Belgarde-based Moonburnt Studio has successfully backed their game on Kickstarter, reaching and exceeding the initial pledge of €40.000. Columnae: A Past Under Construction, is the name of the first Serbian game to be successfully funded on a Kickstarter venture, as reported by Startit. With 16 hours to go before the end of Moonburnt Studio’s Kickstarter campaign, Columnae is currently supported by 974 backers and a total of €40,718.
The campaign started one month ago, when the Moonburnt team decided to speed up the game developing process by getting crowdfunded. Columnae, however, had its breakthrough on the platform where the community expressed good interest in the game. Columnae:A Past Under Construction is an adventure game driven by a non-linear approach to a story that is set in a post-apocalyptic steampunk world. By using point-and-click options, players make choices in the future that immediately affect the type of past they have had and vice-versa.
In an interview for GamEspresso, Moonburnt Studio co-founder Jovan Vesic explained more about the inspiration for developing this game and its concept.
“Around three years ago, summer of 2013, we wanted to apply for an artist residency called ‘MultiMadeira,’ a really good artist residency on the Portuguese island of Madeira. It’s self-sustained, so it’s not sponsored and stuff like that. We’re really into “do it yourself” sort of stuff. It’s also a good artist residency with some really different stuff. We were the only game developers there, so it was not focused on game development, but they were happy to have us. So we wanted to apply to this artist residency and came up with this idea for a game that we’d develop in one month. We wanted to get the alpha build done within one month of starting there and get the Kickstarter started after that. During our talks about it, we realized we had ideas for a much larger game, so what we ended up with after this month, we started working on a game. At the time we were making our own game in Python. But what we had was a short teaser, a video teaser. And after that, we began working on this expanded game that has become Columnae. So that’s how we started,” says Vesic.
What makes this game exciting is that players make up their own story as they level up and in turn face the consequences of each act they took either in the past or in the future. This also gives rise to some moral issues they will be facing. According to Vesic, “You will make ‘moral’ decisions, choose between sides in conflicts etc. and this will open some opportunities, lock out the others, and sometimes drastically change the world and the story. In contrast to typical RPGs, these consequences will not be represented by numbers (e.g. good-evil scale or “standing” with factions) but will manifest as hand-crafted situations, long lasting sub-plots and meaningful relationships with NPCs.”
Take a look at the Columnae trailer and, who knows, you might just find your next favorite game.
