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About this project
We’re ready to make it! Auditorium 2: Duet is the sequel to Auditorium, the award winning game that launched our company. If you're not familiar with Cipher Prime or our first game, play the original Auditorium demo, watch some gameplay videos, or check it out on Steam!
Duet will build faithfully on all the essential elements of the beloved original; players will still be creating music by bending dazzling rivers of light and color through brain-twisting puzzles. But it’s also going to be so much more. The last time around we invited you into our Auditorium. Now we want you all to come back and play together!
So What's the Sequel All About?
- More Cooperation!
Auditorium 2: Duet will be a cooperative experience. To solve puzzles, you will need to coordinate with a partner to guide luminous motes to their proper destinations.
There will still be a single player mode, but the magic will take place in cooperative mode.
It’s going to be a thoughtful and intense experience where you must lean on each other’s intuition and planning to create a vividly pulsing colorscape. You’ll work together to overcome all the challenges we throw at you.
- New Geometry & Controls!
Auditorium 2: Duet will feature multiple interactive playing fields. The addition of a partner is going to be accompanied by an expansion of the game space, meaning several interlinked playing fields. You control your own field, but your actions will affect your partner’s display. The real heart of the game will be found in managing these interactions harmoniously.
- Networked Play!
Auditorium 2: Duet will allow for local and networked play. Aside from a separate single player campaign, we want you to be able to play locally with other people on the same network, as well as over the internet with friends from all over the world!
How Are You Going to Make the Game?
Auditorium was originally built in Flash, and was meant to be played in a web browser. This was awesome for getting lots of people everywhere to play our game, but Flash comes with its own set of performance limitations.
Auditorium Duet is going to be designed from the ground up as a standalone PC/Mac game, and we're building it with a powerful development tool called Unity. Rolling out a robust multiplayer game is going to take a lot of time and effort, and it’s more ambitious than any project we’ve worked on before. Where we go from there will depend on the game's final hardware requirements, the ease and speed with which we can make the game playable on other platforms, and user interest.
What Do You Need?
We are asking for $60,000, which will start a development period for Auditorium 2: Duet that will take a minimum of six months.
This will allow our studio of four people to work day and night on Auditorium 2: Duet for three to four months. If we can get that, we can cover the remainder of the development costs. We are jack-of-all-trades developers. We have to juggle marketing, accounting, legal issues, and customer support. If we're still awake afterward, we get to make games. That's all we really want to do--make awesome games for you.
A successful Kickstarter will primarily help us cover development of the game and overhead expenses for the company. This is our first multiplayer game, meaning there will be more complex development and testing than usual. We'll need the proper hardware, software tools, and software licenses necessary to make sure that the game looks and sounds incredible, and runs smoothly on different machines.
Donations will also help cover the sundry costs of running a company. We normally do all the design and music for our games in house, but being able to hire outside expertise if needed will free up our resources and really jumpstart the development process.
We are essentially asking for our fans and backers to give us the opportunity to focus entirely on a game that we all want, without needing to worry about whether our company can stay afloat. Anything we get above our target will go right back into the game--more game depth, more platforms, more creative flourishes.
How This Kickstarter Makes Duet Possible
For those of you unfamiliar with Kickstarter, this website is a fundraising platform for creative projects. Developers describe what they want to create, set a monetary goal, decide on a deadline for the fundraiser, and offer rewards for certain levels of donations. No money is actually transferred unless the monetary goal is met and the fundraising period has ended.
We are a small independent game company. The only reason we exist today is because when we were developing Auditorium, we put a Donations button on our website, and people were generous enough to support it.
After Auditorium, we relied on publishers' advances and contract work to keep the company running. We also made Pulse and Fractal, but it's been a rocky road, especially without guaranteed income. But we know we can be doing so much more for our fans. This time we want to cut out the middlemen and take the development process straight from the fans to our company and back.
Thank You Everyone!