Why Harry Potter Wizards Unite Failed

The news hit this week that Niantic would be closing down their Harry Potter Wizards Unite title, with it being removed from the App Store in early December and shut down completely come January 31, 2022.

This doesn’t even look like my neighborhood

While “failure” isn’t in the announcement… the marketing department says that says that they are set to complete a two year story arc and that not all games are meant to last forever… I am pretty sure if the title were bringing in even a quarter of the money that Pokemon Go still manages to grab we would be hearing about a bright future for the game.  But the numbers I find on the web seem to indicate the title made about as much over two years as Pokemon Go makes on a good, but not great, month.

So how can a game that is pretty much the same as Pokemon Go, just dressed up in a different but extremely popular IP, fail to gain the same traction?

Wait, did I just answer the headline question there?  Maybe, and I certainly have opinions as to what went wrong.

My experience with Harry Potter Wizards Unite is somewhat limited.  As my wife and I approached the level 40 cap then in place in Pokemon Go, we thought we might give the recently launched Harry Potter game from Niantic a try.  If there is an IP more popular in our household than Pokemon, it is Harry Potter, since my daughter and I both read the books and my wife likes the movies.

I grabbed a copy from the App Store, which was a bit of a challenge as I wasn’t quite clear what the game was called and if you search on “Harry Potter” there are a lot of results, which is a problem right away.  Wizards Unite was not, and is not, the only Harry Potter game in the store.  But I managed to find the right app, downloaded it, and signed up.

I got through the intro and into the game where I went over to the park near us where there is a Pokestop and a gym in Pokemon Go to find there a fortress and something else… I don’t recall now… and there were things to catch or battle by doing wand motions, but it all looked very much like a re-skin of Pokemon Go.

I didn’t hate it, but nothing about it really grabbed me and when Pokemon Go upped the level cap to 50 my wife and I just carried on with that and never looked back at Harry Potter Wizards Unite again.

So I made it to level 10 and stopped, that hardly makes me an expert on the game.  Fair point.  But as a fan of the franchise, I still wondered why it didn’t grab me.  I should have been in the prime demographic for the title.  But here’s the thing.

Pokemon Go is a brilliant translation of the franchise into a mobile AR enabled game.  As a player you get to become that 10 year old in every one of the core RPG titles and go out into a world inhabited by Pokemon to catch, collect, and trade them.  You get to battle in gyms, battle other players, and even fight against the legendary Team Rocket and its leadership.  It took a while to get all that in play, but even at launch it convinced me it was a Pokemon game to play.

That is almost the core of the entire franchise, which was based on a video game that came out in 1996 which did pretty much those things.  The collectible card game, the TV shows, the movies, the spin off games, they have built on and expanded beyond that core, but the core is still there.  If you played Pokemon on your GameBoy or DS, you left you house in the game to do all those things.

Harry Potter doesn’t benefit from that.  Based on the books and a series of popular movies, Harry Potter always feels like we’re going some place else.  Our world is parallel to the world of Harry Potter, and wizards pass through our muggle society, but they are of a different realm entirely, and the magic of the series is being let into that realm and going to places that aren’t in our neighborhood or across town at the community center.

Basically, Pokemon Go can make you feel like a Pokemon trainer, but Harry Potter Wizards Unite never made me feel like a wizard.  My local park spawning Pokemon and having a gym seems is adorable, the same location with a wizard fortress… well, it doesn’t really sell me.  The park isn’t dark and foreboding, it is a happy place with grass and a playground and kids playing.  It is a place where Pokemon fit right in and wizards probably don’t show up until past my bed time.

We’re probably bordering on that immersion topic I have been harping about.  Maybe there is a post about Pokemon Go possible in that series.  I’ve been to Minecraft already, so why not?  I certainly seem to be making a “sense of place” argument here and how Pokemon Go succeeds and Harry Potter Wizards Unite fails.

Which isn’t to say that great Harry Potter games are not possible.

I thought the LEGO Harry Potter titles were great, as an example.  But you know what LEGO Harry Potter did?  It brought you into the world of the books, reimagined in LEGO form, and let you explore an experience that world and the stories we know from it in a fun and whimsical fashion.

And that, I think is the key.  If it sent me off to a LEGO version of my park, that would be kind of cool, but it wouldn’t be Harry Potter.

