If you’re an ‘80s kid who loved Nintendo, then you probably tried to design at least one level for a favorite video game. Maybe you worked at it with a piece of graph paper and a pencil, a cold glass of Coke at your side. Then you had to imagine the whole thing in motion, since you lacked the skills to make your sketch into a real game. That was then, and this is the future. A Kickstarter for Pixel Press wants to help today’s kids bring their games to life by simply scanning the paper with an iOS device (or Android, if stretch goals are reached).

The ‘80s blessed us with big hair, over-synthesized music, and beautiful role-playing gamebooks from publishers like Lone Wolf, Fighting Fantasy, and Fabled Lands. For the sake of our children, these books and their illustrations of orcs, dwarves, and busty elf women must survive in this modern era. Happily, Black Chicken Games has launched a Kickstarter for Holdfast, a gamebook that’s bound for PC, Android, Mac, and print.

We love to wax nostalgic on the Golden Age of adventure games, but even the staunchest fans will admit that patience often outweighed brainpower in the genre’s heyday.  Recent entries in the point-and-click coterie have tended to favor the player’s experience in place of his ability to click randomly until something happens.  The Realm is the next evolution of this trend, further emphasizing fun over frustration, engagement over exasperation.

Hold onto your Booster Packs, Trading Card Game fans, because boy have we got the game for you! HEX: Shards of Fate is being touted as the first “real” MMO/Trading Card Game hybrid, and a “completely new gaming experience” in full. The game has secretly been in development over the last two years by Cryptozoic Entertainment, whose past accolades include the hugely popular World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. From the official Kickstarter page: “HEX combines community and storytelling aspects of an MMORPG with the collectable and strategic gameplay of a TCG.”

A few keywords to get you interested right from the start: 16-bit, metroidvania, pixel art, Gradius, open-world RPG. Still salivating? That's exactly why games like as A.N.N.E exist. The Kickstarter project by Gamesbymo looks to combine some very well-loved game genres into a stunning platformer/RPG/shmup experience. A.N.N.E is a love letter from gaming's history, and it doesn't attempt to shrug off even a bit of nostalgia as it makes its way to modern players.

When you’re a two-year-old, you don’t need scary movies in order to jolt yourself into a scare: The entire world is practically a freak show. Among the Sleep is a first-person horror game that puts you in the fuzzy jammies of a toddler who’s trundling through a hostile dream world. The game features no combat—little hands shouldn’t hold knives—so you have to rely on your wits and the environment in order to find safe hiding spots when danger lurks.

Pixel art will never die, nor will indie games that paint beautiful worlds using those sprites! Discord Games is totally on board with that, which is why the retro-flavored action adventure RPG Chasm is currently in the works. Inspired by the likes of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Diablo, Metroid and The Legend of Zelda, Chasm aims to be the modern Metroidvania of your dreams. And from the looks of it, it's off to a fantastic start.

Having played a lot of endless runners in my day, it takes a lot for a new one to impress me. Gorgeous visuals sometimes do the trick, but typically it’s the inclusion of a unique gameplay mechanic that inspires me to give a new runner a shot. As it so happens, the upcoming Buddy & Me is home to gorgeous visuals and gameplay that deviates from what we typically see in the genre. More importantly, however, it’s also home to tree houses. Lots and lots of tree houses.

The makers of the steampunk-style airship combat game Guns of Icarus Online have taken to Kickstarter to fund an "Adventure Mode" expansion that will give the game a persistent online world, explorable towns, six player-run factions and a whole lot more.

The team behind Planet Explorers obviously believes in the old adage of "go big or go home," because this game promises to be very big indeed. An action-adventure RPG with 4X elements, it will follow a team of interstellar colonists whose ship crashes on its target planet, leaving them trapped and sorely underequipped on a hostile world. Now they must salvage what they can, explore the world, build, fight, survive and ultimately establish a viable, durable new home for themselves and their descendants.