Updates
Please have a try of our customization prototype demo v3!  http://www.indiedb.com/games/mass-builder/downloads/mass-builder-prototype-demo-v3 

updated with the following:

- New armor set for a better preview of our customization system

- More weapons for customization

- A small preview into the combat system through our improved training grounds

- Added melee combat for testing

- Changed and improved particle effects and optimization

- Changed and improved some animation styles

The World: The world after its collapse from being invaded. Countries are abolished and humanity is forced into shelters (a total of 13 around the world). Terrains are deformed as a result of wars and red zones that humanity should never enter are established.

In M.A.S.S. Builder, you’re free to create your own M.A.S.S. with everything you’ve collected. That’s right, you can put any kind of parts into each slot of your M.A.S.S. and create the perfect one that is up to your taste. We have classified each part of your M.A.S.S. into 4 main categories as of following:

Frames and Armors
These are the main body of your M.A.S.S. They are the inner works where you'll be attaching and assembling parts of armors onto. After selecting your frame, you will then attach 'Armors' which are parts that will be attached onto a M.A.S.S. frame to cover them up. You are free to change each parts to suit your liking and create a customized look for your M.A.S.S.

Joint Adjustment: Frame joints' length can be adjusted in most cases to create the perfect looks for your armors.

Armor Assemble: Attaching armor onto a frame.

Joint Armor Expand: Armor pieces that are attached on joints will be resized in accordance to frame joints.

Armors: Armors can be fully mixed and matched up to your liking. Above is a preview of the two styles we have created.

Paint: Each armor will have around 2-4 sub-elements where you can select a paint style for each element separately.
When you edit those styles, every part using it will be changed as well.

Decal: Decals can be attached onto each armor piece and you can adjust its size, color, position, designs, and etc. as you like.

Weapons
Equipped with each M.A.S.S. are an array of weapons to deal with the Quarks. Each weapon will be separated into two parts that form a single weapon, so choose what you’d like to have. You can wield a total of one melee weapon, two ranged shooters, and two launcher option parts on your M.A.S.S. For more clarification, see below.

• Close Combat melee weapons allow selecting a grip to determine your stances and an assaulter part that determines the weapon’s damaging abilities.
• Shooters are categorized into two types. You can select a trigger and barrel for both of them so you can customize them to shoot what you like.
  • Bullet shooters are ranged weapons that fire physical bullets. These weapons have ammo counts but will continuously shoot until they run out of it aside from reloading. 
  • Energy shooters are ranged weapons that fire energy bullets. These weapons do not have ammo counts, but will constantly need to recharge before being able to fire again. 
• Launchers are separated into bullet launchers and energy launchers as well. They attach to parts the M.A.S.S.’ body.
  • Bullet launchers launch projectiles such as missiles or physical objects, they are extremely effective at their purpose but they are limited by ammo counts.
  • Energy launchers will use a large amount of energy from the M.A.S.S. to fire but they do not need to care about ammo counts.

Close Combat: Melee weapons allow selecting a grip to determine your stances and an assaulter part that determines the weapon’s damaging abilities.

Ranged Combat: Ranged weapons allow you to select a trigger and barrel that customizes how you shoot and what you shoot at your enemies.

Weapon Stances: Each weapon has its own attacking stances and their variation of combination of attacks.

Weapon Attachment: After setting up your weapons, you can bring a various of them into the battlefield but the more you bring, the more weight it takes and your balance with speed might be worse.

For everything that you decide to put onto the M.A.S.S. you only need to think about your M.A.S.S.’ weight. That’s the only downside of putting on too much armor and weapons as it will mostly slow you down in exchange of being more sturdy or more powerful. Then after creating the perfect look for your M.A.S.S. you can choose from a variety of combat enhancement 'gears' and 'operating system' to install into your M.A.S.S. These will determine the combat abilities you can wield, adjusting your speed, weight, and everything without having any effect on your appearance.The rest is up to your liking, we don’t want to limit your creativity in creating a M.A.S.S. you like to really use. Go wild!
 

Fighting against you in these missions will be alien lifeforms, not the grotesque one but cool looking ones like these. Most of them are not that strong but beware they come in great numbers and you’ll be overwhelmed if you’re not careful.

Sometimes, you’ll also face an extremely strong opponent, be it a commanding alien or some other mercenaries. Please take care of them for the safety of Earth as well.

After finally finishing the last detail in your creation and finalizing your M.A.S.S, you will take on various missions around the world. 

You will be launched and deployed from your hangar straight into battle after briefing and from there, complete your mission in a fast-paced action-filled battlefield, using your optimized arsenal of weaponry.

Mission Dialogue: Throughout missions, you will encounter NPC dialogues on important progress or information that needs to be relayed.

Movement: There are various methods to traverse the missions quickly in the game. Using boosters are one of them.

Melee Combat: Prototype motion of frame movement and melee combat effects. Melee combats will have a strong effect against enemies.

Ranged Combat: Prototype motion of frame movement and ranged combat aiming effects. Sample of plasma weapon with large area of destruction. There are various other customization with your weapons such as explosive or freezing shots.

While developing as a small team under other developers and publishers, we learnt about each other, growing to become more of a family than a team and gaining experience through our commissioned works. With strong bonds and some coincidences, we have separated and created a new entity that housed everyone from the team together under the same roof living together day and night.

