Our regularly revised feature keeps you up to date on the Kickstarter games worth watching, and helps you track projects both before and after they’re funded.

Welcome to the Kickstarter Compendium, a gathering of games and game-related projects that we’ve come across that deserve your attention. The crowd-funding model for video games has resulted in some interesting new game ideas, and new projects are going up on a weekly basis that deserve your attention. 

The only problem is keeping track of it all – what’s worth watching, and what are these different projects about? As an ongoing feature, our Kickstarter Compendium is your guide to games seeking funding through Kickstarter. After funding projects are complete, this feature will also track what games (and game-related projects) got funded and what games didn’t, and where possible, offer links to the projects as they are developed. 

Games Seeking Funding 

Afterdark: When Heroes Become Legends
Developer:  Napalm Studios
Fundraising Goal: $110,000
Funds Due By: May 12, 2013

Afterdark is a beat-em-up game set in a world of gothic horror. The game aims to resurrect the classic beat-em-up style of gaming. Afterdark showcases epic battles against evil with a progressing list of objectives lined with a developing narrative. 

The Big Blue
Developer:  Ed Annunziata
Fundraising Goal: $665,000
Funds Due By: April 29, 2013

By the creators of the classic undersea adventure Ecco the Dolphin, The Big Blue is an aquatic adventure game set a million years in the future deep in the ocean. Explore the ocean and interact with everything. It also has you pursuing quests and spawning new life forms. All creatures in the ocean are controllable, allowing you to control multiple creatures at once. 

Bleak
Developer:  Tenwall Creatives
Fundraising Goal: $50,000
Funds Due By: April 19, 2013

Bleak is a massive fantasy platformer set in a dark, perilous new world. In this place, your dominant arm is amputated upon birth and in its place is a pickax. From then you are sent to the mines to extract the precious metal, Core. The “Cultivators of the Good” can punish you for refusing to work by denying food. Other workers have different tools for arms, like wrenches, depending on their job. Brave the dark, callous world and explore, if you dare, for around every corner is distress and disappointment, and perhaps even death. 

Buddy And Me
Developer: Sunbreak Games
Fundraising Goal: $40,000
Funds Due By: April 20, 2013

Buddy and Me is a platformer embellished in a beautiful art style for tablets and mobile. It is the story of a boy and his best friend who run through the forest together, seeking adventure. 

Camelot Unchained
Developer: City State Entertainment
Fundraising Goal: $2,000,000
Funds Due By: May 2, 2013

Camelot Unchained is a counter-revolutionary MMO set in a post-apocalyptic world where the boundary between two dimensions has been pierced. This led to the almost-extinction of the world and you must fight to get your world back. 

The Gallery: Six Elements
Developer:  Cloudhead Games
Fundraising Goal: $65,000
Funds Due By: April 17, 2013

A new game in development for the Oculus, The Gallery is an urban exploration intertwined with a secret and shrouded in uncharted mystery. You must travel into six painted portals which represent the core elements of life: Air, Water, Fire, Earth, Love and Death. Retrieve a hidden key from each portal and escape The Gallery. What begins as a typical adventure ends in a volcanic eruption of action and adventure. 

Grimlands
Developer:  Drago Entertainment
Fundraising Goal: $650,000
Funds Due By: May 2, 2013

Grimlands is an MMO-shooter set in an open, post-apocalyptic world. Craft items out of scavenged raw materials and complete quests and battle for territories. Grimlands has undergone a little over five years of development, with the remaining work being polishing. 

Mongrel
Developer: Blake Whitworth & Stephan Messier
Fundraising Goal: $30,000
Funds Due By: April 26, 2013

Mongrel takes place in a world taken over by a new race. Animals have grown into humanoid hybrids and are running the world on a strict caste system. Mongrels are slaves and the only way they can be freed is through battle in the arena. Fight for your freedom. 

Pulse
Developer:  Team Pixel Pi
Fundraising Goal: $75,000
Funds Due By: April 11, 2013

Pulse is a first-person survival game set against a world that can only be discovered by sound. You are basically blind like a bat, and you use something like echolocation to make your way around. Using the sounds and reverberations, you can map out your surroundings. Using visual memories from when they were younger (and not blind), the player can use these memories to help them map out their environment. Creatures both kind and cruel are present and will either aid your journey or slow you down. 

SkyWar Dragon
Developer: Matt "Tieg" Tieger
Fundraising Goal: $41,000
Funds Due By: May 5, 2013

It's rare that we have the space and time to highlight one of the many exciting tabletop Kickstarter games, but we wanted to alert readers to SkyWar Dragon because of the background of its creator. Matt "Tieg" Tieger served as game director over at High Moon Studios on Transformers: War for Cybertron and its sequel, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. His new tabletop venture tackles a theme that's close to the heart of many gamers -- the excitement of midair dragon dofights, complete with breath weapons, dragon riders, and desperate clawing melees, as the combatants tumble earthward. If that's a board game you'd like to see come to life, hop over, and offer your support. 

[NEXT UP: Peruse the numerous games that have been successfully funded through Kickstarter, and track their progress after funding is complete]