So that is my working theory.  Harry Potter Wizards Unite did not capture the essence of Harry Potter the way Pokemon Go did with Pokemon.

Honestly, I think it would be tough for a lot of IPs to work well in the structure of Pokemon Go.  I can’t really see Star Wars or Lord of the Rings working at my local park either.  Maybe Star Trek, as time traveling away teams are canon, or perhaps some sort of superhero IP, but it would have to be done just right.

Pokemon Go just caught the lightning because it was just the right IP at the right time on the right platform.

EVE Online Fanfest Returns to Iceland for 2022

There won’t be a BlizzCon or a BlizzCononline for the foreseeable future and the annual events that SOE used to hold are but a distant memory at this point, but CCP carries on with its tradition of EVE Fanfest at the top of the world by announcing the event will return for 2022.  With the pandemic at least somewhat under control in many places and vaccinations readily available CCP felt it was time to get the band back together in Iceland after having skipped 2019 to do the FanFest World Tour instead and having had to cancel in 2020 and 2021 due to COVID.

Return to Iceland

Attendees will have to comply with the Icelandic government’s regulations… which as of today is asking people to avoid non-essential travel, but who knows what tomorrow will bring… and provide proof of vaccination.

But tickets are now available for purchase, with early bird tickets as a discounted price likely to be gone quickly.

So get ready for the triumphant return of EVE Fanfest in 2022.  Details are available at the EVE Fanfest 2022 site.  There is even a quick announcement video.

Now what about EVE Vegas?

Related:

• EVE Fanfest 2022 Announcement
• EVE Fanfest 2022 site
• EVE Fanfest 2022 forum thread
• Buy Tickets Now

A Visit with Prince Keleseth

It was a busy weekend and we could not get the whole instance group together, but on Sunday afternoon three of us, Ula, Skronk, and myself, found a bit of time to log into WoW.

Retail WoW.

We got out the group I posted about previously to pick up where we left off in Northrend.  We had made it out to the airfield in Borean Tundra and carried on with a couple of quests there as a warm up, enjoying the luxury of features offered by the current version of the game after doing quests together the previous week in WoW Classic.  You can just mouse over the quest in the quest tracker and it shows you everyone’s objective/collection status.

With three of us though, questing was a bit of a walk over.  So we decided to take a shot at one of the challenges we discussed when we started this venture.  We were going to try running an instance.  Our ability, so far, to run all of the WoW Classic instances with a group of four made us wonder if we could handle any of the Wrath of the Lich King instances with a group of three.

Retail WoW is easy-mode, right?  But how easy?

Our group at the moment was:

• Mendula – 22 gnome priest
• Fergorin – 22 dwarf shaman
• Merchi – 24 gnome hunter

We at least had healing covered, as Menula spec’d into that.  We didn’t really have a tank, there not really being a shaman tanking spec.  And, while Merchi was beast mastery, the only REAL hunter spec to my mind, he did not have a pet that was the tanking spec.  His robo-bunny from the tutorial was the cunning  pet spec, which has some damage mitigation, but a tenacity spec pet would have likely been better.

Still, what the hell.  So we headed towards Howling Fjord and the traditional first dungeon from WotLK, Utgarde Keep.  I’m not sure we HAD to go with that instance.  Keeping track of what unlocks when as you zip up levels is more than I can manage.  But we knew where it was and they give you the flight path up front now.

Flight path available

So it was on the… well, not a bird, but a gnomish flying machine… and off to the far side of Northrend.

They don’t call it the “boring” tundra for nothing

Over in Howling Fjord I was reminded just how close to the flight point and the inn that first dungeon really is.  It looms over Valgarde Point, the sinister skull in its facade looking out over the area.

Mendula coming in for a landing

From there it was a quick ride north, dodging the field of mobs before the structure, to the instance portal.  Once inside we were able to pick up the quests from the quest giver inside the instance… by WotLK there wasn’t all the running around for dungeon quests the way we have been dealing with in WoW Classic… after which we were left eyeing the first set of mobs.

The plan was to use my pets to tank… I chose the “two pets out” from the talents, which seemed far and away the best idea… and Mendula would heal while Fergorin and I piled on whichever mob was the target.

After getting a handle on the various mobs wandering around ahead of us, we managed to pull a pair… and it wasn’t a disaster.  Sure, Mendula went down… healing drew aggro… but Fergorin could ress, so we were able to get ourselves back together.

