Broken Age

[Kaisha]

9 hours to go, figured I'd give the thread a little bump. Couple new videos since last post, and they'll be streamining.....something come 3PM PST - http://www.ustream.tv/channel/double-fine-adventure

They finally broke 3mil also just yesterday, which used to be the budget (adjusted for inflation I believe) for Grim Fandango.


The other vids

Spoiler: show

[Aevis]

3.4m total funded. sick. also changed my pledge from $30 to $100 just to get the special edition cardboard box.

[6souls]

http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5328/7...c14fd06137.jpg
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17km...g/original.jpg
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17km...g/original.jpg

[miokomioko]

Terrible character...

[Insanecyclone]

3.3mil

[Cantih]

Hipster Lumberjack does not care, he is just too goddamn happy.

[blindSharingan]

Those images aren't anything official. They were just posted in some thread on the backers forum about the art style showing examples of filters/shadows.

[6souls]

They're screen caps from a video Double Fine had pulled off of youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=EKYrL6fLdvY

[Kaisha]

New update on the backer update page. Couple vids of the discussion on the starting of figuring out wtf they want for the game, dated a month after the kickstarter funding ended.

Have to say I quite like 2P Production's style of filming and editing. None of that super-still professional shit. They have no qualms about playing with the focus mid-shot or giving that handheld feel to it. It feels fairly down to earth.


People who're interested but didn't donate to see the goods now have another option to do so for $15. http://www.doublefine.com/dfa/

[6souls]

[6souls]

Now a two part adventure, part 1 in Jan 2014

Hello, Backers of Adventure!

Those of you who have been following along in the documentary know about the design vs. money tension we’ve had on this project since the early days. Even though we received much more money from our Kickstarter than we, or anybody anticipated, that didn’t stop me from getting excited and designing a game so big that it would need even more money.

I think I just have an idea in my head about how big an adventure game should be, so it’s hard for me to design one that’s much smaller than Grim Fandango or Full Throttle. There’s just a certain amount of scope needed to create a complex puzzle space and to develop a real story. At least with my brain, there is.

So we have been looking for ways to improve our project’s efficiency while reducing scope where we could along the way. All while looking for additional funds from bundle revenue, ports, etc. But when we finished the final in-depth schedule recently it was clear that these opportunistic methods weren’t going to be enough.

We looked into what it would take to finish just first half of our game—Act 1. And the numbers showed it coming in July of next year. Not this July, but July 2014. For just the first half. The full game was looking like 2015! My jaw hit the floor.

This was a huge wake-up call for all of us. If this were true, we weren’t going to have to cut the game in half, we were going to have to cut it down by 75%! What would be left? How would we even cut it down that far? Just polish up the rooms we had and ship those? Reboot the art style with a dramatically simpler look? Remove the Boy or Girl from the story? Yikes! Sad faces all around.

Would we, instead, try to find more money? You guys have been been very generous in the tip jar (thanks!) but this is a larger sum of money we were talking about. Asking a publisher for the money was out of the question because it would violate the spirit of the Kickstarter, and also, publishers. Going back to Kickstarter for it seemed wrong. Clearly, any overages were going to have to be paid by Double Fine, with our own money from the sales of our other games. That actually makes a lot of sense and we feel good about it. We have been making more money since we began self-publishing our games, but unfortunately it still would not be enough.

Then we had a strange idea. What if we made some modest cuts in order to finish the first half of the game by January instead of July, and then released that finished, polished half of the game on Steam Early Access? Backers would still have the option of not looking at it, of course, but those who were sick of waiting wouldn’t have to wait any more. They could play the first half of the game in January!

We were always planning to release the beta on Steam, but in addition to that we now have Steam Early Access, which is a new opportunity that actually lets you charge money for pre-release content. That means we could actually sell this early access version of the game to the public at large, and use that money to fund the remaining game development. The second part of the game would come in a free update a few months down the road, closer to April-May.

So, everybody gets to play the game sooner, and we don’t have to cut the game down drastically. Backers still get the whole game this way—nobody has to pay again for the second half.

And whatever date we start selling the early release, backers still have exclusive beta access before that, as promised in the Kickstarter.

I want to point out that Broken Age’s schedule changes have nothing to do with the team working slowly. They have been kicking ass and the game looks, plays, and sounds amazing. It’s just taking a while because I designed too much game, as I pretty much always do. But we’re pulling it in, and the good news is that the game’s design is now 100% done, so most of the unknowns are now gone and it’s not going to get any bigger.

