Decline Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

BAGEL IS AN AMAZING PAINTER. SO STFU.

 

Nope. He is not amazing ... and even if he was amazing, he still cannot code, animate, design or produce the game on his own.





The guy really likes the entire palette of brown (Edit: and shitty green). Mediocre at best.

 

Fair enough. The Cave just happened to be around for a beating. Nevertheless my main complain is about the DFA campaign ... I guess I really wanted to believe in something like Grim Fandango. But shit happens. Probably DFA game will be just another budget title.

 

He can design!

http://www.doublefine.com/games/my_game_about_me

 

Fixed.

 

Edit: The last two videos are locked. Only for backers

 

In my limited experience, there seems to be a huge jump in cost when you go from amateurs who are working for free to professionals expecting a salary (or per-item commissions). Obviously, going from 0 to anything is going to be an infinite percentage increase. That's not what I mean. I mean, like, to find someone as good as Victor (the artist on Primordia) who you'd hire on salary wouldn't be like a $5,000 affair -- even though Vic didn't make anything during Primordia's production (none of us did). It would be like tens and tens of thousands. And you'd need contracts, so you'd need lawyers, and you'd want to be a corporation, so you'd have corporate taxes, and so on and so forth.

Now, that doesn't get you to $2 million, let alone $18 million. I have no idea how/why games cost so much to make now. But what I was disabused of was my notion that because I'd worked on a really cool games that were made for free (or a couple hundred bucks to host a website or something), it should be possible to make a splendid masterpiece for $20k or something. At that kind of budget, your backbone is always going to have to be free labor, or the exploitation of people who don't realize what their labor is worth (like people with no finished games to their credit). But that latter category introduces significant unreliability, and huge management challenges. So your cost would go up a fair bit, either way.

And none of this really works for a "real" company. We're talking about something that works in a context of no one being a salaried employee and there being no physical office space. If you want a real company -- which is what we're talking about with Obsidian or Double Fine -- you have costs like rent, utilities, support staff, insurance, benefits, etc. I guess a lot of that is generically called "overhead" (I have no head for business type things), so whether it's properly paid for through Kickstarter is anyone's guess, but it does add up.

Again, still not to $18 million.

But the idea that because we made Primordia for pennies and Vogel makes Spiderweb games for $20k (if you treat his income as profit, rather than cost; not clear which way you should count it), DoubleFine should be able to make a Monkey Island quality game for $200k doesn't seem right to me. Whether it should cost millions, I don't know. But I wouldn't beat up on industry professionals too much for not just working out of their basement or whatever.

The thing that's sad about the Notch / Psychonauts 2 affair -- well, a lot is sad about it -- but it seems to me like you could make the sequel for not a crazy amount of money if you leveraged the existing engine, existing art assets, fan support, stuff like that. I imagine you could make it at a budget Notch would pay. It might not be a cutting-edge AAA game, but that's not what anyone was hoping for when they fantasized about a Pyschonauts sequel, I don't think. (Incidentally, I don't think the game should have a sequel; it stands alone just fine.)

 

My only big concern is that Tim Schafer has "lost his mojo" since becoming a father and rather wants to produce games for his little daughter (Sesame Street, Kinect Party, Happy Action Theater...) than do any game in the style he loved to do back in the day, although Stacking and Costume Quest weren't bad/were pretty good.

Other than that, the documentary part (so far) has been the best thing about this project and I'd have kinda hoped that more devs do this sort of thing And Amnesia Fortnight was pretty cool in itself. From what I've seen so far I'd likely increase my pledge even if they offered an option to do that, like the Wasteland 2 guys, but they don't.

 

Doing some napkin math, I think 18 million should be about enough to pay 45 well paid developers to work full time for 2 years, or 30 for 3 years.

 

But the argument isn't that DoubleFine should be able to make a new Monkey Island game for $200k; it's that they should be able to make a decent game for $3 million. I don't think that's unreasonable. And keep in mind that being a Kickstarter might mean a lower salary at first, but companies won't have to share their revenues with publishers, so they stand to make much more.

