#multivarious

Our Kickstarter is Live!

After months of hard work, my team and I are very proud to present our Kickstarter for No Mercy! There’s a playable download available so please give it a try, check out the kickstarter, and leave us any feedback in our discord if you want 🙂

Another Amazing Kickstarter (For Lorne Hope by Multivarious Games —Kickstarter) has been published on http://crowdmonsters.com/new-kickstarters/for-lorne-hope-by-multivarious-games-kickstarter/

A NEW KICKSTARTER IS LAUNCHED:

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Play

  No Mercy follows the story of four main characters, Elliot, Ray, Belle, and Orion, as they work to cleanse the forest and restore balance. Use their different weapons and powers to crush anything that stands in your way, and explore the surrounding levels for hidden secrets. Bursting with vibrant art and interlocking character arcs, No Mercy draws both you and the characters deeper into the heart of a forest under siege.

Your only hope lies in each other, but everyone has something valuable to lose. In a story of love, trust, and a fourth wall-breaking bird person named Kevin, you must work together to save the forest, your friends, or at the very least, your life.

No Mercy is a brawler built around the lives of strangers who find themselves in the forest as an ancient darkness, the Corruption, breaks free. It plays like Castle Crashers mixed with the discoverable narrative of games like Journey, Braid, and The Stanley Parable. We’re working on a Steam Release for PC and Mac, with Act I being released in Summer 2017, Act II in fourth quarter 2017, and Act III in March 2018. We would like to release the game as one, complete story, so if we exceed our funding goal, that will allow us to work full time on No Mercy and accelerate our development timeline to release the game more quickly!

Features:

BLOODSHED: Hack and slash your way through slugs, spirits, and  corrupted golems that are destroying the forest. We named the game No Mercy for a reason. We expect you to bring your A-game or button mash your way through the forest to defeat the Corruption. Once you’ve beaten the game the first time, levels will unlock, and you’ll be able to play as any character you want, fighting until your heart’s content.

  MULTIPLAYER: Relatively self-explanatory, but No Mercy has multiplayer! Play alone or with a friend (or hundreds of your closest friends on Twitch… we won’t complain). 

  ART: Every great battle is commemorated in a stunning painting. Get lost in the ever-shifting, colorful art of No Mercy: the painting that pays tribute to your quest to save the forest. The gestural strokes, expressive colors, and 2D backgrounds are designed for a visually expressive experience. 

  HIDDEN STORY: While destroying every enemy you can find, remember to stop and explore the vast forest around you. Eons of time have passed through those branches, and terrible secrets about the woods, the Corruption, and even your friends could be hidden amidst them. We never want story to break the flow of gameplay, so it has been integrated into the surrounding levels as hidden areas, context clues, and dialogue instead of long cutscenes. 

  CHARACTERS: Alternate through four playable characters in levels designed to gradually reveal more about their wants, needs, and (occasionally tragic) backstories. Each character has a unique fighting style that can be combined to add new challenges and depth to levels. 

    ACCESSIBILITY:  MVG has been working with The Able Gamers Charity to ensure that our game is accessible for those with disabilities. Our goal is to create a game that respectfully represents the disabled community, as two of our main characters, Elliot and Orion, live with disabilities. Accessibility and representation are important beyond measure, so we’re working to make sure we do it right. 

Nature thrives on balance: the ebb and flow of the tides, life and death, day and night, order and chaos. The Shrine Keepers are entrusted with maintaining this balance and tending to the veil between what we know and what we wish we didn’t.  The forest they protect has always known Corruption, trickling like veins through the trees, but its true chaos was sealed away long ago. That is, until a golem is broken and releases the Corruption into the world. As it gushes out from behind the broken seal, the world is left to deal with an ancient, all-consuming chaos that has been building for hundreds of years.

Our story begins with Elliot as he’s racing to find his closest companion, Lorne, who was taken by the Corruption. His luck takes a turn for the worse when a corrupted golem tries to kill him, and the lost battle leaves him with only one arm and much less blood than when he began. As he phases in and out of consciousness, a stranger stops to heal his wounds and fashion him a new arm, albeit hastily, before moving deeper into the woods. As Elliot regains consciousness, he wakes with a renewed passion to find Lorne and to discover the person that replaced his arm, instilled it with magic, and saved his life.

