Molyneux's Godus will now happen whether it hits Kickstarter goal or not

Despite his anxiety, Peter Molyneux says he now knows his attempt at reinvigorating the genre he helped invent will happen.

Even if the Kickstarter for Godus fails, and with less than 50 hours and £15,000 to go it looks like it won't, the former head of Lionhead Studios and creator of god game titles like Dungeon Keeper, Populous and Black & White, says he will move forward with the project.

Molyneux said the team created three plans before they started the Kickstarter for Godus.

The most positive of the plans, the project getting funding significantly higher than the amount asked, included stretch goals.

The worst plan for the team was the game not getting funded.

"If we were significantly under our Kickstarter than we would have to turn around and say, ‘You know what, is the reinvention a good idea? Is it an idea the world will like?'," Molyneux said.

Under that plan, the team simply stops development Godus and moves on to something else.

But Molyneux says that the team also planned for the possibility that their Kickstarter would just miss or just make the goal. In that case, Kickstarter success or not, the game's development would move forward.

And with £435,226 of the requested £450,000 pledged, it looks like the idea of mothballing Godus is no longer under consideration.

Reached for new comment late this morning, Molyneux told Polygon that he is amazed but still terrified and that he couldn't sleep last night.

"We are just about to announce our stretch goals," he wrote, "I never dreamt we would be in a position do that."

While jubilant about the Kickstarter's impending success, Molyneux says he's still worried about the people who first pledge support for a project and then back out. Godus has already had some £5,000 pledges made and then removed.

"Every day there are people who come in and people who go out," he said. "I think the ones who hurt you the most are the very large pledges for top tiers.

"This is a very difficult time of year, lets recognize that. Maybe when we get to the last day people might turn around and say. ‘I haven't got any money left to pay for my children's Christmas present."

Molyneux spoke with Polygon when there was still exactly three days, two hours and 31 minutes left in the Kickstarter. Or at least that's what Molyneux told us when we called.

"I wouldn't choose to start it on Thanksgiving and finish it just before Christmas Eve That's made life difficult."

"I've given up on tracking the seconds and microseconds," he said.

He said that he's been obsessing about the funding numbers since the day the Kickstarter launched.

"I sleep read the number," he said. "I wake up in the middle of the night. I reach out to my iPad. I look at the number. I go back to sleep again. I must do that about three or four times a night. It is part of my daily life now, just checking the number thinking, ‘What are we doing wrong? How can we make the game clearer? How can we engage with the people who have already pledged? How can we persuade more people to pledge?'

"I haven't gone begging to old colleagues or anything like that. I've tried to let it run its course somewhat. I think it is going to be very, very close. It's going to be down to the last minute. There is an irresistible urge to phone up my sister, my mother, my auntie Betty in New Zealand and say please pledge. But all of these things are part of crowd funding."

Molyneux calls the process a "hell of a lot more scary than signing a publishing deal."

The difference, he said, is that a publishing deal doesn't usually come with tens of thousands of emails from fans, haters and everyone in between asking you about the project, about your past decisions, questioning your experience, questioning your legacy.

"It's one of the most intense things you can put your psyche through," he said.

Despite the anxiety that the process seems to have caused Molyneux, he says he would still do it over again. Though perhaps a bit differently.

"I wouldn't choose to start it on Thanksgiving and finish it just before Christmas Eve," he said. "That's a challenge, yes. That's made life difficult."

The Godus Kickstarter also happens to wrap up on the day the Mayan Calendar ends and, some think, the world too.

"Watching the hours tick by to the end of our kickstarter on Godus," Molyneux later wrote on Twitter, "and to the end of the Mayan Calender is truly terrifying."