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Ascension Developer Tests
Horse Teaser
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Survival Ascension Developer Swimming Test #1
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Survival Ascension Developer Dragon Test #1
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DONATIONS

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Limited Time Special Offer Below

All donations are tracked by E-mail address and earn credit towards the rewards listed for the Kickstarter (see below). Your donation will be put to immediate use to acquire & develop assets related to Survival Ascension, and to support the costs involved in bringing it to market. In addition to the rewards listed for the Kickstarter, an early donation will earn you a special in-game artifact which is otherwise unobtainable. It cannot be gifted, traded, or looted from you. It will provide a mana regeneration percentage bonus equivalent to 10% of the dollar value of your total early donations (so 1% regen bonus per $10 of early donations), and it will stack with any other bonuses from other in-game sources, up to the maximum in-game bonus of 500%. While this can provide a significant early game advantage, most players are expected to eventually reach the max bonus level through normal in-game mechanisms. However, unlike other in-game sources for the bonus, your characters will always start with this item, even on respawn from death. This item is our way of saying Thank You for your generous and early support of Survival Ascension. This offer will expire upon launch of the Kickstarter campaign.

Please note that the payment processing fee (minimum $0.30) is not counted towards your overall donation credit for rewards tracking purposes for donations less than $60 USD.

For a limited time only (see timer above):

  • Donate $60 or more and get 1% bonus mana regen for every $2 donated

  • Donate $200 or more and get 1% bonus mana regen for every $1 donated

POLL

Kickstarter Donations Poll

Please take a moment to review the Kickstarter backing levels below and consider how much you would be willing to contribute to the campaign when it launches. Each higher priced contribution level includes all of the rewards from the lower priced levels. All skin DLCs include one or more cool stylization options, as well as a small stats boost for the item to which they apply. They are only available for crowd funding backers and general donations tracked through this page.

Your careful and considerate feedback on this poll will assist us in properly timing the Kickstarter campaign to ensure successful funding. 

Introduction to Survival Ascension

Survival Ascension is an open world survival game. I plan to release it for Windows and Linux first, then follow up with releases for PlayStation 5 and XBox Series X. I've been designing aspects of the game on paper and in my head for about 20 years now. It ties into a 3-book series I plan to write in the future (which I have been outlining and writing pieces of for several years). It is set in Earth's distant future and will take place after the time period covered by the 3-book series. 

From the outset, I envisioned Survival Ascension as an open world game where players could explore and interact with the environment in a way which resembled real life. I imagined players harvesting resources from the land (trees, minerals, herbs, etc), farming, raising animals, using selective breeding to alter their traits, using resources to craft items and construct buildings, forming groups or entire civilizations, creating their own economies, crafting their own spells, conjuring items, summoning magical creatures, raising armies, exploring caves & dungeons, etc. When I first dreamed up the game, it was the early 2000's and creating a game covering that kind of scope seemed like a tall order. 

 

And, let's be honest, at that point my life, I was fresh out of school and did not have the experience or resources required to successfully complete such a project. I have spent the past 20 years of my professional life working towards learning what I need to successfully build and deliver this game, including not only the technical aspects, but also the marketing, accounting & finance, management, team leadership, and business skills necessary to build and run a successful business around the game. In addition, I have worked tirelessly to get where I am at financially to be able to fund the initial development and marketing efforts needed to get the game started and marketed. 

 

But, while I have a great start to the game at this point, I am only a single individual and only have so many hours in a day. Bringing it across the finish line in a reasonable amount of time will take additional people working on it full time. While I have personally invested more than $20,000 of my own money and thousands of hours in this game so far, that is not even enough funds to hire a single additional developer to work on the game full time for half a year. That is where all of you come in. 

 

With your generous support, I will be able to hire the additional help needed to rapidly bring Survival Ascension to market without cutting back on my vision for the game. Your funding of this project will go directly to the salaries of developers and artists working on bringing this game to market, as well as the associated operating expenses required to support that work. I have put together a detailed budget covering three years of development, which will take Survival Ascension from its current pre-alpha state to at least a Beta release with all the required initial functionality built out. 

 

In the event that this fund raising effort fails to reach its goal, I will continue to work on Survival Ascension and re-double my efforts to generate enough interest in the project to complete a successful fundraising campaign. I am 110% committed to bringing this game to market, so one way or another, I will make it happen even it takes me another 20 years. Your support will simply help bring Survival Ascension to market sooner and will help ensure it includes as much of the planned content as possible.

ABOUT
TIMELINE

Post Kickstarter Timeline

Following completion of a successful funding round, the following timeline of events will occur:

  • 0 to 6 months - Hiring additional help and getting them up to speed and productive on the project

  • 6 months to 18 months - Working on the remaining base game functionality for playable launch of the Alpha culminating in Alpha launch

  • 18 months to 30 months - Several releases of Alpha with progressively more functionality culminating in Beta 1 release; also begin taking pre-orders for access to Beta 2 release

  • 30 months to 38 months - Additional releases of Beta 1 (final features, balance tweaks, bug fixes) culminating in Beta 2 release; also begin taking pre-orders for access to Beta 3 release

  • 36 months in - Initial Kickstarter funding expected to be fully utilized; running from this point based solely on pre-orders or an additional funding round

  • 38 months to 40 months - Additional releases of Beta 2 (feature freeze; balance & bug fix only) culminating in Beta 3 release; begin taking pre-orders for full release

  • 40 months to 42+ months - Feature freeze & balance freeze; bug fix releases for Beta 3 only, culminating in full release of the base game

To put things another way:

  • 6 months to hire developers and get them up to speed

  • 36 more months to full game release

    • 9 - 12 for playable Alpha

    • 12 more months for Beta 1

    • remaining time frame to get to full release

    • Beta 3 is bug fix only and may extend beyond the 42nd month mark if there are serious bugs which need to be corrected before full release

Game Scope, Future Expansions, DLCs

Because of the vast scope of the game, the entire game will come in stages, broken up into several planned DLCs. The different stages of the game will be broken out as follows:

Base Game ($59.99)

  • Core survival components: hunger, thirst, temperature / weather, stamina, wet / dry effects, health, breath (swimming / drowning)

  • Combat system: hand-to-hand combat, basic melee weapons, basic ranged weapons, spells

  • Multiplayer support: local LAN; public vanilla & community servers to join; at least 50 players but shooting for up to 120+ players per server at release

  • Full inventory system: multiple hotbar support; manage inventory of self, containers, and pets; role-based permissions systems in place for multiplayer group play

  • Character progression system: lots of trainable abilities which unlock based on character progression & research; humanoid NPCs have same trainable traits; animals & creatures have trainable traits

  • Tech & magic research trees covering up to medieval level of technology

  • Resource mining / harvesting: trees; herbs & food; minerals; water; mana

  • Farming: ability to fish; ability to plant, water, fertilize, harvest crops of various sorts