Allies like Ray, Belle, and Orion will join his quest, though their motives are their own, and together they’ll work to defeat the Corruption. Belle’s training as a Shrine Keeper will be instrumental in purifying each shrine and weakening the looming foe. Though each character brings new talents to the table, they also bring baggage. It doesn’t take long for questions to arise. Why was Elliot so deep in the forest? Why was Lorne taken? Why does a bird person in a sweater keep following the group and making bad jokes?

Before long, our heroes will learn that the corruption wasn’t the only secret hiding in these woods. 

  We’re Multivarious Games, a game studio from Columbus, OH. Welcome to our No Mercy Kickstarter. We’re glad you’re here. 

We’ve been in the game industry for 6 years, but between everyone on the team, we’ve been making games for many more years than that (plus a few months if you include Intern Brian). Serving as the focal point for the game industry in Ohio, Multivarious is working to make Columbus the next hotspot for video game development and to foster a growing community of creative and innovative developers. In just a few short years, our community has grown to over 1,100 members from organizations like The Central Ohio Gamedev Group, affectionately known as COGG, The Able Gamers Charity, and development studios scattered all over the Midwest. We also make games, but hopefully that was implied.

Multivarious keeps the lights on by working with companies all over the world to realize their visions. We develop tons of apps, games, and interactive experiences for some of the worlds largest organizations. Working with your clients and partners is a great way for us to learn, and be able to eat. But our true passion is in making our own games and experiences. Your support on Kickstarter helps us get the funds needed to full devote our development time on No Mercy, and let our creativity flow… everywhere.

That community of love and support has gotten us this far, and we’re asking more of you to join us. We’ve chosen Kickstarter in the hopes that we can reach a broader audience, receive enough support that we can devote all of our energy to development, and hopefully prove to the world that there’s more than just corn in Ohio.

Thank you for being awesome

– MVG

  For a long time, we’ve balanced client work as a means of income, running GDEX: one of the largest game dev expos in the Midwest, trying to build a community for developers, and actually making our own games. It keeps the lights on, but it takes much longer to make the games we want with out energy divided between so many things. We’ve spent a year of solid development meticulously crafting our story, game mechanics, and art, and we’ve reached a point where No Mercy is all we want to focus on. If we cut out everything other than game development, we are going to need a way to pay our employees. 

The $30,000 is going to help us with development while the team offsets the remaining costs with our normal consulting and external development work. Any money above the $30,000 will allow us to allocate more of our time towards No Mercy without relying on our development services to provide our income. Ultimately, the game includes 4 playable characters, a deep funny while serious story, and wide variety of interesting levels. Full funding of our goal will be allocated as follows:

We estimate that the total remaining costs to complete this project would be around $180,000 ($225,000 on Kickstarter with fees and rewards)

  We have already laid the groundwork. The game mechanics, AIs, and multiplayer are all there. Now we just need to model out some characters, polish our story, and get all of it to you. Let’s do this.

   Check out our nifty guide for which Rewards get what!

 ***The VIP Invite and Escape Room rewards do not include the price of travel. If you are unable to travel but still want to donate at that tier, we can arrange a private Google hangout, stream, or metaphysical dream experience. 

Extra Game Add-On: Add $8 to any tier and we’ll add in an extra copy of the game.

Achievement System

We love being gamers, and free stuff, so we wanted to implement a system that rewards all our supporters as No Mercy becomes successful. Everytime we reach a new milestone listed below, No Mercy will get xp and as the amount of xp increases, it will unlock bonuses for backers. Spread the word and help us be a success!

***Baby companion is not an actual baby, but our office dog who is named Baby. Unless you want a large, cool baby to follow you around the game. Is that what you want? I mean.. okay. I guess we can do that if that convinces you to donate. Please donate. 

This is Baby

                                                                                                                                                     Risks and challenges

Game development is a cruel mistress, and there is always risk in this industry. However, Multivarious is a full time game and app development studio that has developed our own title, Hatch-It for iOS and Android, and numerous projects for clients ranging from Mastercard, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, OSU Medical Center, and many more.

Beyond our own experience, we have a brilliant community of developers we’ve nurtured in the Midwest that are available to help us take development over the finish line when ready.

It costs a lot of money to make a game, and we have erred on the lower side of what is needed for this game. Anything past our funding goal will allow us to work full time on No Mercy without having to rely on our client work.

Our team is ready to face whatever struggles may arise, and we will show them No Mercy. This is a game we want to make and a story we believe in and we have a track record of releasing projects over the past six years. Thank you for your support, patience, and trust. We’re in this for the long haul.

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