We first spotted Coral Island before it ever launched a Kickstarter campaign, and, as fans of farm sims, we thought it looked like it had a lot of promise. Fast-forward to the end of the fundraising period, and it turns out the game was more successful than anyone could have imagined.
Coral Island was initially asking for a meagre $70,000 to complete and ship the game. During the Kickstarter period, they ended up surpassing $1.6 million — that’s more than 20 times the initial asking price.
This means the game hit every single one of its stretch goals. In fact, the team came up with even more stretch goals halfway through the campaign, and they hit all of those too. Coral Island is going to end up being jam-packed with amazing features!
Here’s a complete list of stretch goals:
- $125,000 – Minigames – We’ll add a bunch of minigames throughout the island so you’ll have more to do.
- $175,000 – Bug Catching – Bug catching will be added as a game mechanic. The good kind of bug!
- $200,000 – Expanded Museum – The museum will now include an aquarium and indoor park to display your bugs!
- $250,000 – NPC Seasonal Outfits – All NPCs will have different outfits for spring, summer, fall, and winter. Applies to both portraits and in-game models.
- $300,000 – Console & Switch Port – Alpha Farmer backers and above will be able to choose between Steam, consoles, or Switch Keys!
- $350,000 – Merfolk Underwater Village – Expanding the underwater map. Explore and stumble upon Merfolk Village. Rediscover fairy tales!
- $400,000 – Kids Grow Up – All kids, NPC’s and player’s, will age until the teenage years. Includes additional stories and relationship developments.
- $500,000 – Mod Support – Mod compatibility! Help us figure out the type of mods Coral Island should support.
- $600,000 – Multiplayer – Play with friends! We’ll hire two additional full-time devs to implement co-op and up to 4-player online farms in Coral Island.
- $700,000 – Beach & Festival Outfits – We will add bathing suits as Beach Outfits and 1 festival outfit to 20 NPCs (all dateables are included).
- $750,000 – M/S/B/C Now Dateable! – Millie, Suki, Ben, and Charles join the dateable roster!
- $850,000 – 4 New Characters Added – We make the town more lively by welcoming 4 new residents to Coral Island. Amount dateable out of this batch TBD.
- $1,000,000 – Merfolk Kingdom – The village becomes a kingdom and features a festival. We expand the Merfolk romance and questlines. you’ll meet 20 Merfolk, befriend 10, and may find love with two of them.
- $1,250,000 – Island Hopping (endgame) – Unlock a new biome to explore around Coral Island. Slowly build a ship and travel to different islands for even more stories! (This feature seems planned for sometime after the release of version 1.0.)
- $1,250,000+ – Plus Ultra – Every additional campaign dollar will go back to the game, towards making all content more polished!
If you read through the list of stretch goals, you can see the game becoming bigger and more ambitious as it goes. Clearly, fans are excited about every single one of those things.
So why is Coral Island so darn popular? Well, for one, farm sims are all the rage right now. But on top of that, Coral Island features incredible character art — this is some of the best character art we’ve ever seen in a farm sim, and a ton of those cuties are dateable. We’re exciting to start snuggling and smooching these guys and gals!
Coral Island plans to launch an alpha version in June, with an Early Access version out by the end of 2021 and the full game (1.0 release) due out by the end of 2022.
In case you still haven’t seen it, the Coral Island announcement trailer is below.
