Reject Your Reality.

I got Tracer :-)

Who did you get?

Happy Thanksgiving!  Hope your holiday is filled with friends and family. If not, you can always fill it with Ajna and her friends!

Indivisible crowdfund is at 69%( $1,034,433 ) what we need is $465,567

we’ll just assume because holidays are coming up no will wants to donate too much to it

so if everyone goes with the 5$ tier that would mean we would need 93,114 people donating $5 to get the game funded

15$ tier means we’d need 31,038 people to donate to it

and of course we have the $30 dollar tier which we only need 15,519 people to donate $30 to

Right now we have  16,101 people donating to it. the ideal way to go about this is just for the 16,101 of us who want this game to be made just to donate another 30$(or more if you choose). I mean we got two weeks left. someones has to be getting paid in that time period. just set aside 30 dollars to upgrade your tier.

…

or if you’re like me and you just want this game funded already, just throw another 30 at them and just give away your extra tier rewards to someone else (tis the season afterall)

for anyone who needs a refresher course here is what comes with the $30 tier

Lab Zero art, Indivisible soundtrack(by Hiroki Kikuta),the actual game and some alternate colors so you can play the game in even more style 

and for anyone just curiously scrolling through don’t you worry that pretty little head of yours. there is plenty of room in the Indivisible fandom for you too.

just head on over to Lab Zero indiegogo page on there you will find out all there is needed to know about the game. and while on the page download and play the free prototype

2D games are a rare breed, Valkyrie Profile-esque large cast games are a rare breed.  We have the chance to be a preservation society while picking up some neat shwag and an awesome game. And if you’re hesitant because the game itself is planned for release in 2018, just note that Lab Zero plans to do what they did with Skullgirls - frequently updated beta builds to test new characters and areas, without actually spoiling the plot.  And they’re very diligent about such things, so we’ll at least be getting frequent taste-tests of the game!

If you can’t contribute, s’all good, yo.  Just please, PLEASE signal boost, because this game deserves to get made so very much, and Lab Zero deserves success after what happened to them thanks to Konami.

Indivisible, the new RPG from the creators of Skullgirls has less than a week of crowdfunding left with almost half of its goal remaining to be reached. And while the support given so far has been massive, there are still a lot of people who are skeptical. Here’s a couple things I hear regarding Indivisible and my thoughts on them. I hope that if you have second thoughts about supporting Indivisible that reading this may change your mind!

1. The $1.5m goal is too high!

For me and you, $1.5m is a lot of money. For a game studio with several employees, contractors and overhead, it can disappear pretty quickly. The full budget for Indivisible is actually $3.5m (the publisher has agreed to provide the other $2m if the IGG is successful), with the development of the game happening over the course of the next 2-3 years.

So why does a game cost this much to develop? Let’s start at $3.5m and work our way down a hypothetical cost breakdown.

First off, there’s the fees. Normally IGG + the transaction fees takes 10% of what you make, however lndivisible gets a slightly better deal at I believe 7%. So that’s about $105,000 already gone. Then you get to deal with taxes, let’s say at another 5% - a low estiamte. So there’s another $75,000 gone.

We’ve shaved off $180,000 and we haven’t even started development yet!

The game development cycle is about 2-3 years. So now you have to factor the cost of a living wage for 8 people who work in-house at the studio. Let’s say they’re each getting paid $40,000 a year, which for a big city like Los Angeles is modest living at best, arguably even being underpaid depending on the position. Then, consider the cost of each employee in terms of minimal benefits working at that salary will incur another $800 per month per employee. Add on to that office equipment/electricity/internet/rent/etc and all that you’re looking at the very least another $8,000/mo to keep the studio fully functioning. Over the course of 3 years that adds up to about $1,262,400 gone.

We’re now at $2,057,600.

