Chronicles Of Elyria Nears Funding Goal, Talks Stretch Goals

Chronicles of Elyria's Kickstarter has turned out to be quite the success. In only a week, the team at Soulbound Studios has raised $729,000 of its $900,000 goal. The Kickstarter is looking like it will be definitively successful, which is why Soulbound has begun talking stretch goals.

According to a new Kickstarter update, there are two options when it comes to handling stretch goals.

Option 1: Add more features to the game as the funding goes up.
Option 2: Offer more rewards as the funding goes up, but keep the features more or less intact.

Soulbound is leaning towards the latter. The reasoning is as follows.

We're going more for option #2. While we did have some features which had already been planned for CoE, such as Wards and Mounted Combat, we had to remove them in order to fit the "minimally viable game" into $900k. So our first priority for the stretch goals is to get those features back into the master plan.

Beyond that, we plan to stagger those features with new rewards at various tiers.

We're taking this approach because, as stated in the Q&A, the more features you add to a project, especially in an effort to earn the additional seed funding, the more likely you are to under-estimate the additional cost and overhead in terms of time and resources. This can, and does, lead to feature creep and delayed schedules.

Since we already had planned for, and have good estimates for the features we had to cut to fit in the $900k mark, we're ok adding them back in. But beyond that, we really want to use any additional money we get beyond $900k to ensure the game is delivered at the highest quality possible, and that it's delivered as quickly as possible.

So you can all look forward to new rewards being given at various tiers, but not too many new features going in. That said, there's been a lot of requests for Mac, Linux, and Console support. So those are definitely things we'll look into if we can get far enough above our funding goals.

Additionally, concept art for two mounts has been revealed. One of them is featured above. You can find the other in the Kickstarter update.