Airship Q gets funded for Vita in Japan

Just days after launching its crowd-funding effort on Makuake (Japanese version of Kickstarter) Miracle Positive has announced a successful funding for Airship Q, a low-cost sandbox action game for PlayStation Vita. Airship Q lets players solve mysteries by controlling an airship whose pilot happens to be a cat. Airship Q is one of the first Japanese sandbox action games delivered by an independent game developer, suggesting they're starting to get into indie and crowd-funded development.

That could lead to some great things coming out of their crazed dev studios. Development of Airship Q started from scratch about 2 years ago. Inspired by Minecraft and Terraria, which it shares a similar look to The creators decided to build an innovative sandbox action game by utilizing directional buttons, optimized for a handheld game experience. After countless trials, they are now finally approaching complete gameplay. The game reached 140% of its funding (half a million yen, £3,150, $5,000) in just 19 hours.

That's pretty small change for western teams, but if Japan starts small, it should soon get gamers on board to fund bigger ideas. Wonder who Shahid's Japanese counterpart is? As he's going to be a busy man. This could be the small beginnings of a very big story.

Due to the success of the campaign, a PC version is on the cards and based on feedback, the developers will continue improving the game to eventually deliver an advanced Airship Q for PS Vita. The game is Japan-only for now, but doesn't look like it'd be too hard to translate over.