Perihelion Interactive’s game of a Tsarist Russian space empire is fully funded with four days left to reach its intriguing stretch goals.
Before Kickstarter, many innovative game design ideas failed to materialize due to a simple lack of necessary funds. Sure, these completed projects might prove to be better concepts than finished products, but for ambitious developers Kickstarter provides an opportunity for developers to succeed or fail on their own merits. The Mandate is one such project, a co-operative sci-fi RPG set in a Tsarist Russian space empire, combining FTL‘s spaceship management with XCOM‘s isometric strategy. With four days to spare, The Mandate has now joined the ranks of other successful Kickstarter-backed gaming projects, hopefully giving us the chance to explore its procedurally-generated universes in the next two years.
“We’re excited that we’ve reached our initial funding goal for The Mandate and look forward to seeing what stretch goals we can achieve before the campaign ends,” said Ole Herbjørnsen, Executive Producer at Perihelion Interactive. “Everyone at Perihelion is extremely passionate about The Mandate and we will strive to exceed on our backers expectations when the final game is released in 2015.”
Although there isn’t much time left on the clock, Perihelion Interactive still has a few promising stretch goals it hopes to complete. The $600,000 mark lets players take part in planetary away missions, sending crew members well beyond the confines of their ship. $700,000 opens the door for massive starbase boarding operations, while $800,000 lets Perihelion throw resources behind their third-party modification tools. And that’s not counting the free digital addons being extended to various backer levels once certain benchmarks are reached.
Now that progress on The Mandate is more or less assured, Perihelion has released a new developer’s diary revealing details on what it hopes to achieve. Perhaps even more encouraging is the fact that Kickstarter isn’t The Mandate‘s only crowdfunding platform. Perihelion Interactive is also collecting Paypal donations and offering rewards on its own webpage, presumably raising collected funds beyond the $518,000 currently listed. Regardless of the final total, I’ll personally just be happy once I have my procedurally-generated galaxy to play in. Outside of that, we’ll have to stay tuned and see.