With this shipping solution I think we’re balancing the size of the game and the realities of funding it pretty well. We are still working out the details and exact dates, but we’d love to hear your thoughts. This project has always been something we go through together and the ultimate solution needs to be something we all feel good about.

In the meantime, I’m hoping you are enjoying the documentary and like the progress you’re seeing on Broken Age. I’m really exciting about how it’s coming together, I can’t wait for you to see more of it, and I feel good about finally having a solid plan on how to ship it!

Thanks for reading, Tim

[Correction]

Translation: "We saw Walking Dead's numbers and wanna suckle that fat episodic teat too."

[Kaisha]

But this isn't episodic. It's just being split in half on a project mostly figured out and set in stone.

Nice to see we finally got a rough date to have a playable copy though. Been waiting quite some time now.

[6souls]

Tim Shafer wants more of your money

Broken Age, the Double Fine adventure game that popularized Kickstarter in the videogames community, is going through some trouble. Despite having raised $3.3 million in Kickstarter contributions, Double Fine are finding themselves unable to complete the game using that amount of money.

Double Fine’s Tim Schafer, who is behind the project, let the game’s backers know via an open letter today, which has been published in full on Gamasutra.

“Even though we received much more money from our Kickstarter than we, or anybody anticipated, that didn’t stop me from getting excited and designing a game so big that it would need even more money,” Schafer writes. He adds that he has a specific idea of how large an adventure game should be, and that he finds it difficult to design something smaller in scope than, say, Grim Fandango.

Schafer and his team looked at how long it would take for them to execute on their vision, and realized it would take them until 2015 to develop in its entirety. So, here’s the solution they’re proposing:

What if we made some modest cuts in order to finish the first half of the game by January instead of July, and then released that finished, polished half of the game on Steam Early Access? Backers would still have the option of not looking at it, of course, but those who were sick of waiting wouldn’t have to wait any more. They could play the first half of the game in January!

We were always planning to release the beta on Steam, but in addition to that we now have Steam Early Access, which is a new opportunity that actually lets you charge money for pre-release content. That means we could actually sell this early access version of the game to the public at large, and use that money to fund the remaining game development. The second part of the game would come in a free update a few months down the road, closer to April-May.

Schafer goes on to assure all that the delay isn’t due to the development team working slowly. “It’s just taking a while because I designed too much game, as I pretty much always do,” he writes. “But we’re pulling it in, and the good news is that the game’s design is now 100% done, so most of the unknowns are now gone and it’s not going to get any bigger.”

http://www.siliconera.com/2013/07/03...dventure-game/
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/1...completion.php

This is one of the risks of a kickstarter campaign.

[Correction]

This is one of the risks of a kickstarter campaign.

More like 'the risks of giving Tim Schaefer unlimited creative freedom without publisher oversight.'

[Jefe]

Who here is shocked? This kickstarter shit is a scam... most of the time.

[Aevis]

Why would you associate this with scam? DFA got 3.3M, Tim created a game costing around 6M with a final release of 2015. Once realised, they figrued out two options: a) Cut the game dramatically (about half) to make it within a realistic release schedule and with what's left from the kickstarter money b) Cut some of the game, release first half through Steam's Greenlight in Jan 2014 and the entire game in April-May.

As a backer, there's no drawback here. I don't have to pay any penny more, the release date has been "when it's done" for quite some time now and I still get it before Greenlight. Did Tim fuck up? Yes, he did. But instead of going with route a) delivering half a product and confer their fuckup onto us, they found a pretty decent solution. The current documentary episode shows that process in detail and is probably the reason why the backers on the forum are ok with this solution, while every outside source seems to outrcry and gather pitchforks.

[Mazmaz]

It sounds like they're using profits from the game's overall sale to fund the 2nd half of development? I think that's a pretty good compromise.

[6souls]

Part 1 to be released to backers next week

Broken Age: Part One will be released to Kickstarter backers next week as promised on Tuesday, January 14, Double Fine confirmed to Joystiq. In July, the firm’s boss Tim Schafer said Broken Age’s design had become too ambitious despite its record-setting amount of crowdfunding, so it would be released in two parts with the first half available through Steam Early Access. Sales from the first half of Broken Age and other Double Fine games are intended to sustain production of the second half.

http://www.vg247.com/2014/01/10/brok...ers-next-week/
http://www.joystiq.com/2014/01/10/do...=rss_truncated

[Tarage]

Game's out for backers. I've played it. It's pretty much everything I wanted in the game, if being a little short.