At the end of last year, Tim Follin kindly answered our questions about his Kickstarter campaign for Contradiction. This week we received sad news that the campaign failed to reach its target; but is this the end of Follin’s dream or have we not seen the last of him yet?
For those who missed our interview with Follin, Contradiction puts you in control of a murder-mystery film. You play Inspector Jenks, a police detective assigned to the case of a drowned student, and make notes of the objects you find, suspicious things you see, events you witness and information you hear. You’ll also meet several characters who you can question and after telling you what they know, their replies are noted too. But Contradiction is full of liars – and liars always slip up and contradict themselves, of course. This was an interesting concept to us that has a ton of potential.
I believe the project failed because of a fear of full motion video (FMV); when the genre is done badly, it can look terrible and basically put you off for life, no matter how much reassurance you get. When a conversation started on the comment section of our preview about FMV, Follin himself interjected with the following comment: “I’m all too familiar with what FMV means to most people, but all I can say is this’ll be different, honest!!” We were extremely keen to see just how different it was going to be.
We can’t wait to see how this new era of FMV will work out.
As quick as he was to say that Contradiction had failed, he announced that he was going to have another crack at the whip by launching the project again but with a new lower target. However, he explained that this lower funding level this could throw up problems in connection with finding actors:
“As you may know I’ve launched a new Kickstarter with a new lower budget of £3,000. However I’ve been asked to explain why if I’m now only asking for £3,000 I was originally asking for £10,000! It’s a fair question and here’s the answer:
“My main concern about Contradiction is that it relies on great actors to make it work, but great actors cost money. Around £7,000 of my original budget was purely for quality actors, so that I could afford full ‘buy-out’ fees. However, with my new budget I’m going to have to get actors based on their willingness to be paid just costs plus some sort of cut of any profit made, which of course will limit the actors I can approach but still means the project is possible.”
We hope this guy can still act in the game as he was quite good in the trailer.
This idea of launching the new, lower-limit Kickstarter straight away after the last one was an extremely smart move by Follin, because not only is he striking while the iron is hot with the people that backed Contradiction the first time, but the new target is realistic to reach and at least gets the project rolling. This strategy obviously worked as the game is already fully funded with five days to go, so now the aim is to add as much to the £3,000 as possible so we can get a great title. Head over to the Kickstarter page right now and pledge your support so Follin can ring in the change of FMV.
