Auditorium developers making a sequel; funding via Kickstarter

Indie developer Cipher Prime (Fractal, Pulse) has announced that it’s crowd-funding a sequel to its critically acclaimed first game, Auditorium, called Auditorium Duets.

February 28, 2012 2:00 PM2

Coinciding with today’s PC debut of its experimental music game Auditorium (shown above), indie studio Cipher Prime has launched a Kickstarter campaign in an effort to fund a sequel, called Auditorium Duet. As the title suggests, the sequel will include cooperative multiplayer–provided that the game’s $60,000 funding goal is reached in time.

The $60,000 goal is enough for the small team of developers at Cipher Prime to keep their modest studio up and running for “three, maybe four months.” Co-founders Will Stallwood and Dain Saint estimate that Auditorium Duet will take between six months and one year to make. In other words, it’s a situation in which Cipher Prime will still likely foot about half (or more) of the game’s overall development costs, something likely made possible by the success generated by their other releases like Pulse and Fractal.

The campaign for Auditorium Duet runs until the end of the day on Friday, March 30. The fundraising page on Kickstarter notes that the game is being developed as a standalone title for PC and Mac. Rather than developing the game in Flash (as was true of the original), Cipher Prime is using the Unity engine this time around, which will give them more flexibility to facilitate ports to other platforms without having to rely on third-party publishers.

Auditorium Duet will also mark the developers’ first foray into the world of multiplayer. “There is a whole slew of new features popping up,” Stallwood recently told Joystiq. “We’re really hoping to make a very unique co-op experience with Duet. Maybe one of the most exciting things multiplayer will bring is the idea of creating music rather than just filling levels,” he explained.