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Crest - Now on Forever Funding
Crest has reached its goal and we are currently working on the final
version of it. We have decided to participate in
Indiegogo's Forever Funding program, meaning that
the campaign will be open for more contributions until March when we begin
our early access stage. Our original plan for our
crowdfunding was that it would cover part of our budget, but not all of
it (and that the rest of the budget would come from loans and
investors). Luckily for us we now have gotten a loan and we have enough funds to be able to continue our
production of Crest. We got a budget, but it's a tight one.
Your contributions would help us establish a buffer
and also buy us time to polish and iterate our game, in short, help us
make Crest as good as possible. We see this as a chance for our current and new
fans who have missed the campaign to contribute, but also an
opportunity for our supporters that want to contribute more to be able
to do that. Thank you to all of our supporters who have helped us get so far, Crest is on its way!
We restarted the perks for the Forever Funding, so that's why there's no visible claims from the older funders. However, we want to underline that all previous claims to perks will be redeemed of course.
What is Crest?
Crest is a god game where expression is the
key, creative problem solving is your tools and the goal is to create
interesting interactions and consequences. Witness a world populated
by your followers, wholly autonomous entities that live their own
lives and have their own ways they behave. Your
inclusion into the game is to provide a higher reason for their
continued existence, help them along the way, plan ahead what you
want them to become, see how they evolve and how your relationship
with them grows. Crest is developed for Windows, OS X and Linux.
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We hope you have taken time out to watch our pitch video. It
should be noted that gameplay from the video is taken from our
prototype of Crest, and should not be a representative of what the
full version of Crest will look like or function. We encourage you to try out the prototype for yourself if you are interested in how the game plays
out at this stage of development.
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When you've tried the prototype we encourage you to leave feedback. Since we're still early in the game's
development now is the best time to tell us what you think. We're
interested to hear everything from bugs to what you'd think would be
nice to see in the future.
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Crest's method of input is writing commandments. These
commandments are rule sets for your followers, describing what actions
they should take if certain conditions are met. Commandments can be
used as orders. Safety valves to deal with possible future
situations. They can be linked together to create more defined
outcomes amongst other things.
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How your followers will respond to
your commandments is not a sure thing however. Followers have many
attributes that deal with how they interact with your commandments. They may forget your commandments. Revert back to how they used to
live their lives once a commandment fades from memory. They may even take
what words you have written and translate them to try and extract the
real meaning behind it. See how their vision of their God develops
and how they attempt to figure out your grand master plan for them.
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One of our goals with Crest is to create an engine for history
creation. While in the earlier stages of the game your focus may be
on seeing to it that your followers survive, that they have enough
food to support themselves, eventually the game will proceed to
higher areas of discussion than just basic needs. Your goal will be
to shape society in a way you find interesting and see how your
followers will act. Events that happened before will have
consequences on forthcoming generations; remembrance of hard times may cause followers who lived through these periods to be more adamant about saving their food and cautious of expanding their tribe.
Expressing yourself in
Crest is done through your people. Your people have characteristics
that modify their behavior, and in correlation with their other
characteristics form the essence of their being. Other factors do
favor into their decision-making. Young, happy followers with high
Chastity characteristic may work very hard to provide food (maybe
enough to provide for the entire city) but will not contribute
towards producing the next generation. Old followers with high
Greed characteristic may be too old to work and will constantly take all the food
the young followers produce for their own use. In Crest your goal is to try and tailor your followers behavior to your liking, and their characteristics is one of their defining traits that you need to think about.
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Creative and easy input with varied consequences - Writing
commandments for your followers is easy and will have a huge impact on
their
lives. You write statements that will trigger actions under specific
conditions. If you write commandments that are sensible to the
people your commandments may survive unfiltered throughout the ages
whereas other commandments may be interpreted in new ways and may
provide
disastrous implications for future generations.
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Many ways of expression -
Crest is
about what you want your people to become; there will be situations that you
can solve in several ways, but no real inherent right or wrong. It’s about
experimenting and expressing yourself; through seeing how you can shape your
people, and how they in turn, shape history.
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Partake in the legacy of the world – The
world and everything in it will change over time, long periods of fruitful
harvest may lead to better chances for forthcoming generations. Artifacts
telling the stories of times passed will decorate the scene. Your people will
evolve, and you may need to evolve along with them.
