We need about 3 more months of salary for our coding and art teams to finish a minimal feature-set to produce a playable alpha. We’ve got to pay for hosting and software licenses too. We’ve got 5 full-time and 6 part-time developers, 7 artists and musicians and 5 other writers, marketing and community management folks, all passionate and devoted. Only a few of us are drawing salaries, the rest of us are devoting our spare time while working dayjobs. We’re running lean and tight, but we need your support.

The playable alpha will be an MMO with beautiful AAA-quality graphics, massive army combat, slick UI and support for group chat, Empire chat and in-game mail. It will include a few different units, but no city-building initially. It will include AI, but not the ability to customize your own. It will include Empires but not the really cool social features or endgame scenarios we’ve planned for. The map will be smaller than the map of our dreams, but big enough for some fun.

The complete world of Avalon will include so much more than just the mini-game alpha! We have many stretch goals. If we only make the Kickstarter goal and no more, we’ll finish a neat but small sandbox city-builder with Probably Slightly Less Boring Than Working army RTS fighting. Then we’ll seek additional funding to complete the full game from private investors or publishers. We’d love to retain creative control of the game, however. If we meet our stretch goals, we’ll finish the whole thing with community input and self-publish.

MMOs are truly massive. Most indie devs don’t have the resources to make an MMO a reality. They require a great knowledge of networking, a lot of skill with game design, a lot of art and animation and a solid support staff. Creating a virtual world is the closest most of us will ever come to playing God! That is a huge amount of fun, but also a large amount of challenging, highly technical work.

We are up to the challenge and passionate, driven to make our vision into reality. Members of our core team who can afford to do so have been funding the project with our own money, paying other team members who can’t afford to miss a paycheck. Friends are backing us financially too, but it really is a huge project. We have been working hard to get the game’s combat system working and polished, so we can really show off where the game is headed. We are all proud to have gotten here.

Your pledge will help us cover immediate costs for our full-time team members and necessary server expenses. Every little bit counts!

We need your friends’ support too! Mass support on Kickstarter will give us great leverage with potential investors and banks. We’ll be able to take out business loans to finish making the world of Avalon.