My guess would be that there's a lot of bloat in the larger projects. Instead of paying a freelancer $15k for some music, they end up hiring the person full time for $70k. Likewise creative consultants, artists, secretaries, etc. Money is spent on downtown offices instead of cheaper offices in the suburbs. Expensive elements that don't add much, such as cutscenes and voice acting, are put into the game.

Keep in mind that DFA pulled in more money than the budget for Full Throttle, even adjusted for inflation (~75% of Grim Fandango's budget, adjusted for inflation). Is it more difficult now to make such a game than it was in 1995? We also see situations such as the Coles, who said they couldn't make a Quest for Glory type game for $400k - yet Quest for Infamy is doing just that for $60k. Maybe there's just some huge developmental doughnut hole between indies and veterans, but from what I've seen, it looks like a lot of developers just can't manage their budgets. If Double Fine is running out of funds after making 8x their goal, why not give the money to indies instead?

 

Does it help at all to know the actual budget for the game was only 2.2 million?

 

Well the three Kinect games are the only ones that fit to your description. The others are not like they are made to his daughter. Custome quest, Stacking, Iron brigade are on par with Psychonauts and DOTT in terms of theme (not story or quality). They are lighthearted stuff with humor and occasinal dark elements.

 

I completely agree that when you run a company your costs go up exponentially, but a company like Double Fine has clear advantages that usurp the disadvantages.

The company has a set production line where they are doing other work which is paid for by publishers. They aren't hiring a team of artists per project, they are hiring s team of artists to work at Double Fine. The Kickstarter money should be going to augment those existing artists salaries to work on DFA, while working on the other projects.
One major advantage of having a full team of artists is that you can juggle resources around, and get MUCH more out of them.
You other management costs, software, hardware, etc get spread around ALL projects in the company. That's why companies run multiple projects at the same time-it saves money.

An Adventure Game also doesn't NEED a full team of artists and programmers. Infect, I think that the more people you add to an AG, the slower it actually gets developed (feature bloat becomes a massive issue). 5 experienced developers should be able to get out the game in a year. They had more than enough money, and time, for that.

 

Of those games, only Iron Brigade doesn't look like it's for children. However, it's a shooter, not an adventure game.

 

I think their biggest problem has been that they were trying to make a $3 million game when they only really had about $2.5 million.

 

I don't know if you have played those games, but Stacking is not a sweet little children game, like Sesame street for example. Custom Quest is more lighthearted, but still not Kinect Adventrue category.

 

So it took them 6 - 9 months to figure out their budget?

 

No, they had that figured out pretty early on:

Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler

It might be surprising for some people, but shit changes during a games development and there can be complications or delays. As of their last video update they had most critical systems implemented and even had working gameplay for one area/world, although it still looked kinda rough, but were over budget and behind schedule.

I wouldn't particularly worry too much about it, since I'm pretty sure they will get the game done but it might be late. A thing I expect(ed) to happen to about 80% of the KickStarter projects and which isn't particularly rare in "normal" game development either. For instance, even though Project: Eternity has a April 2004 delivery date, I'm rather sure it'll be a few months later than that at least.
Not sure why people decided to pick on the Double Fine KickStarter specifically either, since it looks to be one of the most promising ones so far and the Documentary episodes alone would've been well worth the money, might have something to do with it being the project that started this "KickStarter craze" I guess.

 

I don't think you can really make an adventure game without voice acting at this point. And if you're going to do it, you need to do it right -- basically all those gorgeous European adventure games are ruined by crappy voice acting, whereas good voice acting has spun gold out of solid but not great scripts (Sacrifice and Soul Reaver pop to mind, and the Blizzard games' stories benefit hugely from this). Great voice acting on top of a great script can be amazing -- take Psychonauts. Likewise, cutscenes done well can make a game feel like an extension of childhood fantasy of a playable cartoon. I still think a huge part of why Primordia works -- to the extent it works -- is that the introductory cutscene that Victor did feels like it could be a Don Bluth cartoon.

