HELP US CREATE AN AUTHENTIC STEAMPUNK EXPERIENCE
“One is bored… You, lackey, create an alternative reality for The Ship: a Steampunk world – a most audacious sequel wot is crafted from coal and brass, and wot has one in it.”
–– Her most imperious Majesty, Queen Victoria, at GAME & Son, Piccadilly, 2012.
Yes, my friend – by imagined royal appointment, no less – our navvies here at BlazingGriffin will soon be pounding out white-hot ingots of C++ in the vast coding foundries that put the ‘great’ in Great Britain, transforming The Ship – an already awesome game on Mr Babbage’s Steam Emporia – into its very own, steamed up and punky sequel: The Ship: Full Steam Ahead.
This sequel will take you back to the Colonial Era of the British Empire, where men were strapping chaps, women wore six-barrelled guns in their garters, and Victorian England was thriving in an alternate time-line powered by steam.
Did we mention the Steampunk?
Ah, the smell of coal dust; the worrying hack of TB in the lungs; the clank of a mechanical servitor thwacking a villain with a hickory-handled five iron…
In the spirit of the original, 1920’s game, The Ship: Full Steam Ahead will let you dress up in your Steampunk finery, travel on Victoria’s finest shippage, and ‘drub’ the enemies of the Empire, while those self-same scoundrels, attempt to murder you. You’ll get to play in an evocative, Victorian environment, where eating, sleeping, and promenading (as well as unmentionable ablutions) are just as important as murdering your shipmates. After all, one must have some sense of decorum, don’t you think?
Going beyond this ‘hundredweight’of original gameplay, we’ll be embracing the rather risqué craze of ‘open development’, waving our merry kerchiefs with much hulabaloo, and setting sail for gameplay unknown. We have plenty of ideas for new features, but most importantly, we want to create something new and rather daring with input from YOU — our most noble players.
In short, now is the time to prime your gas gun and don your mechanical timepiece…
HOW YOU CAN HELP
“You, sir. A trip to the Indies, you say? Why, give us that penny, and we’ll give you a world of steam and high adventure!”
–– Sir Chitlin Wynthrop, The J. Noobington Home for Wayward Gamers.
We need your shillings and sixpences to build The Ship: Full Steam Ahead.
This is an ambitious project – one for which a stiff-upper-lip, a cold mustard compress, and a stout truss have undoubtedly prepared us. But there’s no doubt that the renovation of The Ship is going to give us a‘discommodious swelling of the brain’ and a ‘furious griping of the bowels’without the patent cure of funds.
To this end, the monies gathered by Messrs’ Kickstarter Esq. will allows us to:
- Pay everyone:these days, it seems, it’s the ‘done thing’ to recompense to the working classes. That includes our business folk, designers, coding navvies and artistic wallas, as well as our specialists in the field of auditory, acoustic engineering.
- Change our engine:replacing the technological marvel that is The Ship’s resilient – though somewhat antiquated – engine. The scale of this task may be imagined as a rather modest canal-building project, using desks and keyboards instead of shovels. The use of flat caps will, of course, be mandatory.
- Rebuild the core game: recreating the core of the old game in its new genre. How else might we regale the world with our thrillingly eccentric creations, such as new gameplay, environments, weapons, and passengers, and some ‘banging good tunes’ – all in a most gratifying Steampunk styley? This will be a slim slice of the multiplayer game, but one of merchantable quality.
- Create a content delivery platform: so we can deliver our new, anabaric wonders without recourse to a pony and trap, or the laying of a new trans-Atlantic cable.
- Promote and market the game: so we can aggrandise ourselves in the most prestigious periodicals. Such shameless promotion will help us sell our tenacious product, and thus self-fund future expansion of The Ship: Full Steam Ahead, the Empire, and possible sequels.
- Localise our content: so that those in the colonies as well as London may enjoy our loquacious quips.
