So, the wait is over – we’ll be starting our Kickstarter fundraising in January 2014 (pending their approval turnaround time). Whilst we had originally aimed for Q3 2013, some changes behind-the-scenes meant we ran about a month behind and, with Christmas soon to be upon us, we wanted to try and maximise our chances of getting funded by not competing with the festive season for peoples’ wallets!

By the time the Kickstarter rolls around in January, we should have a closed alpha of the game available to our selected community testers that will have all the gameplay basics included (car physics, AI, etc.) and be in a state where we can get meaningful, relevant initial feedback. We also hope that we can provide this early alpha to selected reviewers, to broaden awareness not only for the Kickstarter campaign but GeneRally in general.

Our funding goal will be a modest one by Kickstarter standards (we’re just finalising the budget at the moment), but will allow us to cover our costs for development licenses, server facilities, etc. as well as permitting us more time to develop without having to worry about whether we can afford to eat or not! We’ll have some reasonable ‘stretch goals’ that cover some of the more ambitious features we’d like to see in the Sequel, but which the initial target wouldn’t be able to cover.

We hope to provide tier-based rewards that give people an incentive to contribute, without artificially inflating the Kickstarter goal by needing to cover postage and other costs (many Kickstarters use as much as 50% of their funding for fulfilling rewards alone). There will be a range of digital rewards, along with some nice physical bonuses for the higher funding tiers (including some opportunities to work with us to have something of your own included in the game).

Over the weeks leading up to Kickstarter, we’ll be covering some important issues about the Sequel, including:

More information about the Kickstarter target, rewards and stretch goals.

An insight into some of the changes we’ve made behind-the-scenes recently.

Our response to the community reaction on the poly-count for cars.

How we plan to handle the public beta testing phase of the project, when that rolls around (hopefully) in 2014.

Stay tuned, it’s shaping up to be an exciting couple of months!

Many of you already follow us on Twitter – but this week we launched our Facebook and Google+ pages, so please consider checking those out and sharing the upcoming news with friends, family and co-workers (basically, anyone you think will love a little bit of top-down arcade racing action).

P.S. The eagle-eyed amongst you will also notice this was posted to the YouTube account “Curious Chicken Games” – this is simply the moniker we’ll be using going forward.