I was going to cry bullshit, but damn, you seem to be right. I have no idea how they made Full Throttle on that budget! That said, they were leveraging an existing engine and a team of artists and designers who had lived that genre for a while, which probably pushed costs down. Full Throttle is also on the short side of adventure games -- not compared to Primordia or something, but compared to classic commercial games. It's also 320x200 (I think). One of the things that we got most heavily criticized for regarding Primordia was the screen resolution. Maybe DF could get away with it because they have more of a right to be retro, but they probably figured that they had to up the resolution. Higher resolution art requires a lot more frames of animation, which increases the art load.

That's because (I assume) much of the team on Quest for Infamy isn't getting paid (except in residuals), they're using an existing engine, I think (AGS), built on top of their existing scripts for that engine, etc. Incidentally, AGDI made a Quest for Glory type game (in fact, they made Quest for Glory 2!) for zero dollars. But that doesn't mean the Quest for Infamy team is being greedy on inefficient. It means that different tiers of developers have different things they can leverage in terms of free labor. I don't think the Coles are prepared to have unpaid volunteer work -- my guess is that they're concerned it would lend an air of unprofessionality to the whole endeavor and also make the legal issues more stressful.

Both are probably true. I just think people shouldn't be so quick to assert malice or malfeasance when it comes to how projects are handling their budgets. All the time I say to myself, "Doing X should be really easy." Then I try to do X, and realize it also entails doing A, B, C, D, E, F, G, none of which I realized. That's why Vic and I thought we could do Primordia in a fifth the time it actually took. Not having been on paying side of a commercial project, I'm reluctant to criticize them too much.

Also, it seems to me that all of this criticism is predicated on DFA being a lousy game. If it's a lousy game, then, to me, that says less about the budget than it says about the team. My feeling is that the DF team should be able to make a great game at any budget. If DFA sucks it will because I overestimated their ability, not because they had too little or too much money. (The core aspects of writing, setting, and visual look can be done at any budget, really.) If the game is awesome, then $3 million was cheap because, really, how often do we get awesome games, at any budget?

 

I thought the point of the kickstarter was to try something a little less mainstream, so to me it sounds like no voice over would fit right in. Though, to be honest, voiced games always rub me the wrong way. So I would much rather have the game with no voice at all.

I understand you just mean to explain things from their point of view, but for people who care about older games this is more inflammatory still. I mean, not only did those 320x200 games look way better than higher resolution games of today, but they also are cheaper to make. Why the hell don't developers just go back to the old tools and ways?

 

DFA isn't using traditional animation. They created 3D skeletons to do movement, but have 2D images on top of them.

Also the game is designed to scale to different resolutions, it's not pre-rendered.

I think that was actually their initial plan for 300k, but once they got 3 million they assumed people wanted more flashiness.

 

Bickering in defense of a project that doesn't even really excite me seems like a squander of my 100th post, but so be it!

A couple things. First, the point of Kickstarter is to crowdfund projects where conventional funding isn't available. That sort of means more or less mainstream, but not necessarily. In this instance, I'm not sure any adventure games have been able to secure significant conventional funding in the United States in a decade outside of the Telltale games, which almost exclusively rely on licensed IP. So any adventure game is going to be outside the mainstream, especially when it is not leveraging an existing IP. In any event, it's not clear to me why "retro" has to mean retro to 1990 rather than retro to 1996 -- by which point 320x200x256 was more or less over and done with. Second, even assuming that in some respects the project should be outside the mainstream and that that means retro sensibilities, that doesn't mean developers must maximize non-mainstream-ness or retro-ness. I mean, EGA would be more retro than VGA, a parser would be more retro than a pointer, keywords more retro than dialogue trees, etc. Cutting VO would push you back to, I dunno, early VGA era?