As we’re a small team bootstrappingThe Ship: Full Steam Ahead into existence, Blazing Griffin’s patronage of the ‘Indies’ and other such development communities is entirely assured. You’ll definitely have an opportunity to tell us what you think, or what you’d improve. Scared we’ll break this fiendish contraption? Forego the formalities, drop by and have your say!
In the meantime, we do hope you’ll be compelled to join us on this adventure of brash derring-do…
WHAT YOU GET
“Come Pip. Invest in my bridal cake business and you shall have Shwag aplenty”.
–– Miss Haggis ’n’ Ham, Great Expectations.
What might you expect for your most liberal financial backing? More than just war bonds from the British East Indian Co., you may hope. And you’d be right! Some of our more rousing rewards include:
- A Copy of The Ship: Full Steam Ahead (or the equivalent in paid downloadable content): as soon as our ironclad behemoth of Victorian gaming glides down the slips, you’ll be able to ‘socialise’ with your fellow backers, ensuring steampunk accoutrements, dandified pugilistic skills, and fine breeding are their prima ‘causa mortis’.
- Copies of The Ship: Murder Party: intrigued by the futuristic 1920’s? This is your chance to play The Ship ‘classic’. Despite our current attempts to overhaul the boiler, The Ship is still a mostexcellent game and you’ll get five copies(one for you, two for your friends, and two for their friends). With these degrees of separation, you may end up playing Sir Kevin Bacon…
- Beta, Alpha, or Pre-Alpha Access: gain a formal introduction to our new features before everyone else and avoid the embarrassment over ‘which fork to use’… as a weapon. Ask your questions or contribute to our daring designs via Her Majesty’s World-Wide-Telegraph. Our operators will be standing by to connect some of the greatest minds of our century, with nothing more than fine elocution and patch cables.
- T-shirts: those of a delicate disposition have been known to become ‘quite overcome’ at the sight of our strapping young men wearing these excellent Imperial T’s. Note the quality of the decorative embroidery and the heft of that colonial workmanship. And, by God, the ladies are wearing them too (tailored to support side saddle and the low gravity of space)…
- Badges (or for those in the Americas, ‘buttons’):feel some metal at your breast, sir, with these most excellent charms from the Orient. Guaranteed to deflect arrows coated in the deadly secretions of Dendrobates Azureus should you be caught short in the Amazon.
- Credit: achieve the credit you deserve before the upper classes purloin your last morsel of self-respect.
- Wallpaper: why not line the inside of your digital devices with our wallpaper –presumably to accommodate the storage of socks, garters or monogrammed articles of a more feminine nature.
- An Honest-to-God Raygun: Johnny Alien won’t ‘like it up him’ with this finely crafted Martian sidearm. Set the dial to ‘one’ for cocoa, ‘six’ to sauté a can of Bully Beef, or ‘twelve’ to cut through the hull plating of a Venusian Attack Barge. “Vlahuk nik Vlahhhargh!” as they say on the Eastern Craters!
- Poster Map: deck-plans and engineering schematics of the Imperial fleet. Revel in our secret locations and placements of devious devices. Alternatively, cover that annoying hole in the lath and plaster…
- Stickers: a novel use for the rare, Carpathian butterfly and the best horse-glue money can buy.
- Soundtrack: MP3’s from, or inspired by, our steampunk soundtrack. Enjoy ‘Algy, the Piccadilly Johnnie’ lovingly transcribed into this modern, wax-free format by the Worthington Ladies Society for the Renovation of Shipping.
- Limited Edition Character Model: our artisans wanted to make something wholesome, as behoves our temperent ways – perhaps involving kittens in formal wear – but some lower-class near-do-well got into the castings and made a limited run of his own visage. Clearly illiterate, the poor chap could only sign his moniker as a simple ‘X’.
- Your Name or Image in the Game: frighten the in-laws with garish tales of how you were one miniaturized by an occult order of the Illuminatum and placed within the bowels of a fearsome engine. Mr Verne, himself, could scarcely imagine it!
- Our Most Esteemed Thanks: a huzzah, a virtual clap on the back, and a ‘dashed jolly good show!’ for good measure. There will be no inappropriate hugging.