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Indirect control – Your
followers are autonomous and have their own behaviors, preferences and needs
that will dictate how they act in the world. Your commandments are also viewed
through their perspective, they may reinterpret what you say and if they
dislike your actions as a God they may even turn against you!
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Procedurally generated content - The
world will be randomly generated to ensure that each playthrough will
begin with different conditions for your followers. Cities built in deserts will behave differently from cities in areas with heavy vegetation and so forth. The initial surroundings and the lay of the land will play a definite part in the forthcoming development.
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Our team has worked on Crest since October 2013. Much of the time spent on Crest has been done without pay, next to studies and other work. Luckily, some members have been able to dedicate themselves fully to the game from time to time and a few of our members saved up money in order to be able to work full time during this summer. We now have reached a point where we have something we can show you which will give a glimpse of what Crest could be.
Everybody on the team is passionate about seeing Crest come to fruition. What we are hoping to achieve with this campaign is not only to raise funds in order to see this happen, but also come in closer contact with our current fans and find new ones. We want you to be as excited about Crest as we are and hope to see it materialize.
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Thanks to the generous contributions of our followers and a loan from Almi, a Swedish incubator, we have enough money to keep us afloat until May. We're currently working full time on developing Crest, but we wish to have more time in order to create a more immersive product.
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Our goal with our campaign was not for you to fund our whole production. We have now also received funding from our municipality and Almi as mentioned above. Obviously, the more sources of funding we can secure, the longer we can spend on producing Crest. Crest will be released, right now its just a question of how big it can become.
As of today, we have 4 employees. We also employ consultants. When
it comes to personnel cost, we calculate with a monthly cost of around
7000 USD. This is, obviously, the largest chunk of our costs and
will dictate how long we can spend on developing Crest. Our other
costs (bank, rent, fees) amounts to 150 USD / month. For marketing,
we plan on investing a total sum of 100-200 USD / month. Additional
licenses will amount to 3000 USD. We mostly use open source software
to produce our assets. This is our current budget breakdown:
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Instead of increasing our low minimum wages we will use the extra income to be able to extend working on it as many months as we are able to make a better game. Your contributions would give us more time to work on Crest and help us out with all other costs that quickly pile up during game production.
Supporting Crest financially doesn't just mean getting us closer to
being able to deliver this game to you, but will also help us establish
ourselves as an indie game studio that focuses on innovative games we feel is missing from the market. Our plan is to stay in the business for as long as we can. If we raise above our intended goal, it means we get more funding into our studio without strings attached; we will be less dependent towards third parties and can spend more time polishing Crest.
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We’re Eat Create Sleep, a small indie studio situated on an island called Gotland (Sweden) in the Baltic Sea. Apart from Roland who has previous experience in professional game development as an audio designer, the other four of us are graduate students from Uppsala University, with bachelor degrees in game design. We’ve all spent years with making smaller experimental games and have now moved on to make a commercial career out of our studies.
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We strive to be a studio that take the game medium further and create more meaningful experiences in the game scene. To achieve this we take risks both when it comes to theme and on the way we produce them, but we never reinvent the wheel just for laughs. We’re deeply rooted in game history and conventions, but we aim to explore new paths.
Before we started making Crest, a part of the team started making their first full featured game. Oskar and Martin met in 2012 at their university and started on the ecological management simulation game Among Ripples early 2013. We learned a lot about polishing a project and taking it all the way from start to finish. It was released in the beginning of April, 2014 and has garnered a lot of positive feedback since then.
We’ve appeared on several outlets with positive reviews and have several impressions on Youtube. The game is available for free and can be downloaded right away, so don’t take our word for it. During the later stage of production for Among Ripples we rallied more
creative and brave people behind us and started on our new vision,
Crest. A continuation on our first game in more than one way.
If you want to know more about us you could always play our behind the scenes RPG "Eat Create Sleep Adventures!". Become our producer for a second and partake in our journey. Incidentally the soundtrack for ECSA is available as a perk.
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"Your followers need to build, harvest, eat, reproduce, die, and all that god game stuff, directed by Your intervention."
- Alice O'Connor, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
"[...]the possibility for an interesting AI-driven look at morality, sociology, and human interaction is there."
- Bob Reinhard, Artistry in Games
"Many
of my friends enjoy playing The Sims like they’re watching an ant
colony: Hardly interfering, merely observing. I, as a video game control
freak, prefer to engineer their life. Eat Create Sleep is creating
something that’s in between those playstyles."
