, Electronic Super Joy and Noitu Love 2. You'll also get Scale, of course. The new $15 tier includes a copy of Scale and Inputting. The Kickstarter updates for Scale each take place in-game and show off the mechanics, puzzles and strategies players can expect from the final build. The second update provides a look at Scale's resizing gun once it becomes outrageously powerful and can no longer hit individual objects – instead it shrinks and grows entire worlds. Plus this update shows a really embarrassing photo of Swink himself. Take a peek at more improv Scale gameplay in the first update below.
Scale tells a tale of prison break, atomic science, a cat
Take a moment to watch this trailer for Steve Swink's Scale. You're welcome. Scale takes cues from Portal and The Swapper, blending first-person scientific gunning with a mysterious, whimsical setting ripe for exploration and adventure. Players embody Penny Prince, an inventor jailed for accidentally destroying the east coast with a gun that sucks the size out of objects and injects that mass into other things. While imprisoned, Penny slaps together a hodge-podge sizing gun and escapes with the rehabilitative therapy coordinator living in her brain, seeking freedom and her cat. This is the first declaration of the narrative driving Scale since its unveiling at GDC 2012: The fresh story details come from the Scale Kickstarter, launched today and seeking $87,000 over one month. The game has players resize objects, animals and worlds to solve puzzles and uncover secrets in a beautiful 3D environment, all while the makeshift sizing gun becomes increasingly unstable. Scale is the brainchild of Cubeheart Games, led by Swink, with voice work by Ashly Burch of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin'? and Sarah Elmaleh of Gone Home, and music from FTL's Ben Prunty and Super Meat Boy's Danny Baranowsky. Scale is due out for PC, Mac and Linux, and Swink is sure to point out that Linux support means Scale is coming to SteamOS and Steam Machines. Check out the Scale Kickstarter details here.
The union of Scale, Gravity Ghost and the indie devs making them
Scale and Gravity Ghost share a surprising number of characteristics, especially considering how different their core mechanics are. They're both serene, soothing experiences, at least at first: In Gravity Ghost, players control a girl as she flows around the gravity fields of planets, searching for her fox, collecting stars and bits of the universe that were destroyed in a recent black hole. It's a physics game and an odd type of platformer, and it can be a simple exercise in circling planets or a completionist's dream, completely up to the player. Scale is a first-person shooter, but the gun is a shrink-and-grow ray, allowing players to suck the size out of one object and blast it into other objects. Doing this, players can either complete esoteric challenges or simply play around in bright worlds of flowers, pretty houses, green grass and happy trees. Gravity Ghost and Scale are made by Erin Robinson and Steve Swink, respectively, and both games were selected to participate in the PAX East and Prime Indie Megabooth this year. Robinson and Swink both live in Arizona, in the same city, in the same house, and they have been dating for four years. This month, they got engaged. To each other. See – so much in common.
