Ed Fleming, founder of the Main Campus Camps, let us know that he has launched a Kickstarter to provide some much needed funding to buy new technology for the summer video game design camp, along with some funding to give "in-need kids" free access to the program. Main Campus Camps hosts video game and science & technology summer day camps for children ages 5 - 16 years-old at Villanova University, just outside of Philadelphia.

Anyone that has ever flipped through the pages of Computer Gaming World knows the epic struggles between Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk in their popular column Tom vs. Bruce. The second most popular column at the time in the magazine could return if it can raise enough money to do so. The Kickstarter campaign is asking for $10,000 to write ten brand-new columns to be released on a monthly basis over the next year.

With 11,638 backers, the Kickstarter for Isle of Wight-based video games developer Stainless Games has successfully funded Carmageddon Reincarnation. The remake of the popular racing game that encourages using your car as a weapon against innocent bystanders has raised $445,895 (as of this writing). The developers were asking for $400,000. The project still has eight days to go before funding closes.

Season two of the ultra popular Fallout-based fan web series, Fallout: Nuka Break, will get the help of Fallout: New Vegas designer Chris Avellone and the original Fallout lead programmer Tim Cain - if they can raise $120,000 in their latest Kickstarter appeal. Both have agreed to sign on to season two as writers and designers and make guest appearances if the creators of the show can raise enough cash.

City National Bank has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against Konami and developer Autumn Games for allegedly defrauding the financial institution of money it is owed related to a $15 million line of credit. City National Bank claims that Konami and Autumn Games defrauded it of $15 million in credit for the development of Def Jam Rapstar. They also alleged that both parties "lied" to the bank in order to secure the credit line, promising to pay it back with the sales of the game.

38 Studios has let some of its staff go, according to Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chaffee (I), though how many people we do not know at this point. Chaffee made his comments to the media after a lengthy meeting with the Rhode Island Economic Development Committee and 38 Studios founder Curt Schilling. After the meeting Schilling had no comment for the press, save that his company would not be looking to Rhode Island taxpayers for help.

Social game matchmaking company Xfire announced this morning that it has secured an additional $3 million in funding. The company will use the cash injection to expand into Asian territories. The financing round was led by Singapore-based firm IDM Venture Capital. The cash follows the news that Xfire has inked a partnership deal with CHINA YOUTH GOYOR TECHNOLOGY (BEIJING) CO., LTD., who will help bring the service to more than 400 million gamers in Asia.

Everyone is getting in on the crowdfunding bandwagon. Electronic Arts announced today that it will make life a little bit easier for anyone that successfully funds a game through a crowdfunding program such as Kickstarter by letting them sell their game on its Origin digital distribution platform for free for 90 days. While 90 days might not seem like a very long time let's keep in mind that the best sales usually come in the first two weeks of a game's release anyway...

Things are going from bad to worse for 38 Studios and its employees. On Thursday a company representative hand-delivered a check for the $1.1 million payment that was due on May 1 to the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, but the company then said that it didn't have the money in the bank to cover the check. If a private citizen wrote such a check they would be under arrest and enjoying the amenities of a Rhode Island jail without bail, but that's another story altogether.

Not everyone has the brand and name recognition that Tim Schafer and Brian Fargo have. So how do you get funding when nobody knows who you are or what you are capable of? Games journalist and tech writer Scott Steinberg may have the answer you seek in his brand new book on the art of crowdfunding called "The Crowdfunding Bible: How to Raise Money for Any Startup, Video Game or Project." 

Update: A Boston Globe report indicates that 38 Studios founder and former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling has asked Rhode Island officials for more money for his company in the private meeting that was held this morning. The newspaper says that board members of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation took no action on Schilling’s request. The amount he asked for was not disclosed.

In November of last year a Marine Archaeological company that has been working in the waters around Africa and Asia for the last 17 years decided that they wanted to bring their experience in deep sea treasure hunting to life as a video game, so they began working with Estoril, Portugal-based developer Arqueonautas to build a strategy game called ARQ Quest. In the game, players take on the task of creating the perfect atmosphere for treasure hunting - from building the perfect team of specialists, and investing research, to buying the right equipment and stocking up supplies.

InXile CEO Brian Fargo has updated the “Kicking it Forward" site - located at kickingitforward.org, in case you didn't know - to answer a number of questions about the concept he started when he launched his Wasteland 2 Kickstarter. The easy answer to a definition of "Kicking it Forward" is to kick back 5 percent of the successful funding back into other Kickstarter projects.

You probably don't know who Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe are right off the top of your head, but the duo are best known for creating the popular Space Quest series of comedic adventure games for Sierra back in the day. Like Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe and Gabriel Knight creator Jane Jensen, the duo see hope in creating a new spacey adventure by crowdfunding it, so they have launched a Kickstarter campaign to do just that.

The Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter campaign has closed with $1.8 million in pledged funding. The funding drive by Bellevue, Washington-based developer Harebrained Schemes was aiming for $400,000 when it started. It ended up raising $1,836,447 from 36,276 backers. Including PayPal pledges (which allowed those outside the U.S. to participate) the company managed to raise a total of $1,895,772.

