artizens_kai

As far as I know, there really aren't any similar games available today. If you look for online 2D platformers you'll find games such as Maplestory, Dungeon Fighter Online, and Awesomenauts. We're different than all of these, mainly because we believe in skill based gameplay and intense customization options.

Artizens is a co-op game where you fight monsters alongside your friends, kind of like 4 player co-op games such as Gauntlet Legends and Magicka. Except in Artizens, you're not just progressing from screen to screen. Instead, you are hunting a huge boss monster in every mission, and the mission is made of up many arenas that you run through to chase the monster down.

On top of that, we have character customization that exceeds pretty much any game you've ever played. We're letting you pick from a huge list of equips, mix them however you want, and even draw your own images for them. Other drawing games, such as Draw a Stickman and Grafighters, are very focused on the drawing and have relatively shallow gameplay. We're going for serious gameplay and serious customization, so that your drawings really matter.

All in all, I'd say our game plays like Monster Hunter with great online multiplayer support, and we're bringing character customization to a level that other games haven't really tried yet.

If we launched our Kickstarter campaign and got absolutely no attention and zero community support, then I think we'd have moved on. Now that we're out here, we see that we're on track toward meeting our goal and we have hundreds of backers. Things are looking good and we're on schedule for a solid alpha release.

Let's say everything went to hell and somehow we lost all of our funding and backers. In that case, we'd be forced to disband the team because we couldn't pay them. We would spend whatever little time we have left looking for outside investment. And if that didn't work out, we'd go back to working our full time jobs and start Artizens again once we're ready financially. It's not the end of the world for any of us, and we've already enjoyed the experience, no matter what happens.

It was a huge decision, but I'd say we were more excited than scared. We lose the comfort of having a steady paycheck, but in return, we take full responsibility for our own direction and we always work on things that matter to us. We all still pretty young and so we love the idea of being adventurous with our careers before we've settled down.

For the low level packet sending, we are using ENet. On top of that, we have a custom message protocol defined using Protobuf. At a high level, we use the same design patterns as the Source engine to get completely smooth gameplay and still have everything run on the server.

The networking code took about 3 months to complete. I built it up alongside some of the other systems we have in the code such as component based entities and Lua scripting.

Yeah, we'd love to be on Steam, and have full integration with Steam Workshop. That'll be something we look at after the Kickstarter finishes and we release the alpha version.