Village Gamer

Custom-built, destructible airships? Check. Flying sky whales with mineable innards? Check. Procedural Steampunk landscape floating at 40,000 feet? Check. Funding to make it all happen? …the studio will know 61 hours from now. Snowed In Studios has just under three days left to fund Windforge, their first original title. After contributing to the development of such titles as The Sims 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a successful launch would mean the freedom to continuously devote resources to their own original content rather than fulfilling the dreams of others.

For those who have yet to hear of Windforge or its Kickstarter, the game is a 2D sandbox side-scroller set on the airborne world of Cordeus. Players use airships to hop around from island to floating island and city to floating city, searching for an ancient energy source to free society from its dependence on the world’s dwindling supply of Sky Whale oil.

The road to the Kickstarter’s goal of $50,000 has been paved with challenges. After an initial spike of pledges when the campaign began, funding stalled around $15,000 for a solid two weeks.

But last Thursday saw the start of a massive increase in pledges that hasn’t stopped rolling since. Each day has seen several thousand dollars added to the campaign as backers raise their pledges while more and more backers are pledging for the first time. While the campaign just has three days left, sitting at $32,246 of $50,000 the Windforge campaign still has a strong shot at success.

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“We have seen so much positive feedback, and our backers have been enormously generous so far,” said President and Co-Founder Jean-Sylvain Sormany. “We’re not quite at the finish line, but if this sudden explosion in generosity continues we may have a chance yet.” Sormany has no doubts that a fully-funded final product would not leave backers disappointed.

In Windforge, airships are not bought, traded or earned. They’re built from the ground up, piece-by-piece, with resources mined from the fully-destructible world. Windforge’s construction system lets the player build anything from small flying dinghies to giant aerial fortresses. As the game’s lead designer Evan Hahn says, “It’s no longer about the ground beneath your feet, but the air under your props.”

This brings building block games like Terraria and Minecraft to a whole new altitude, where players build unique vehicles not possible before, with a fully-fleshed storyline missing from similar titles.
If successfully backed, Snowed In Studios plans to release Windforge in March 2014. Backers pledging $25 or more will have pre-release access in early December 2013 in time for Christmas.