A Hat in Time, originally a demo produced with no money by Jonas Kærlev, has recently passed its last Kickstarter stretch goal. Pitched as a 3D collect-a-thon in the style of classic Nintendo 64 Rare games like Banjo-Kazooie, the game is built on Unreal Development Kit and features a cel-shaded style reminiscent of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Unlike the games it is inspired by, A Hat in Time will have local multiplayer and many perks for its backers.
The game garnered enough attention that it hit half its initial Kickstarter goal in a matter of hours, and met that goal in a little over a week. In their second update in the Kickstarter blog, the developers revealed that they actually pitched the game to a publisher and got rejected before resorting to crowdfunding.
After their initial funding, they revealed several funding tiers, including hiring former Rare composer Grant Kirkhope, full voice acting, a physical box, and the final tier, adding a hub in the form of the Hat Kid's time traveling spaceship.
In spite of meeting its Kickstarter goals, Gears of Breakfast is unable to guarantee ports to Steam and Wii U. This is because they need to spend more to get a full version of the Unreal engine to make porting possible. It was also revealed that the engine is incompatible with Linux. For this reason, they still have the game up on Steam Greenlight. They also got interest and ha discussions with Nintendo, but for now have pledged to work on delivering PC and Mac versions, with other platforms to come later.
UPDATE: An update on the Kickstarter page has detailed they will invest the extra funding for two new tunes by Grant Kirkhope, as well as additional enemies.
We covered how rapidly Kickstarter grew as a serious source of indie game funding last March here.
