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Fandom Effect: Homestuck Fans Fund Video Game Kickstarter Within Hours
What happens when a quirky webcomic creator asks his fans for $700,000 to make a video game? They’ll give it to him. Fast.
Homestuck is a webcomic created by Andrew Hussie which takes pride in it’s near massive amounts of constant updates, unique style of humor and art, and unquestionably convoluted storyline. Among all this, however, is it’s huge fanbase, which makes itself apparent both in gigantic loads of fan art on the internet and the gigantic crowds of gray-bodypainted/orangehorn-donning cosplayers at comic/anime conventions.
Homestuck as of late.
Homestuck is the fourth webcomic created in 2009 by Andrew Hussie under his collection of MS Paint Adventures, a collection of webcomics based on the idea of reader interactivity, taking reader responses and progressing the comics from there. It has grown immensely from its original several thousand fans and has become one of the most prevalent fanbases on the internet. And it shows. Launched only yesterday, a Kickstarter was initiated by Andrew Hussie asking fans and others alike for $700,000 to help the development of a planned Homestuck adventure game. Within an hour, almost $100,000 were raised and by the end of the day, it had already surpassed its half-way mark, and as of writing, it is only less than $25,000 away from it’s goal, a clear sign that it’s fans WANT this game. According to the Kickstarter, development for this game will start sometime during 2013, after the webcomic finishes.
All of this is truly an amazing thing to watch. This comic has been built by its readers, and now its readers are building its relatively high-budget video game. As an involved reader and somewhat obsessed fan, I am excited for what is to come. As part of the fandom, I understand that a large part of the Homestuck fanbase is actually under the age of having easy access to a credit card, bringing a thought to my mind. How much more would projects like this get funded if younger audiences could actually pitch in their own money? And for readers who are also fans, I ask this: Are you happy to see him working on this spin-off game? Andrew has said that this would be his next project after the Homestuck comic if this gets funded. He’s worked on small Flash/HTML5-based “RPG/Myst-like” games, but do you think he and a as-of-now-unknown indie game developer deliver? Would you have preferred he stuck to his roots with his web-based comics/animation/games?
(UPDATE: 32 hours after starting, and it’s funded!)
So – I have finally started to read Homestuck. I’m on Act 3 and am starting to see why a game version of Homestuck would be appealing (although I heard that it gets better as the series goes on). I think I’m most excited for the possibility of having an overly complicated Sylladex.