A: Em-8ER is a crowd-funded game project. We do this by setting small, manageable milestones. We then have a crowd-funding campaign for each milestone.
Milestones are short, achievable steps and goals for the game. The community can inspect each milestone and determine if they want to see it continue by funding, or encouraging their friends to fund the next. This grows the audience and community for the game as we build trust and deliver results. So far we have successfully funded and delivered 2 milestones for Em-8ER at 460-600% of our original goals and grown to nearly 10,000 community members. It appears to be working!
This has benefits for us, the developers, too. First, we don't end up building a game where there is not enough demand or community. Second, we also avoid wandering off course or into feature creep as we have to keep very focused on these smaller goals. Finally, we get to grow an enthusiastic, excited community over time, not based on hype, but based on what they've actually played.
The primary goal is to have a couple of milestones to build our first playable mockup of the game. This is what devs call a "vertical slice," which is taking the core elements of gameplay and fully rendering them to see how it looks/feels. This is used to ultimately approve full development of the project. Only, in this case, it is the community instead of a publisher who will be approving our playable mock-up. We will hold a large fundraiser when we complete the mock-up in order to start everyone on a full-time production schedule.
To
check out our current or most recent Milestone, Click here.