I say all of this being someone who loves the 320x200 era of adventure games. But DFA isn't my vanity project or yours. It's Double Fine's. If this is the game they want to make, then it's their prerogative. They were deliberately evasive in the KS pitch: "Other than that it will be an old school adventure, we're not sure. That's the beauty of it! Everything will unfold in front of the cameras with help from you!" In my view, all that really means is that it has to resemble some adventure game prior to, say, 2005. There's a huge range of stuff there. (I haven't seen any of the development videos, as I'm not a backer, so if their game were truly not an "old school adventure" but rather, say, another Trine clone a la The Cave, then maybe there would be an argument that they're not delivering.)

All I can say is that, having just gone through the process of releasing Primordia, the market for old school adventure games isn't what you think it is. Almost every review, even the good ones, criticized the game's low resolution and low frames of animation. Almost all of them asserted the puzzles were too hard (which seems incorrect), or involved pixel hunting (which is just factually untrue). A great number of them said there were too many inventory items (you seldom have more than five or six and cap out at like 15, and then only if you're metagaming to max out inventory) or too many puzzles (what else do you want in an adventure game? it's like complaining about Medal of Honor because it involves too much shooting). All of them praised where we removed classic adventure tropes (removing "adventure game logic," backtracking, deaths, impossible situations, and writing stuff down); if people overlooked the ways in which we eliminated these tropes, they tended to criticize them. Several criticized the game for requiring you to write stuff down, which the game doesn't (it has an autonote feature).

If these criticisms were coming exclusively from young reviewers on IGN and GameSpot, it would be one thing, but we got them from even sites dedicated to adventure games and reviewers who are steeped in classic adventure gaming.

Now, I think DF might do a better job designing their graphics to accommodate low resolution, and -- as I said -- the mere fact of classic designers being involved would get them a huge amount more slack. But I'm pretty sure they've read the tea leaves correctly if they've concluded that even hard core adventure fans no longer like traditional adventure games.

Possibly I'm just traumatized. Who knows? (Incidentally, our reviews haven't even been that bad!)

In any event, it's altogether possible that the DF team would just rather work in higher resolution. Again, it's their prerogative! I don't think "old school adventure" entails low resolution given Curse of Monkey Island, Broken Sword, King's Quest VII (yech), Grim Fandango, etc.

Yikes! I've yet to see that look good. The most depressing instance was in Aquaria, and otherwise gorgeous game done by a guy I went to high school with who is a phenomenal artist. The sprites lost so much character with this method. But, maybe DF will make it work. . .

 

This is the Codex, man! Bickering is what we are here for

I actually meant this project in specific, not kickstarter as a whole. Sorry, I should have been more clear.

True, but I meant mainstream as relative to adventure games. I mean, I imagined that without kickstarter, Double Fine would be able to at least match the kind of thing published by Tell Tale.

It doesn't, but if the result is uglier and more expensive, why the heck use it?

I just assumed that stuff would be too much to ask for. I certainly would have preferred a text adventure.

I didn't expect no VO. I just would prefer it if they did that. Specially if that allowed them to make a more expansive project.

I don't mean to say the Double Fine managed their money badly. It is theirs to do as they see fit. What I mean to say is that they seem to have spent it with stuff I couldn't care less about, and I think they could have used it more wisely. Still, the real test of whether they wasted the money I gave them or not is whether the final product seems worth it. I still hope that is the case.

Which is exactly why I want Adventure games outside the mainstream of Adventures. They became something so sad that hardly resembles a game at all! Maybe it is impossible to make an adventure game that is both good (according to my own tastes) and a commercial success. I don't know. What I do know is that it is impossible to make one that is similar to the newer ones that were released and that is good (again, according to my own tastes).

No, but that would be a very nice bonus!

By the way, congratulations on your work with Primordia. It is, I think, the best Wadjet Eye game to date. It also seems to have the most old school vibe among all adventure games I played that were made this century.

 

Cinematic experiences, obviously. Duh.

Yeah, most likely people that just like with RPGs, don't really like the genre they're reviewing. And they'll criticize anything that doesn't fit with their backwards idea of what that genre should be, which in most cases revolves around cinematic experiences and clicking on "continue" to get to the next scene.