When we established Numantian Games and set out to develop Lords of Xulima, we planned the project to be viable in economic terms and in terms of the time needed for development because we knew that as an independent studio we would need to fund the project on our own.

Fortunately, our projections for the time and funding required have so far proven to be very accurate. The development of Lords of Xulima has been progressing at a good pace. We’ve finished about 60% of the game’s content, many testers are already playing the demo version and there is currently nothing on the horizon that poses any danger to the game’s ultimate completion and release.

That said, we may have to delay its release about a month. This is mainly due to balancing difficulties, which have proven to be much more complicated than expected. At the end of the day, it is a large open world RPG with over 60 hours of game play and hundreds of possibilities, so there is a lot of balancing to do and we want to get it right.

So… Why Crowdfunding?

Basically, there are three optional features that we’re not certain if we’re going to be able to include because of their costs.

Lords of Xulima is our first production and even though for us it’s the ideal role-playing game into which we’ve put all of our passion and thousands of hours of work, we really don’t know how it will do commercially.

For this reason we’ve decided to start a crowdfunding campaign to try to include these features that would improve the game and make Lords of Xulima a much more well-rounded production.

An Original Soundtrack

Lords of Xulima requires 18 different music themes (more than 60 minutes of soundtrack). There are different themes for different regions of the continent, for combat, and for interiors like dungeons, castles and temples. Currently, the music of Lords of Xulima has been carefully selected from different tracks available commercially and, frankly, we think the result is pretty good. However, we would love to have an original soundtrack composed especially for the game, one that fits perfectly with the different environments of Xulima and, above all, a grand epic theme that gives identity to Lords of Xulima.

To have a quality soundtrack that’s more than an hour in length will mean contracting a good artist for the composition to work with us for three of four months.

Additional Languages

As you may know, Lords of Xulima will launch in both English and Spanish. Of course, this is a game with a lot of text and dialogs (the equivalent of a novel of more than 400 pages) including riddles and word games whose solutions are necessary to progress in the adventure. It is important to us that players are able to enjoy the game in their native languages and we have received many requests for the game to be translated into more languages like German, French, Russian and Italian. We would love to include all of these languages, but each new language needs a perfect translation, with rigorous revisions and testing to ensure quality is maintained.

More Content

From the beginning we’ve designed Lords of Xulima with the intention having some optional content that would be included during the development if time and funding allowed.  Here are some of the features we would like to include:

• New classes like the Warrior Monk and the Alchemist.
• New regions like the Garden of Nameria and the Enchanted Isles of Varas Talak.
• New quest arcs: Lords of Xulima consists of three main quest arcs that are explored in parallel as the player explores the games: The Impious Princes, the Titans, and the Divine Artifacts. To these three we would like to add the Guardian of Ulnalum and the Children of Raznet. These arcs would include new locations, non-player characters and enemies.

To avoid this being all or nothing, we divided these elements into smaller goals, so that depending on the success of the campaign, we can include all, or just some of them, in the final game.

In the event that we are able to raise significantly more funding than we currently expect we also have a couple of very special features to include. One of these is a new “Roguelike” game type where players will have to escape the Dungeon of Torments, a randomly generated dungeon full of traps and dangers that make for a truly hardcore experience.

Kickstarter or Indiegogo?

Our first intention was to launch our campaign on Kickstarter, which is the more famous cowdfunding portal where the majority of recent campaigns to raise money for video games have taken place.

However, because Numantian Games is a Spanish group, we were running into a lot of difficulties using Kickstarter for the campaign due to the payment method being through Amazon Payments, which only works if you are based in the US or the UK. This proved to be a complicated barrier to us using as there were too many legal and tax implications at play for us to try any work arounds.

So, we decided to use the second most popular crowdfunding portal, Indiegogo.

Really, both portals are virtually identical. Kickstarter is more restrictive in the projects that it allows on its pages, but, just like with Indiegogo, the responsibility for meeting the funding goals rests squarely in the hands of the team running the campaign. In both portals it is the contributors who must decide if they are willing to place their trust in those running the project. On behalf of the team, we hope that the choice of the portal is not a barrier for you to decide whether or not to support our project.

We are working hard to create a video for the campaign which features many new images and gameplay clips that we have not shown before. We have also created some special rewards to thank you for your support.

The campaign will launch in the beginning of September. From Numantian Games you have our sincere thanks for your support.