Let’s have a look at one of the smallest campaigns I supported in my Kickstarter list. Crayon Chronicles is number 41 and ran from the 6th of March, 2013 to the 1st of April, 2013. So that’s just a bit longer than a year after the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter.

As a short description of the game, it was shown as a small rogue-like RPG with a unique graphical style that – as the name implies – makes it look like a lot of the game is drawn with crayons. Personally, I find that refreshing compared to the usual pixel-art that is used in a lot of 2D indie games.

The Campaign

The Kickstarter itself didn’t ask for a lot of money. Only 5000$, since the team has already worked on the game for 3 years before and only needed a final push to get it out the door. In the end, the campaign collected a sum of 7341$ from 1101 backers. Fitting to the overall goal, the lower tiers for backers were cheap, with only 2$ for the basic tier that included the digital version of the game, selected by 216 backers. There was also an Early Bird version of this tier for 1$, limited to 500 backers (it “sold out”). The highest backer tier was set at 500$ and included the game (obviously), an entry in the Credits as “Executive Producer”, a copy of the soundtrack, a limited edition lunchbox and 2 limited edition 3D-printed figurines. The tier was limited to the US due to the shipping items and had 2 backers.

During the campaign

As the campaign only covered the end of development and the game itself was pretty simple, there wasn’t need for many updates as it was going on. In this time, 3 updates were posted. These were mainly about additions and changes to the campaign, like Paypal as a separate payment option, the game being on Steam Greenlight and a lowered price for the villain figurine (this was potentially before Kickstarter disallowed editing of tiers after starting the campaign).

Added Stretch Goal(s)

After the original campaign goal was reached, one stretch goal was added. This goal would have been Mac & Linux support, but as it was set to 10,000$, it wasn’t met in the end.

After the campaign

Once the funding phase of the Kickstarter campaign was over, altogether only 3 more updates got posted, but given that this was a very small project and very close to being finished as well, this isn’t a big deal. The first of the updates was posted as the campaign concluded (on April 1st, 2013) and was a “thank you” announcement. The second update announced the release of Crayon Chronicles (posted on the 18th of May). The last update announced the game’s availability on Steam along with the latest changes to the game. This was on the 4th of March 2015, so almost 2 years later. Steam Greenlight took a while it seems. Backers were offered free Steam codes through the update. Finally, the update also included some information on the next project Outer Grid Games was working on. But from what I could find, nothing of that project was made public, so it was either abandoned or they are taking a really long time in working on it.

The game

Crayon Chronicles itself is a decent rogue-like, with its visuals being the standout. The artists of the dev team managed to create a nice paper-craft look in everything, from the characters to items and even the whole interface. One play-through is supposed to take 2-4 hours, which is pretty fitting for the genre. I haven’t played the game a lot so far (around 1-2 hours), but it gave me a decent first impression. Of the only 20 Steam Reviews, 75% are positive, resulting in a “Mostly Positive” Rating on Steam. I’d say for the price it’s worth a look if you are a fan of the genre and need new material.

Conclusion

This was a very “quick and painless” kind of Kickstarter. The game was already almost done at the start of the campaign and it was a rather small and cheap game as well (3,99€ on Steam). Due to this and the game releasing very quickly after the campaign (about 1 1/2 months after it concluded), the small amount of updates during and after the campaign didn’t really bother me.