The UnEarth Initiative, A Strategy Game About Colonizing Alien Worlds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4rpXsvQt8B4
The UnEarth Initiative is a science fiction game created by veteran developers of the classic Playstation 2 Ratchet & Clank series. This 3D Sim mixes humor and charm with the deep gameplay of building and exploration on a previously undiscovered planet.

The developer emailed this in to get it highlighted. After watching the trailer I was delighted to be able to feature it here, it looks really nice.

I love building simulators and when it throws in a good bit of combat with a bit of comedy, sure I'm game!

Features

• Lead the untrained outcasts of Earth society on a mission to colonize alien worlds!
• Build elaborate underground bases!
• Program rovots to do your bidding, then share your programs with other players!
• Meet bizarre alien races and establish long-term trading relationships - or unending blood feuds.
• Discover the long dead colonies of other players.

They are now on Kickstarter looking for your support, Linux sadly is a stretch goal; the developer had this to say about that:

QuoteI know people are suspicious of extra platforms being listed as stretch goals, but the problem for us is testing. Despite the cross platform libraries we use (or perhaps because of them?) I run into a small but annoying number of platform specific bugs.

A decent chunk of my time as a programmer is spent debugging. Supporting a new platform means that for each new rev of the game I need to play through on an additional machine and, in the worse-case-scenario, fix some problems that are unique to just that platform.

We've set our Kickstarter goal to be what we know is the bare minimum budget we'd need - we don't want to try and milk people for extra money. But since it truly is the minimum budget even things that might seem small, like an additional testing load, need to be accounted for.

I can understand where they are coming from if it is their first time working with Linux, doesn't stop it from bothering me though.

When asking about the Linux stretch goal some more:

QuoteOur stretch goal for Linux (and accompanying Space Penguins!) is set for 300,000. Bear in mind that this is the total, and there are previous stretch goals at 20k intervals before it, so we're not saying it's 100k to port to Linux. :)
Its position is both due the costs Peter described, and to the structuring of our stretch goals. (We have more exciting goals at the 100k marks.)

Unfortunately, Linux is not one of our current development or testing platforms. Peter determined that getting the game running on Linux would take enough extra effort that we didn't want to commit to it without sufficient interest.

So, even though the Linux stretch goal isn't 100k by itself, they still need an extra 100k over their 200k goal for us to get it.

Make of that what you will, are you going to back it? Or do you have some wise words for the developer to share in the comments? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.