That’s $2 million left to pay all your contractors - this includes dozens of animators (Skullgirls had around 70 and Indivisible will likely have around the same amount), background artists, a musician, voice actors and whatever else is needed for 3 years. They need more animators than anything in both clean-up and color departments. I know this because I worked on both Skullgirls and the Indivisible prototype. Lab Zero is constantly sending out this kind of work and they won’t stop for pretty much the entire development process of the game! The animations are short, but the incredible attention to detail means a lot of care must be given to every frame.

Factor in Murphy’s Law and Lab Zero will be fortunate to have anything left by the end! Making games is expensive, and what they’re asking for is an honest budget that will allow them to create the game and be able to survive while creating it. If you want to know more about this topic, have a listen to MikeZ talk about it on a Skullgirls stream.

Though this leads me to another point that I see often..

2. But i’ve seen other games made for less money!

The cost of a game’s development is proportional to the amount of work and number of people required to finish it within a realistic timetable. There are games today being made anywhere from a couple thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars. All things considered, Indivisible falls somewhere in the middle of the road.

(Above: an animation I did for Indivisible - Zeibei fainting)

Hand-drawn animation is an iconic part of Lab Zero’s style, it is time consuming and requires a lot of skill and experience to create. For the amount of detail and complexity of animation required for a game like Skullgirls and Indivisible, many people are needed to help create it. All of these people need and deserve to be paid for their work.

Another thing to consider is that many crowdfunding projects undersell the true cost and over-promise features on their project pages. I don’t want to point fingers at specific projects, but i’m sure you have seen it before - a game with a ridiculously low goal for the scale of the game promised, complete with an ambiguous hype trailer dotted with concept art and not much more. The idea here is to present a perfect game with a lot left to the imagination and a seemingly feasible goal, with the hopes of smashing it quickly and presenting the “stretch goals” which will fund the true scale of the game. Some games also have the backing of a publisher and extra funds but will not outright say it. All of this is a deceptive marketing tactic to make the idea of pledging more palatable. And in the end, these practices can sometimes doom the projects after they are funded, resulting in an underdeveloped or sometimes even nonexistent product. These experiences have left a bad taste in people’s mouths.

What the Indivisible campaign is offering is the exact opposite of these kinds of misleading tactics. Presented to you is the full cost of the game, the name of the publisher, chart of the budget, and an actual proof of concept prototype of the game you can play yourself and be the judge oft. I think this is the kind of honesty in a game crowdfunding campaign that players deserve, where everything you need to know is on the table so you know your money will be well spent.

On top of this, the Skullgirls Indiegogo campaign delivered on everything that was funded, so Lab Zero already has credibility when it comes to crowdfunding.

3. I will just buy a copy of the game when it’s released! 

Unfortunately, if the game isn’t funded, you won’t be able to do this! Please keep in mind that Indivisible’s Indiegogo page does not have Flexible Funding - which means that if the game doesn’t reach its goal, all the money is refunded.

505 Games, the publisher, also will not give the rest of the funds unless the goal is met - so it’s truly all or nothing!

4. I don’t think it’s going to make it!

To me, this is the same defeatist logic that you can try to apply to almost anything - the idea that you don’t make a difference. Yes, sometimes as humans we feel small and that our contributions to the things we care about aren’t felt. I think we often forget that when we are pushing towards something, we forget to look to our left and our right and see other people next to us doing the same thing, working together. Humanity is at its best when we remember this. 

There are millions of 2D animation and RPG fans - only a fraction of them are needed to come together to make Indivisible happen. You might not feel like your donation alone is going to help make the goal, but what if everyone had that same attitude? Many incredible games that were funded by fans would not exist.

If it doesn’t make its goal, you have nothing to lose - your money would be refunded and that would be the end of it. But if it does, you helped breathe a little life in to a game, dozens of artists, animators, voice actors and musicians for the next few years - and you’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of that in the future. And that, to me, is the coolest part about crowdfunding - the fans being able to take part and closely follow the development of the game they helped to create.

Don’t focus on the numbers and the charts and statistics. Believe, and be a part of it!

