Anime Web Series. Action / Drama / Mystery. Conspiracy theories meet anime and HK-style action cinematography. Made in Unreal Engine 4
Abyssian Knights is a combat-driven animated web series about a covert military organization that is forced to go rogue in order to save themselves and overthrow the powers that be. It’s a story about deception, secret societies and assassination.
Read: It’s a B@D @$$ anime web series full of hot anime girls and guys kicking @$$. What more could you ask for!? :D
Rendered in Unreal Engine 4 using a proprietary cel shader developed by our internal code ninjas, the Abyssian Knights project is a cross-media IP making its first appearance as a web series. The base funding goal of our Kickstarter is to fund the production of two episodes with additional funding enabling us to deliver more episodes and improve the quality of the project.
We’re not trying to sell you anything here. The web series is free. You’re backing this because you want to see this kind of stuff happen and also be able to brag to your friends that you were apart of something totally awesome when it was at ground zero.
Let’s put it this way. Looking back, if you had the chance to be apart of the wizard community when the Hairy Pothead book series started or the insider community that developed when the Game of Chairs series originally began, would you have jumped on the opportunity? Imagine being able to tell your not-quite-as-cool friends that you were into this stuff before it was cool. Well guess what? we’re giving you that opportunity right now!!!
Get in early on the True Believer Early Bird tier (now renamed to the Braggin’ Rights tier) and we’ll issue you a digital certificate with your name on it that, certifying your bragging rights as an early adopter!!
It’s ok. We’ve all been there. You don’t actually have to get in at the Abyssian Candidate level to be part of the community. If you can afford to buy coffee, you can get in at the Buy Me a Coffee level. Once you get in, we’ll keep you up to date on the project and earn an upgrade to a higher tier. Yes you heard right. As long as you’re in, you will always have the opportunity to earn your way to the Abyssian Candidate tier.
BUT.. if you can’t afford to buy a drink. Don’t worry about it. Follow us on Twitter to stay up to date, tell your friends about the project and write in to your favorite streaming network to tell them they need to pick up this series!!
Not going to lie, ideally we’d need $200k+ to really do this. So why are we aiming for $30k? Because you don’t know us and we have don’t have any embarrassing stories from your parents to use as leverage.
The base goal of $30k is the absolute minimum we need to bring on board the animators who have helped get the project things far on a part time basis. Because of the limited staffing, it means we can really only guarantee the delivery of 2 episodes and with a minimum number of characters.
We’ll pull in favors and sink in our own personal funds for everything else, just like we have done so up until now. Our hope is that you enjoy the first season enough that you’d be willing to help support the development of the content later when we Kickstart more content.
After the delivery of the first two episodes, we’re just going to roll out additional content whenever we can afford to get things done. This is ultimately a passion project of ours and we’ll just keep investing our own time and money to keep it going. As long as there’s one person out there who enjoys this stuff, we’ll just keep slowly cranking stuff out.
We like to believe that this is going to be the one of the few things that some kid in a hospital really enjoys in life and it’s what helps keep him or her going. If this project helps them, it’s worth it. Even if we’re delusion to believe that, if this project helps inspire someone else out there to pursue their own dream of making some awesome stuff, it’s still worth it.
Basically, at the bare minimum, you get two guaranteed episodes with the rest coming whatever, but you have the power to change that by helping us hit those stretch goals!
If you look at the chart carefully you’ll see that at the bare minimum raised here only really covers some animation and some operational overhead associated with making the animations happen. Ideally, we’d like to get $200k for a full season which allows us to bring to you, real voice actors (not just the producer and his friends), improved motion capture, some proper music that isn’t just something we got off a stock music site and we can finally pay for some back end programming to improve the visual quality of the cel shader.
Even though for the most part, we’re offering digital rewards, our research has indicated that reward fulfillment in general still takes up about 30-40% of the gross amount raised. *IF* Anything is left over from our rewards budget, we’ll let Budd splurge on a couple of packs of the premium $0.79 instant noodles for one day and then put the rest towards the production.
[The fine print: All sales final. No shoes, no shirt, no service and all that jazz. Oh yeah, absolutely no refunds but will offer a lifetime warranty on the digital bragging rights certificate. We want your grand kids to brag about you being the first people to get in on this.]
— The boring part where we tell you about us —
Dev Null Studios – Originally founded as the R&D division of our parent company, we eventually became a contractual ninja development house providing covert and clandestine ghost services for a select group of clients worldwide. We have since then risen out of the shadows to develop our own IP with Abyssian Knights being the first of many.
Due to contractual obligations, we can’t disclose what we’ve worked on. Just think of us as a bunch unknown game developers who are just somehow really well connected and happen to be licensed developers for a couple of major game consoles. (Yes the Abyssian Knights game will be coming to console! But first, the web series!!)
Senbon Umishima – Our Super Awesome Character Designer. A seasoned veteran from the anime industry, Umishima-san provides the authentic anime character designs this project needed. Why have character designs that are merely inspired by anime when we can get characters designed by an actual anime character designer? How much more legit can you get? You can check out her credits over on here.
Risks
The primary risks we face are budget overruns and unforeseen delays in production. Both of which are not actually unique to our production as it exists in virtually every production out there. The risks that are unique to this project are primarily technological and have been mostly mitigated during pre-production through extensive R&D.
Challenges
Our biggest challenge is staffing as being a small independent company, we simply don’t have the budget to bring on a team of people that would normally be needed for a production of this type. Even though the core staff on this project are willing to live off instant ramen while living with their parents to make this project happen, we can’t expect the same thing from everyone. While we have been able to secure the some help from friends to assist us in the areas we are weakest at (like character rigging), there is only so much they can do before we need to bring in dedicated staff. Getting qualified folks onboard with a limited budget is hard, but thankfully pledge now and you can help fix that! :D