Jason Rohrer hits Kickstarter for 'Diamond Trust of London'

The developer behind the indie favourites Passage, Sleep is Death, and Inside a Star-filled Sky has turned to crowd funding site Kickstarter to release his latest game, Diamond Trust of London.

The developer behind the indie favourites Passage, Sleep is Death, and Inside a Star-filled Sky has turned to crowd funding site Kickstarter to release his latest game, Diamond Trust of London.

Jason Rohrer has been working on Diamond Trust of London – a game for the Nintendo DS – since late 2010. The game completed QA testing in late 2011 and received approval from Nintendo last week. He is now turning to Kickstarter to raise the funds necessary to release the game.

"Everyone who publishes a game for the DS (including EA and all the big companies) pays Nintendo to make the cartridges for them," Rohrer tells Polygon.

"Cartridges obviously cost money to get made, and theres also a rather large minimum order."

After multiplying the cost of individual cartridges by the number of cartridges in a minimum order, Rohrer says the total came to being around $78,000 just to get Diamond Trust of London onto Nintendo's cartridges.

"This is a campaign to raise the money to get this finished game – this game is totally finished, I'm not raising money to keep developing it – I'm raising money to get it manufactured and get it out there and into people's hands," he says in his Kickstarter video.

The Kickstarter has a goal of $78,715 with 16 days to go. The rewards for pledging begin at $5 for a physical photocopy of the refracted company memo from the Diamond Trust of London archives, to $35 for a boxed copy of the game. The highest pledge reward is for $10,000 for a hand-crafted Diamond Trust of London mega archive box with funding credits, copies of the game, and a collection of artifacts hand-delivered by Jason Rohrer himself and Tom Bailey.

The Kickstarter campaigns ends May 26.