The excitement of April Fools' Day kept us from taking note of this on Friday, but Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch, the “side-scrolling tag-team beat-em-up” that landed on Fig in February, has been successfully funded. The campaign ended with $445,000 on a $400,000 goal, not quite a runaway success but enough to work in a stretch goal that will add other playable characters to the game.
The latest Fig update also reveals the first two “Assist Characters,” who are essentially NPCs that can be called upon to help out when things get dicey. The first, the “Boner Bodybag Bounce Assist,” features Big D—Dante, I'm assuming—who “rushes in the level with a body bag with a familiar stiff with a stiffy and clobbers his victims with an overhead smash.” The second is the “Double Swift Donkey Show Assist,” which to be honest I'm having a bit of trouble parsing, and will thus leave it to you to figure out for yourself if you're so inclined.
It's interesting that roughly three-quarters of the funding for Chronic Blunt Punch came from investors rather than conventional backers. The significance of that imbalance is debatable, but it makes me wonder if there's as much interest in this game among the people who might actually play it than the success of the campaign indicates. That's something that obviously won't be determined until it's released, but simply put, if this had been a Kickstarter campaign, relying solely on backers, it would have failed spectacularly.
But it didn't! It's happening. There's no set release target yet, but the “estimated delivery” time for Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch is set for the first quarter of 2018.
