Hey! Someone asked for a clarification on my "stretch goals", because I haven't given a lot of detail on how the game would be different if I had more resources to work with. Most crowdfunding campaigns write something like:

I hate this because it's all fake. You don't know in advance how many iterations an idea will take, you don't know if an idea will even work out until you've mostly implemented it. It's just not how designs go. At least, it's not how I make games - I grow them organically, using what resources I have available, trying ideas and adding them if they make it better, scaling things down if I have to, and taking out what doesn't end up fitting.

Honestly I think lots of games are much worse than they could have been because they commit to this kind of budgeting beforehand. Especially if they're publisher-funded; the small-minded conservative risk-averse fools in charge of making investment decisions want everything planned and scheduled in advance so their ass is covered. They care more about avoiding looking bad than whether what gets made is any good, and so they insist on all these processes that end up preventing lots of good work being made. This is one of the reasons crowdfunding is a better fit for me - you, the backer, can look at the end results of my work and decide just based on whether you like what I make! You don't have to justify to your boss if it looks a bit weird in the middle!

That said, you want to know the kind of stuff I have planned. None of this is binary in the sense that a certain number will let me do it or not, it's things that might scale up or down depending on how many months I have to work in, and what I have left over to pay collaborators.

Lots of people asked for a daily mode in 868-HACK. I thought I had a good reason why it wouldn’t work well, but looking back, I was overly attached to my clever solution to a problem that didn’t necessarily need to be solved. Regardless, for the new game I’m pretty sure I can make a good daily mode! But - obviously it takes time to implement and test.

I'm inspired by the Cursed modes in Slice & Dice (and especially by talking about them with Doug on the eggplant show) to think about how far the complexity can be pushed, in terms of escalating the difficulty modifiers to absurd levels while also powering up the player to deal with them. I'd like to explore that here for an alternate challenge mode, but it will take at least a few weeks of experimentation to see if there's a good version here, and then if it works out (which it might not) a few more weeks to polish it. So this potentially costs a few thousand extra!

Other ideas I haven’t thought of yet will come up along the way, and the more funding I have the more free I’ll be to explore them when they do.

Most of my games feature some kind of dynamic music, responding in some way to the game action (e.g. getting more intense during fights). We’re planning to take this to the highest level I've done yet, now that Tara’s collaborating on the music. How deep we go into this, with how many layers and how detailed the reponses to game events, is going to just depend on how much time we can afford to spend on it - it's not a fixed target but just a flexible area where more resources can keep making a better experience. I really want to do a great job of this - the soundtrack is a critical part of cyberpunk vibes.

As it stands I'm working on the game graphics by myself, but there are some scenes I want to include to really situate you in the world of the game, to evoke a stronger sense of environment and presence. I don't currently have the skills to pull this off. Either I have to spend time skilling up, or work with a visual art specialist to bring them to life. At the current level of funding we'll be able to get together a cool intro screen and ending screen, but I'd like to have a few more for special events in the game. Again this is not a $number, but a flexible possibility space where I'll do the best I can with whatever resources are available.

I've already released a game on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS and Android with Godot engine, so I'm confident in all of these. Though - with the variety of different devices and resolutions these days I wouldn't expect to catch all issues without extra costs.
People have asked about things like Steamdeck, Switch and other consoles and.. I have literally zero experience with these! I would have to get hold of the equipment, play with it enough to have a good feel for it, do whatever it takes to port the game to them (for consoles, this means paying someone who specialises in that), spend time making sure the game feels right.. this is one of the areas that adds a lot to a game's budget - add say €5k for Steamdeck and at least €15k for any console. Yeah, it's a lot, and I'm probably even underestimating here.

So, I hope that clarifies my stretch goals. Thanks again to everyone who's backed, and if you're on the fence then maybe now is your time!