Mendula and our two targets down

Once she was ressed, we carried on, learning a bit with each fight.  All of us died a couple of times before we started to get the hang of it.  By the timer we got out onto the furnace floor, I had figured out my traps, one of which made a pretty effective crowd control.

One mob ice trapped, with the tar trap slowing the others down

Like so much in retail vs classic, hunter traps are a lot different.  I found that I could not only throw them in combat, but I could even throw the freezing trap under a mob in a group that we had yet to aggro and trap it without pulling the group.  Strange times.

We were starting to make headway and it felt like we were doing okay, and then we made our way into the dragon room.

The dragon room

Something in the back of my head said that the dragons were tougher than normal elite mobs in the instance.  I seemed to recall they had double the xp rewarded, which was commensurate with their increased difficulty.  Also, I remembered that we didn’t have to clear the whole room, just one side, in order to make our way to the next area.

I found out quickly that my freezing trap wasn’t good on dragons and deaths occurred.  Fortunately Fergorin has a self-ress spell… also, because we wiped more than once in the room, it is nice that when you release you come back in the instance.  Again, WoW Classic had us expecting to run back from the local outside graveyard.

Dragon progress

We managed to make it through the dragon room on a few tries, then pressed on into the next hallway, where we faced a group of four normal elites.  That we were able to handle.

From there it was into the next big room, Reavers Hall, which is where Prince Keleseth resides.

The big room with the map table

The four mobs at the table, who come as  a group, got a bit out of hand, but we managed to take them down.  That left Prince Keleseth, the first boss in the instance, as our next target.

Prince Keleseth was an inflection point for the instance group back in the day.  We managed to half-ass our way through vanilla WoW instances as a full group, and managed to barely get past the instances in The Burning Crusade.  But Prince Keleseth was a wall we could not get past the way we were working.

We actually spent a week off reading up about our classes over at the then font of such knowledge, Elitist Jerks, upgraded our gear (I think I still had the Carrot on a Stick trinket equipped), and generally worked to “git gud” before we gave it another try.

And, after no small effort and a few more runs, we got past him.  And, from that point forward in the group, instances became more a matter of learning the boss fight mechanics than simply trying to apply enough DPS.  Our ability to run through most of the WoW Classic instances as a group of four, many of which were a struggle as a group of five back in the day, is directly related to lessons learned back then.

Which also leads to us having the spunk to think we might be able to take on an instance in pre-Shadowlands WoW with a cobbled together group of three players.

Prince Keleseth, however, had other plans.

We sort of remembered bits of the fight.  I recalled that he would summon helpers during the fight from the door on the far side.  I thought I might put my tar trap down there to slow them down a bit.  Other than that we couldn’t recall much.  So we gave it a try.

We wiped, naturally.  We had forgotten about his ice block attack, where one of the party members is encased in a block of ice, unable to do anything, while it applies a bunch of damage.  You have to get everybody to attack the block and burn it down before it kills the person encased in it.

Also, as we remembered, Prince Keleseth summons friends, a set of undead, to come help him.  You need some AOE to knock them down fast.  And there were some line of sight problems with the big table and the short people standing around it.

We got ourselves together and tried to refine our approach.  We pulled Prince Keleseth back to the door in order to give ourselves a bit more time versus the adds, but we were not quite ready to deal with them, or the ice block.

A couple more tries yielded the same result.

I’m dead, Fergorin is in the ice block, Mendula is all the DPS

We had been at it for a while by then and it was getting to be time for dinner at my end, so we called it for the time being.   We might not have a very good class mix, I might need a better pet, we might not even have critical skills at our level, or it might not  be a viable instance to go in with just three people.  Some more research to be done.  But it was a bit of fun to go in and try, and we even got the first quest done for the instance, got a few drops, and gained a level.

Looking Back at BlizzCon 2019

BlizzCon 2019 was sure a hell of a lot better for Blizzard than BlizzCon  2018.

I watched some of panels I wanted to see, but not all of them yet.  So, while this isn’t quite a hot take on the event, it is my impressions about what was announced in a slightly more detailed fashion than my recap of the big four announcements post I did on Friday.  That post has links to all the cinematics and game play videos that Blizz posted as they announced things, if those interest you.

So, lets dive in by categories that almost line up by franchise.

