Just came across a new Kickstart for a retroplayerNL project: SANTA's Magical Christmas Sleigh:
https://www.kickstarter.com/proje...

good looking graphics, smooth platformer gameplay, fun soundtrack, and a resonable timetable (November next year)!

Yep! Headed to the frontpage as soon as I have time off work!

WOW! That is quite nice looking, good find!

That looks fantastic!

Curious to see if each level is a tribute to different games or is each level the same. The one shown looks to be a homage to DKC.

Looks very interesting.

I am still curious if the game is indeed all original. They have only done hacks before, and that is a pretty big switch to make. Maybe the creator will chime in? He's around here somewhere.

I like.

I don't know why retroplayerNL thought it would be wiser not to credit the people involved in making this game*, but it is a full homebrew.

Łukasz Kur, programmer of both Cowlitz Gamers Adventures, Lucky Penguin, etc. is programming it. I tested an early version ROM for him a month or so ago.

*I know sometimes programmers / artists request not to be credited, but I confirmed that that is not the case here.

Also, I don't know about other potential customers, but when publishers commission NES work, I would be A LOT more willing to purchase when the developer, artist, and musician's names are front and center.

For instance, at least one of MegaCat Studios' offerings was from an external programmer, but there's no apparent mention of it on their site (If I'm overlooking it, please correct me), so it's impossible to tell when their in-house team has made a game or when they're publishing someone else's.

Awesome to hear.

Pretty neat but the 8-bit X-Mas yearly carts are satisfied that inch.

Looks like a solid platformer

Heh, they did contact me a few months ago and asked if i could be commissioned to do some gfx work on it. They never got back to me though once i had presented my offer, so i guess they found someone more suitable/willing to do it for less.   Anyway, looks really solid!

If it had had your art and creative input in it, I would probably be more inclined to back it.  

Haha thanks! Some other time, some other game...   Anyway, i like the candy like level they've shown so far and i think the santa design is nice.

Oh, and ut seens they've added a clear mention of Lukasz to the KS campaign itself if it wasn't there before. I agree this looks more appealing.

16 Euros to ship a cart only order is ridiculous.

Int'l shipping's a bummer. Living out of the US, the last couple of projects I considered backing had like $30 shipping of CIB products, meaning I'd be paying like $90 for a title. It's hard to justify for a title, and even if a developer/publisher isn't profiting from shipping charge, it's still a hard price to ask.

International shipping rates are an unfortunate fact. Cart Only or CIB, i think the going rate is around that for international shipping from the EU (generally also from one EU country to the next). I've been thinking about this a lot. There's basically just two solutions to this problem. 1: using a fulfilment company as they may be able to push shipping rates down through special deals or using their own channels (such as FedEx fulfillment), or 2: establishing an independent network of reliable bulk handlers recruited from the community across several countries.

Option 2 exists at times. Some of us will buy together, ship to one location, and then ship out. I have also collected titles for someone and then shipped them all at once to reduce costs. KS campaigns are a little different, since there are cut and dry costs, but it never hurts to contact a dev to try and work something out.

Similar to what you wrote, another option specific to KS could be to organize an official group buy thread with volunteers for each shipping domain. Everyone puts in money to the organizer per domain, equal to the domestic shipping + if they want CIB or CO. Organizer backs the campaign, and in agreement with the KS campaign holder, goes to "manage my pledge" and puts in the extra money needed for the number of proxied backers via the group buy thread. The funding becomes visible on the campaign main page this way. Have a reasonable deadline before the KS campaign ends. Could work.

That it could. That's one of the great things about the homebrew community, you're dealing with real and often passionate people so things often work out. Trades between devs are always fun options too, ha wink   .

No, I've no doubt shipping costs are actually that high. I paid $25 to send a tiny box of art for CG-2 to the States, and $50 to mail a framed piece of A4 art for CGA-1. It just makes the purchase a lot harder to both pay and ask.

EDIT
...which is why I've opted for digital only on some past backed projects, and it's nice to have that option.

I dunno. The last international NES kickstarters I've backed (Dizzy World) had 7 Pound shipping (about 8 Euro) for CIB. It seems lazy and expensive to charge 16 Euros.

And Royal Mail aren't very cheap for int'l shipments in my experience. :S They might've used one of those subscribable plans, though. Anyway, for an individual without a company and a plan with a logistics company or a deal with a fulfillment company, you're at the mercy of whatever categorization your post office makes.

I don't know the specifics behind this campaign, or what shipping shipping rates apply, but just for the sake of discussing international ks shipments in general, i made a little update to my estimates...
package for CIB:s (or bare carts) from Sweden to USA, currently the cheapest options (tracking and guarantee included and nonoptional) are:
9.6 eur up to 250g
14.5 eur if exceeding 250g; up to 1000g.

The 250-1000g category is honestly a tiny bit better than i expected, but the existence of the -250g category is actually pretty fortunate. A cartridge might vary in weight, but let's say anywhere between 120 and 150g. Booklet... 10-20g? dust sleeve, box, foam/styrofoam bit, packaging and carton weight.. you need to be careful not to tip over that threshold. Else, most service providers here just slap the same fee for anything under 1kg or even 2kgs, in which case it's not optimal for something like a nes cart.

Yeah, that shipped from the UK, right? With tracking, the cheapest option I see is £10.32 (around €11).
https://www.royalmail.com/persona...

This game's being shipped from the Netherlands it seems, so I'd imagine it'd be by PostNL, which has int'l parcels shipped outside of Europe starting at €24.30, in which case they might actually be planning to eat some of the shipping cost.
https://www.postnl.nl/en/mail-and...

However, this discussion wouldn't be necessary if the campaign were transparent as to which shipping method they plan to use. You don't want to pay 16 Euros and have the game show up, beat-up in an envelope via some obscure trackingless surface mail option.

EDIT
*Not sure on how my tone has come off in text, but I don't want anyone to think I'm particularly defending or promoting this campaign, just engaging in the discussion of int'l shipping, homebrew, and kickstarter.