When Celsius Game Studios Inc. releases its space-trading game Drifter later this year, it will feature planets or star systems named after five real-life Earthlings, who have paid handsomely for the naming rights.

Based in St. John’s, N.L., Celsius has already launched three games; the most successful sold 9,000 copies.

Founder Colin Walsh wanted to do something more ambitious with his next game. To finance his plans, he launched a Kickstarter “crowdfunding” campaign last May, aiming to raise $50,000.

 (Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a venture by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people.)

In a Kickstarter campaign, a person has a month to solicit commitments from sponsors, and it can offer prizes for people who donate certain amounts.

Depending on how much they donated, the Drifter supporters received prizes, such as as the game, the soundtrack, boxed copies of the game, posters and 3-D printed models of the spaceship used in the game.

And if you donated $1,000, you received all of the above and Walsh named a planet or star system in the game after you. Five people hit the top bracket and will soon be able to visit their namesake celestial bodies online.

Those five big contributors are one reason the Kickstarter campaign was such a great success. By the time the campaign ended, the company had raised $81,304.

And that outperformance meant Walsh could become even more ambitious with the new game.

 “Originally, it was going to be space-trading lite,” he said in an interview. “I was going to keep the focus small. But the scope got bigger after that.”

Drifter allows the player to captain a spaceship that trades goods between planets and galaxies, mining on some planets, exploring new systems and eluding or fighting space pirates.

Walsh said the genre is under served and there are people who are actively looking for this type of game.

Whereas Walsh developed his previous games — Chromodyne, Chromodyne HD and Red Nova — on his own, he has been able to work with a St. John’s-based graphic designer and user interface specialist to greatly improve the look and feel of the game.

He also commissioned music composer Danny Baranowsky of Seattle to write the score for Drifter.

The game will sell for $15 for desktop computers or $5 for iOS-based devices.

Walsh, who works out of the Genesis Centre at Memorial University, hopes to sell about 10,000 units in the first year. Other than the cut taken by retailers, it will be almost pure profit as the development costs were covered by crowdfunding.

After the release, he may continue to develop the game further — if it’s successful. Even now, he’s tempted to keep working on it, though he knows he has to get it on the market.

 “It’s a game you can work on forever,” he said. “It’s like a big sandbox and you can keep adding stuff to it but I hope to have a launch by the end of the summer.”