World of Warcraft

A new expansion.  Pretty much a requirement at BlizzCons that fall on odd numbered years.  So they got that right.  But honestly, I am not sure how I feel about Shadowlands.

Part of that is just what you get when your game gets past maybe three expansions, they start to blur for all but the most hardcore.  There are some cool things in the plan.  The covenants things seems like it could make for interesting choices.  I like the return to a plan to focus on classes rather than specs.  A single narrative arc that drives you through four zones in order is back to the old school, and how alts will be handled seems innovative.

No more re-grinding

Better character customization is good direction.  Everybody can be a death knight now.  But the ideas for a new class… again, perfect chance for a necromancer class to show up… seems to have been bypassed.  And thus in its way it will be more of the same, more zones, more levels, more dungeons, more raids, and so on.  And it feels a bit like they were inspired by Stranger Things, which means we will no doubt run into plenty of references to the show.

It sure looks like the Azeroth Upsidedown to me

Wait, did I say “more levels?”  I meant LESS levels.  The level squish is coming.

Leveling up after Shadowlands

I said Blizz wouldn’t do it, so I have clearly been proven wrong on that front.  And my concerns from that post remain, though there are some updsides.  It sounds like they will rescale… again… all of the old content so you can get to level 50 playing through any previous expansion then head into the Shadowlands.  Still, it will be odd to have max level characters in WoW and WoW Classic at the same level.  There were more details about this in the deep dive, which I watched, and I will probably throw together another post just to look at how leveling is going to change with Shadowlands.  But the level squish is coming.

Overall though, you can color me somewhat interested in the expansion.   I am sure the fact that it was made available for pre-order will get hopes up that it will show up sooner rather than later, but I doubt it will show any time before June of 2020.

There is no doubt another post to be made in Blizz moving to three levels of expansion packages, especially just as Daybreak moved to four levels.  No level 120… eventually level 50… boost with the base package either.

MMO Champion has a good outline of the main presentation.  Or you can look at the pretty pictures on the official expansion page.

WoW Classic

We got the very bare minimum of news about WoW Classic, something I indicated might end up being the case back at the start of October.  There was a bit of “isn’t this great!” and the date for the phase 2 unlock (November 12th), and that was that.  No future plans, no talk about expansions, and nothing even daring to look in the direction of somebody low key hinting that there might be anything like original content for the WoW Classic path.

In fact, WoW Classic was stuck in the “oh, by the way” section of the keynote with StarCraft II and Heroes of  the Storm.  Talk about being put on the bench.  Even at the WoW Q&A session the question about future expansions for WoW Classic was pretty much deflected.

But Blizzard moves slowly, something I have to keep reminding myself.  I am sure they are still trying to figure out what to do with this unexpected success story.  We will likely have to wait until next BlizzCon to hear anything new I guess, but that will put it after the Shadowlands launch, so Blizz will be able to focus on it.

I will say though, at least we got a self deprecating crack from J. Allen Brack about serving vanilla ice cream at the BlizzCon concessions.  He didn’t think we would want it, but it turns out we did.

I don’t find Brack to be a particularly compelling or convincing speaker.  He lacks Metzen’s energy or Morhaime’s air of goofy humility.  And, of course, after the infamous quote, I associate him with a level of smug condescension, which biases my perception even when I agree with what he is saying.  We all see things through our own filters.  But at least he was willing to stand up there and remind everybody how wrong he was.

I previously wrote that if he said something about that quote I’d stop bringing it up every time I mentioned him.  I think I can stick to that now.  I won’t mention it every time, though I reserve the right to bring it up when it fits the situation.

Diablo

Diablo IV was announced, to nobody’s surprise.

It looks interesting.  I like the direction they are going.  Darker.  A more open world.  Mounts even.  No RMT auction house.  I have no doubt I will play it some day.  But that day will be… when?  2022?

I guess I can see why they didn’t want to announce it last year.

Basically, I will be a lot more interested in this when it seems like its launch is imminent.

Overwatch

Again, if even I was predicting something like Overwatch 2 more than a month ago, then having that announced was probably not a huge surprise.

I am not an Overwatch player.  I don’t even eat the cereal.  But I am interested in how they are handling Overwatch 2, which is more like an expansion than a new game.

