Am I missing something? It looks pretty cheap and generic to me, yet they already raised over $20,000,
It's more about what's under the hood than how it looks on the surface.
The
Trese Brothers are a two-man team working out of Boston who focus on depth & strategy in their production design. Their games are renound for having layer upon layer of systems with impressive complexity for a team so small.
They also pour incredible amounts of TLC into their individual releases over a sustained period of years, constantly tinkering, updating & expanding them at no added cost to the end user.
Their latest, Star Traders, launched on Steam Early Access
in mid-2018 EDIT: Nov. 2017. It's since seen 198 content updates, an average of almost twice a week since launch 26 months ago. These guys are obsessed with iterative development, expansion & improvement. And they don't ask for a dime beyond your initial purchase.
So their games do look kinda amateur on the surface (though it has been improving over releases with their last one looking quite "lo-fi charming"), but the meat of the experience is the complex gameplay systems with levels of granularity that very few devs aspire to.
Trese Bros. remind me a of a few other solo/couple/few-person dev teams that have these passion projects where you can't help but see all the love & labor they pour into the project. Games like Caves of Qud, RimWorld, TOME, UnReal World or the almighty Dwarf Fortress itself. Titles like these will never be lookers by any stretch, but will always be regarded as among the all-time best in the business.