Although we are a new company, the team has been working together on various games and assets for many publishers and developers to use in their own games. What we’ve worked on are products that have been distributed to the world in a manner or the other, and this is speaking from Thailand.The games that we’ve worked on includes MMORPGs, Mobile Games, Rhythm Mobile Games, even VR Games as well. Although we sounds funny and silly when we do things like this, our team leader is a very strict man that won’t allow errors or low-quality works to manifest in our games so we hope that you’ll put your trust in us.

For the supporter options, here are both versions of the digital poster. You may choose one. The rest of the tiers will get both colors.

1. Why Indiegogo campaign?

The reason we’re using crowdfunding as a source of funding is because it’s a great method for us to secure some funds to further develop our framework into a game that we’d like to play. Since we’re doing that, we would like to invite other people to join us in the game, create something that we’d never thought of to create, and have fun with us, and the best way to do that is to let you guys chip in your support and feedback of the game with us so we can improve it while building.

We’d also like to fully commit into game development, not going part-time, taking a few hours after our work to develop a game. No, we’d like to spend at least a third of a day to work on M.A.S.S. Builder and that requires you guys to help support us.

2. Why $40,000?

Alright, let’s get this straight to the point. Our team is working full time on game development as you are reading this right now, but it's a game commissioned by someone else. We would like to instead, create, work on, and play what we'd seen as truly our game.

With this amount of money, we’ll be able to survive to finish the game within the specified timeframe (with the standards of living and how we live) while also being able to procure what is needed for the completion of the game.

For clarity, we'll breakdown the $40,000 for you to see how they goes into each part of our development process.

• (40%) Arts and assets: Due to M.A.S.S. Builder being a very customizeable experience, we'd like to create lots and lots of variants of armors and weapons for our players.
• (30%) Programming: There's lots to programming, creating databases to fulfill each parts of the game, utilizing particles, enemy AI programming, etc.
• (10%) Sound: Voice overs from professional talents and composers to create the soundtrack for the game.
• (5%) Content Design: Creating contents to create a world that feels "real" in its own sense with story writing and the settings.
• (10%) Game Design: Creating additional mechanics that create the "fun" factor in gameplay and balancing numbers in "building."
• (5%) QA: Quality assurance can help us get rid of possible factor of "unfun" and bugs before the project is released.

3. Why flexible funding?

This might be a question many of you are asking, and we’re ready to answer it. As we have mentioned above, we’re working full time on game development already and this is a project we’ve started as our liberation for a good while already as well. So for any amount of money that we receive, you can be sure that we’ll finish the game eventually, just not in the time frame that we’ve stated. 

Of course we’ll try to procure more funding in any other ways so that this project can be done as soon as possible and not later than we speculated in deliverance. So let me repeat this to you again, we will finish the game for every of our backers and fans.

4. What’s the business model?

M.A.S.S. Builder final product will be sold on steam as a purchase once, no subscription model. We’ll continue updating the game with free contents and patches but we’ll tell you honestly that there might be some DLCs available as well after sales and if there are great demands for the game.

5. Where can I find more information about M.A.S.S. Builder?

For now, we’ve got all existing information available on our social media (Facebook, Twitter) where you are free to send us a private message to talk about things, ask questions, and the likes of those.

Q. Regarding the perks that allow us to design stuffs, when are we getting to do it?

A. For those perks, after the development of the alpha/beta finishes, we will contact you through your e-mail and start designing together with you on those stuffs. This process might take some time so we'll try to do it as soon as possible after we are complete but it should be at least the 2nd quarter of 2018. We'll update you with our builds and designs in our demo before that though so you can get a sense of what's to come and what's to be designed. Maybe faster if we can allocate more resources to that.

Q. How do we help you design those stuffs? How do I send my design in?

A. You can either sketch us a design or find us a reference image for both of them. If you're into 3D modelling, we'll be more than happy for your model.

For armors, since they don't have status or anything, we'll take the image or model, sketch it out in our designs for our 3D artist to use, and have him create it.

For weapons, we'll have you break it into two parts, melee being the hilt and the edge, ranged being the trigger and the barrel, and launchers being the generator/ammo and the launchpad.

Hilts will state how they are held in stances, edges will be how it damages, triggers tell how the weapons are fired (burst? ammo type? stuffs like that) and barrels tells us how the projectile is activated (shoots double or a bullet at a time? maybe a gatling barrel?), and generators tells us what are shot (energy ball of heat, electric discharge?) while launchpad will tell us how each projectile behaves of firing (small pod of 4 or 8 like missiles or maybe a beam discharge?).

Risks in development, challenges to overcome

Okay, you’ve read it this far and want to know how risky this project is. First things, game development takes time to create a very immersive and fun experience for our players. To this point, we all know there are various games that takes forever to be released, or folded projects since there’s not enough money. We’ve already finished designing mechanics and core gameplay features, cutting down one of the most time-consuming workload already so all that’s left is to start the development.

Spreading the word

Thanks for reading until this point, if you liked the project or at least what you’ve just read, please tell your friends, your foes, whoever you’d like to! Just spreading the word about our project is a great help in realizing our game, our dreams, and bring it to life. We’re extremely grateful for the opportunity and support that you gave us.

Thank you very much!