If you own Overwatch, you can keep playing that and your play will overlap with Overwatch 2 players, which includes all the original content plus all the goodies you may have gotten.  Overwatch 2 players will get their own content as well, including a PvE campaign.

I think the latter, the PvE campaign, might be the key here.  The thing that the original lacked was new stuff to sell players… besides loot boxes.  And if loot boxes are you revenue stream it might be prudent to diversify that a bit.  But additional PvE co-op campaigns, that is something Blizz could sell people on.

It is interesting to see how they have chosen to go.  EA gets you to buy their latest Battlefield game by shutting off the servers to the past ones.  I assume Activision does something similar with their Call of Duty games, along with leaving a year gap between launches and trying to add new gimmicks with each annual generation.  In contrast, Blizz wants to keep people playing together.  I suspect that you won’t be able to buy Overwatch once Overwatch 2 is out.  But if you do have the original, you won’t be left completely out in the cold.

Hearthstone

A new expansion.  What a surprise!  It isn’t like we don’t get a few of those every year in any case.

The real surprise was that Blizz decided to take the Auto Chess/Auto Battler idea and integrate it with Hearthstone with their new Battlegrounds play mode.  That demonstrates some oddly un-Blizzard-like thinking, since the obvious route was to copy Teamfight Tactics and Dota Underlords and build it off of their MOBA.  I didn’t exactly get how this was going to work, in part because the description during the opening ceremony was pretty fast and in part because I have no interest in Hearthstone so I didn’t watch the panel where it would have been explained.

At least I haven’t watched it yet.  It was well down on my list of priorities.  I might still, just to get an idea where Blizz is going with this.

Warcraft III Reforged

The re-release of Warcraft III seems to be getting closer.  No ship date was announced, but they are spreading the beta further afield now.  If you were at BlizzCon or had the Virtual Ticket, you now have access to the beta and can download it from the Battle.net launcher.  I was actually in already, as I saw I was able to install it early last week, though I couldn’t tell you if that was because I was special or because they started opening it up to Virtual Ticket holders early.  Either way, it seems unlikely that I will download it to play before it goes live.

StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm

A new commander and a new AI for the former, and new unit for the latter, all mentioned during what felt like an apologetic side bar in the midst of the opening ceremonies.  I was not expecting much, and so was unsurprised when that was exactly what we got.  Still, being in the same segment where they mentioned the Blizzard Arcade at BlizzCon, where you could go play Rock n Roll Racing and Lost Vikings, does tend to set a tone.

The Heroes of the Storm fans are probably happy for any scraps they get, but the StarCraft II playerbase has to have some mixed feelings, since SCII is still one of the Blizz esports titles.

Unmentioned

I did not hear anything about the remaster of Diablo II yet again.  It came up as part of the ideal for Diablo IV, but it was left out otherwise.  I still want this.  I would happily take a GoG.com version updated to run on Windows 10, though I would really like something more akin to the Warcraft III Reforged full remaster for modern screen sizes.  Maybe someday.

Then, maybe I missed it, but I didn’t hear anything about Diablo: Immortal.  Did fan reaction really bury that?  My complaint from last year wasn’t that it wouldn’t find an audience, just that it was presented to the wrong audience.  They put some updates on the official site… it was mixed in with the feed on their “all news” page… but they seemed loathe to mention it yet again in front of a live studio audience.

Also, any hope for a completely new game or IP was left in the dust.  Everything was an expansion or a sequel.  There wasn’t even a mobile version of any other Blizzard IPs mentioned.  Hearthstone might have had the only new idea… or, newly stolen idea, this being Blizzard and all… with it picking up the Auto Chess/Auto Battler idea.

Virtual Ticket

The Virtual Ticket plan still seems like an acceptable value to me.  There are still a list of panels I want to watch that I could not make time for over the weekend, so I am able to watch them at my leisure.  As I noted previously, this year Blizz has decided that access to the videos will remain up until March 2020.

One feature I noticed was that Blizz also gives access to the videos from the past two BlizzCons as well.  So you can, if you want, go back and watch the horrible Diablo: Immortal panel or the informative Play Nice, Play Fair panel that was completely bypassed by the gaming media that often rages about how companies like Blizzard do nothing to contain player toxicity.

BlizzCon Overall

This would have been pretty much the ideal BlizzCon for the company, with four big product announcements.  Back at the start of October it looked to be huge.  And then, of course, there was the Hong Kong thing, which necessitated the apology, which I covered in its own post.

