[Kickstarter] Single Player Campaign

I will donate 100 AUD (more than paying for any game ever in my life) if the dev or some one can implement a complete single player campaign with lore and all other goodness.

It have to satisfy a few condition:

1. Must be working (i.e. relatively bug free)
2. Must have a story
3. Must teach player most gameplay mechanic and units
4. Be a part of main user-interface (i.e. player can just go to single player and see the campaign list by default)
5. Last about 15 min or less per map or support save and load

I'll tally up the total amount of money if anyone else want to donate for the same cause.

I'll donate an extra 20 AUD if the dev make a comprehensible campaign editor

The donation will come in when the single player campaign is finnished


Current promise: 205 USD

570 USD if other conditions are met

Personally I would like some new tools to make the campaign rather than the campaign itself. A graphical mapmaker that you can just sculpt with and a mission maker that did not crash all the time and had better triggers (and linux support!) would do it. I am sure that there are plenty of ZK players who would make a campaign if there were better tools to make it with, leaving the devs to improve the game.

I think Licho said he would turn salary into dedicated-fixing-stuff time. That was his idea behind the donation buckets.

If "marketed" well, a kickstarter sort of thing can gain publicity, achieving what we really want - more players and a longer life for ZK.

Without extra publicity, the effects of a big and well made single player campaign are relatively minor to the overall player numbers of the game.

quote: 15 mins or less per map? are you serious?

Without save/load, this will be the average you could ask of a player. I'd extend it to 30 minutes, but if you put 30 minutes out on the table, it will take new players an hour.

I like what is being done with http://zero-k.info/Campaign .
You can just play from any machine and the progress is kept in "The Cloud". Moar missions!

Why would you outsource everything to Thailand?

I'll prepare a e-mail to send to many game reviewer and game promoter website, but I deem it is hard to capture their attention unless we have a single player campaign, to teach them how to play,

It's a catch-22 need more publicity to improve the game, need to improve the game for more publicity.

many voice actor could do work for free, I know some other open source project who had asked for volunteer voice actor and success I can ask on their forum as well



side note: to prevent the dilution of the thread, I would suggest unrelated comments to be post in another forum.

example:

quote: Why would you outsource everything to Thailand?

quote: It's cheap. Actually, it's much cheaper than just about anything local.

quote: A graphical mapmaker that you can just sculpt with and a mission maker that did not crash all the time and had better triggers

gajop is working on both those things, within spring. So it would work on any platform.

http://www.youtube.com/user/gajop/videos?view=0&flow=grid&sort=dd&live_view=500

SpringMapEdit already allows you to sculpt land:
http://springrts.com/wiki/Maps:SpringMapEdit

But if you're going to make a map with a pefectly green texture and a hand-sculpted terrain, it's going to look awful. It would only sit there looking bad if we included a mission made this way.

Mission Editor has been around for years and nobody did anything serious with it at all. I said to Quant 'Just make a mission editor, Other games had things like DOTA and such created on their mission editors! People will definitely make missions if you give them the tools.'

I was wrong. MissionEditor may be a bit buggy but it's MORE than enough to make some good missions. There are very few people willing to contribute their time seriously to this project and I don't think Linux users are that much more likely to contribute (We have NO permanent devs who run Linux, or maybe we'd actually have decent linux support!).

So, right, again, it falls to the long-term devs who have skills that are much better used doing other things to learn all the tools, spend all the time, and make this happen. The money is appreciated, really it is. But your time and effort is more valuable than your money. We already work on this game for free (Or, the rest of the devs do, I rarely have enough time).