The U.S. National Endowment for the Arts will fund four games that explore climate change and literature. This will be the first time the NEA funds video games since it changed its policy in May 2011 to include the category.

Replay Games and Leisure Suit Larry series creator Al Lowe have officially gone over their Kickstarter funding mark with just seven days left until the deadline. As of this writing, the project garnered $501,527 of its $500,000 goal as promised by 11,147 backers. That means that a remake of the very first game - Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards - will be developed.

Replay Games said that whatever money they garnered above its target number would go towards expanding the project to:

A new crowdfunding platform dedicated exclusively to game development will launch this June at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. Dubbed an "alternative to Kickstarter," the new platform is being built by Dutch company Gambitious.

Last Week Harebrained Schemes announced that if it hit a funding milestone of $1.5 million in its Kickstarter campaign for Shadowrun Returns, it would create special content that would tie story from the new game into the SNES and Sega Shadowrun games. This content, the company said would be exclusive to backers.

According to an analysis by Rock, Paper, Shotgun, more than $10 million has been pledged to various game-related projects through crowdfunding site Kickstarter since the beginning of March. In the month of March, a total of $6,977,432 in funding has been successfully collected by game projects as well.

InXile's Wasteland 2 Kickstarter managed to bring in around $2,933,147 from 61,289 backers, well over the $900,000 it originally asked for. According to InXile founder Brian Fargo, and additional $107,427 was raised from PayPal pledges - mostly from individuals outside the United States who can't use the Kickstarter system. 

Develop has an interesting article about how War Balloon Games found that the reward tiers it created for its iOS game Star Command have drained much of the cash it generated when it pitched the game to the community in October of last year. The company raised $37,000, but only initially asked the community for $20,000. But what the Star Command developers did not anticipate was the cost of the various reward tiers it created to get donors to drop larger and larger amounts of cash.

I find this fascinating.  Having just crossed the million dollar mile marker, the Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter was just updated to say that if it reaches $1.5 million, developer Harebrained Schemes will build a special mission exclusive to backers as a thank you.  A thoughtful gesture for sure but the comments show that backers are overwhelmingly against the idea.

Hairbrained Schemes' Kickstarter for a 2-D turn-based RPG for tablet devices and the PC has managed to raise $897,767 of its original goal of $400,000 from 20,895 backers. The company that has worked on such franchises as Shadowrun, Mech Commandeer, Crimson Skies, and MechWarrior, hopes to hit a new milestone of $1 million. They say that if they meet this new funding goal they will add some new content. As of this writing the game, Shadowrun Returns, will be developed for PC, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux.

While we are not sure if it is the first Kickstarter funded game development project to come to market, Saturday Morning RPG is the first in recent memory to be released. The iOS action RPG which is being released as an ongoing serial (i.e. like a Saturday morning cartoon) successfully managed to raise $10,661. The developers were looking to raise $6,000. The first two episodes launch today.

It will be interesting to see how the public (who didn’t participate in the Kickstarter) receive the game. The App Store page for the game contains mostly positive reviews so far.

Garry Gaber, the project lead on Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns while at LucasArts, has launched a Kickstarter to raise funds for a space combat game for PC and PlayStation Vita called Starlight Inception. Gaber is looking to raise about $150,000 for the game, which he describes as a "first-person/third-person free-roaming space shooter". If all goes well with the funding, Gaber hopes to have the game ready for take-off in the third quarter of 2013.

Everybody is doing it so why shouldn't Jane Jensen give it a shot? Jensen is best known as the creator of the popular Gabriel Knight adventure game series. In the last eight years she has designed and directed such casual games as Women’s Murder Club, Dying for Daylight and Deadtime Stories at Oberon Media/I-Play Studio. Now she is returning to her adventure game roots with a new company she has formed with her husband called Pinkerton Road.

What started out as a PS3 hardware hacking project has turned into a full-fledged project looking for some Kickstarter funding magic. The technology is simply called an "open source tracking device," and is designed to tell you where your PS3 is by texting or emailing. The project is a little more complicated than that, of course, but that the basic premise.

Replay Games and Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe have managed to raise $107,959 of the $500,000 funding goal from 2,806 backers on Kickstarter for its Leisure Suit Larry in the Lands of the Lounge Lizards remake. Al Lowe, the original creator of the comical adult themed adventure game for Sierra, posted a thank-you message to the Kickstarter community for its early support of the project. Of course, $100,000 is a long way from $500,000 but it's a promising start. The crowd funding campaign has 28 more days to go.

InXile is inching towards its new goal of $2.1 million in funding, a milestone it set last week in hopes of bringing Obsidian Entertainment on board to help provide tools and develop Wasteland 2. The Kickstarter for the sequel to the classic Interplay post-apocalyptic RPG has hit $1,903,323 with the help of 38,742 backers - with 14 more days to go.