- Luke Siuty, Indie Game Magazine
"Crest appears to be a very interesting twist on the god game formula."
- Cyber, Death by Beta
"I
can’t really think of a game that mirrors this style of play quite in
the same way. It has the potentiality to become something pretty big,
especially depending on how far through civilization Crest will allow
your people/tribe/world to evolve."
- William Usher, One Angry Gamer
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First and foremost we are
grateful for anything you are willing to contribute to our cause. The perks themselves we see as mere incentives to support us, we hope
that you are supporting us because you believe in our game, but we
hope that the perks themselves are satisfactory as well. All the higher tiers will fetch all perks below it, for example
if you claim the Crest Strategy Guide you will also get the ECSA soundtrack and get access to a free copy of the game.
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We're a newly founded indie outfit and have to face the worries of getting everything to run smoothly. Everything from acquiring all the necessary funding to establishing the administrative side of running a studio. But we see this as a natural part of starting up, and have taken precautions to follow through.
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Besides monetary contributions we welcome you to share the campaign, online and offline. There are links at the top of the page, below the video, that allows you to easily share this campaign on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.
We really appreciate all the help we can get and getting the word out is just as important as the contributions themselves.
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What is the goal of Crest?Crest invites the player to define his/her own goal. If all your followers die you will lose the game, but Crest is not a game where you constantly struggle for survival. During play testing some players have opted for goals such as trying to spread their civilization as much as possible or trying to maintain a balance in the community. We hope the full version will inspire you to experiment and reach for whatever goal you feel is interesting.
How long can a game session be?
Crest has no set time limit, players are free to play for as long as they like. Our goal with Crest is to offer gameplay that will keep the player invested in the same session for a substantial amount of time.
How does player and followers communicate?
The player will communicate with the followers by commandments; telling them how to behave and how to react in specific situations. The followers will give feedback to the player, ranging from how their work day went to their needs and how they feel about their god. The player is free to ignore or try to appease the people, it will not entirely be clear at all times what actions will better their disposition.
What is missing from the prototype that will be in the full version?
The design of the full version of Crest is still dependent on how much funding we can secure. What we want is more immersive feedback, more focus on the gameplay evolving to higher levels as time goes by. More ways to express yourself through your commandments. More interactions between the followers and the world that they populate. A substantial late-game experience that will keep the player invested in the history that will play out.
Is Crest going to be alpha funded?
Hopefully. What platform we will use we cannot say yet.
Why are you not asking for money for the whole production?
We do not wish to rely entirely upon the generosity of our fans; with your invaluable support we feel we can attain funding from other sources and not ask you for everything. We believe the sum we have set for the campaign is attainable for our fans, both new ones we will gain and our old ones.
How much is Crest going to cost?
We are currently unsure of what price we will attach to Crest, the price will vary based on what we value the end product. We want a fair price based on both our target audience and the work effort we have put in.
What platforms are Crest going to be released on?
Our ambitions is to release it on Steam, Desura, Humble Store and itch. Once we get to post-production we may want to release it for more platforms however. What we want is to have it accessible on many sites so our fans have the option to choose a platform they feel comfortable with.
Is Crest going to be DRM-protected?Apart from the Steam version (if we get greenlit) there will be no required DRM to play our game. So if you don't want it on Steam, then you won't need to worry.
What languages will Crest be released in?
Due to the uncertainty of Crest's future we are focused right now on just developing a full version we feel does justice to the concept; so we are settling for just an English release. If we have the time, money and resources once we have finished Crest it is a definite possibility however to translate it into other languages.
Will Crest be released for tablets or other platforms in the future?
We do not currently have plans for it, but if the fans want it we are open to investigate how migrating the game to other platforms would affect the experience. It's a possibility.
Why does the Early Access perk cost so much compared to the Game perk?Our perks are not pre-order products, but incentives for supporting our crowdfunding. All our perks above 15$ give the funder a peek into the process of Crest before it's released as a full game. Our intention is to get the early adopters onboard, those who believe so strongly in us that they think they can safely spend a higher amount.
Since we don't treat the perks as pre-order products they do not represent the final price tag when Crest has become a product.
Is your game inspired by god game X?The game is inspired above all by religion and ancient history, and not so much by any specific game. That's how we usually do at ECS, we prefer to start from scratch. But when we've looked at mechanics for inspiration we've looked at The Sumer Game/Hammurabi, Dwarf Fortress, The Civilization series and City Building games such as Pharaoh.