After Blizz banned Blitzchung and the outrage was at its peak there were wild predictions that they might even cancel BlizzCon.  Or, if BlizzCon went on, it would be tightly controlled, a mirror image of the repressive Chinese state on stage in Anaheim.  Would Brack even get up in front of the audience live, or would he just appear on the monitor so the engineers could cut out the sounds of the crowd should they get 40,000 people chanting “Free Hong Kong!” or some such?  Would Blizzard be able to contain the outrage of the fan base?

In the end, things went mostly as they usually do.  The vast majority of the fans were there to see Blizz and to revel in the spectacle and be a part of the event.   Cheering was the norm.  And when, during the WoW Q&A panel, a questioner ended his interaction with a message about Hong Kong, he wasn’t cut off or ejected from the event.  People chanted a bit and Blizz let it all pass like the guy in the Winnie the Pooh costume, who showed up on camera at least once.

People will take whatever message they want from that.  You can read into that the promise of better behavior from Brack’s apology, or you can assume it is Blizz throwing a minimal bone to some fans that does not otherwise reflect corporate policy.  It still puts them ahead of the NBA in either case.

In the end though, Blizz clearly won the news cycle.  Every “What about Hong Kong?” story had to contend with a dozen or more “OMG! New Things!” stories out of BlizzCon.  With that and what will likely be a somewhat rosy Q3 2019 earnings report later this week (thanks to WoW Classic) and the 15th Anniversary WoW events coming up, the company seems to be well positioned for the balance of the year.

EVE Vegas 2018 Swag

I finally went through and collected up all of the stuff that I got at EVE Vegas for the standard tableau shot I do every year.  I am just two weeks late this time around.

The swag laid out

The T-shirt on the left was the gift bag item from CCP.  I am always a bit underwhelmed by their T-shirt choices, and the Triglavian gate continued with this tradition.  I would like a T-shirt that isn’t so obscure in message that if I wore it people would ask me about EVE Online and not what the hell it even was.

On the right is the Open Comms T-shirt from Dirk MacGirk.  That was the shirt to have.

A lot of the items on the table were part of the gift back that groups can put their items into, including this item.

When do we want them?

It is a pre-addressed post card to be sent to CCP to get them to add alliance bookmarks to the game.  Just add a stamp and you’re set.

A few of the items were from the store, like the deck of cards with members of the “space famous club” on them.

House of Cards in Space

52 cards and a Joker.  The Joker is Winterblink.

Then there are my badges for four years of EVE Vegas.

Four years of badges

I drag the badges with me to each one.  As it turns out, the badges don’t change all that much over the years and people fully bought my 2015 press badge as legit before I picked up my speaker badge.

The two bracelets above were the blinking LED ones handed out for the party at Drai’s.  It is the same thing they often hand out to fans at playoff sporting events here.  While they will blink a bit before the event, when the host sends out the right RF signal they all synchronize and blink together in the same colors.

All flashing red… that guy in front of me is wearing two

And then there was the most important item to have at EVE Vegas.  Lady Scarlet was handing these out.

Friends indeed!

You’re not getting out of any sticky situation if you aren’t friends with Matterall.

Project: Gorgon Returns to Crowdfunding

In August of 2015 Project: Gorgon, on its third run at a Kickstarter, succeeded and raised nearly $75K to fund development of the game.

Since then a lot of changes have come to the game.  However, they are back for another crowdfunding campaign.  This time the game is going the Indiegogo route.

Three reasons were given for the new funding effort.

• Allow people interested in the game to support it using PayPal, as they only support credit cards on the game’s site.
• Cover expenses like server costs and third party development during this non-revenue time frame.
• Cover the costs of some planned and “wish list” features

The target amount of the campaign, like the previous Kickstarter, is $20,000.  As of today they are closing in on the $4,000 mark.

Indiegogo campaign

As noted in past posts, with Indiegogo you can do a “flexible goal” campaign, wherein you get all the funds pledged, even if the campaign does not reach its goal.

The campaign itself runs through the end of the month, and as part of that they have created a new trailer for the game.

While I have poked my nose in on the game from time to time, I am personally waiting for it to hit the “ready for Steam” stage before I spend any serious time with it.

If you missed the links embedded in the post above, you can find the Indiegogo campaign page here.