Hey folks, just got word through the grapevine that if Indivisible reaches 900,000 before tomorrow, they’ll be able to extend their deadline for 20 more days!  So if you can donate now, please do! They’re at about 850,000 now, so every little bit helps!

So, some of my friends here may know I’ve been on a pretty big kick on Indivisible lately.  Recently their crowdfunding campaign has just barely hit 800,000 out of 1.5m with only 5 days to go.  I’m taking this opportunity to reach out once more to ask: please, pals.  If you can, please consider giving to Indivisible’s campaign if you can, or signal boosting if you can’t to spread the word, because holy HELL does this game deserve to be funded.

If you want specifics, visit their tumblr here:  http://indivisiblerpg.tumblr.com/

Below, I shall summarize, in detail, why I’m so adamant in my support for this.

So I think at this point a lot have seen or heard of this beautiful game being developed by Lab Zero, the core developers of the popular 2D fighter Skullgirls. However if you haven’t heard of it, Indivisble is an action RPG with side scrolling Metroid style platforming, well Lab Zero currently has an active crowd funding campaign with a pretty lofty goal of 1.5 million dollars of which they’ve only raised about a quarter, with only about 25 days left in the campaign.  Now 1.5 million might seem like quite a budget for a game like this, but given Lab Zero’s standard of quality combined with cost of animating each character, programming, and design it’s not at all unreasonable, and in fact that’s not the actual budget of the game, which is currently expected to cost over 3 million dollars. if the game reaches it’s crowdfunding goal then Publisher 505 Games cover the remaining development costs, as explained here in the campaign itself.

By now you’ve probably noticed that rather large amount of money we’re asking for in this campaign. However, this isn’t the actual budget for the game.

The total budget for Indivisible is $3,500,000.

If we raise our goal of $1,500,000 or more, 505 Games will provide the remaining $2,000,000 we need to complete the game. So, effectively, up to the initial goal your contribution is worth more than double.

And the more we raise beyond the initial goal, the better the game gets and the better the publishing arrangement with 505 gets for Lab Zero.

To be clear, this is not a campaign to “gauge interest” – Indivisible’s budget represents a more equitable funding split, where your support directly influences not only the game, but also the post-release benefits Lab Zero receives.

Indivisible will not happen if we don’t hit our goal. But should the campaign succeed, Lab Zero will have a better outcome than we would’ve gotten through a more traditional publishing deal – that’s the risk we took, and we feel it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

Additionally, this represents the complete budget for our entire vision of Indivisible.  If we are lucky enough to be in that situation, we will not be adding additional gameplay content to the core game as stretch goals As such, all additional content funded through stretch goals will be released in post-release updates.

So as you can see, every contribution makes a HUGE difference, because if the game is unable to meet it’s goal then that would mean the end of Indivisible and possibly the end of Lab Zero altogether, which if you ask me would be a MAJOR loss for gaming overall! So if you can, please donate and if you can’t then please spread the word so this game can become a reality.

There is a great Prototype availabe for download HERE, and the Indiegogo campaign can be found HERE!

It has Razmi.

two of the main cast are poc. the alien in his human form is a poc as well.

the traditionally feminine, concerned-with-looks character, who spends her free time shopping and who has perfect blonde hair and who follows fashion trends, is also the team’s main combat powerhouse and is generally ferocious and terrifying in combat and a Soldier more than anyone else in the team. these things do not negate each other

the other female character is the kind and gentle one but also strong as fuck and the most talented at the animorph’s Main Skill

there are love plots, but they are understated and affect the characters without defining them. they are also, in one case, fucking tragic

realistic portrayals of ptsd and general trauma

varied family compositions and firm calling out of families that emotionally abuse children

characters are not portrayed as single handedly able to save mankind, they are just trying to hold out so that the cavalry can arrive

IMPORTANT NOTE: Sadly, the last bullet point in that list appears to be out of date - Richard’s forum hasn’t been hosting the ebooks in quite some time (2006, I believe) due to a request from Scholastic.  Most unfortunate.:/

I’ve already backed it, and if it doesn’t get made, I will probably cry.