Decline Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

J_C let's conveniently forget that Double Fine is always working on multiple projects at the same time and they didn't have to hire all those fancy artists and voice actors.

 

The budget of a typical Daedalic adventure game is around 500k, according to their founder. And you can't really complain about the length or production values of those games (well, maybe about english VA, but I don't think that's a budgeting problem).

 

That's because the great majority of the work in their games is done by interns.

 

And midgets as well, hard to make a good adventure game without a midget.

 

Whispered World 2 looks a lot pricier than that, what with the fancy 3D made to look like 2D and all that.

(Also Memoria facial animations sucked, not that it mattered)

 

Maybe, I think the figure referred to the likes of Deponia more than anything. TWW2 wasn't even announced at the time of his post.

 

Breaking news, Daedalic has caught a band of programming midgets and forces them to make Adventure video games against their will while dressed in ridiculous garments, video has leaked from the premises:


Up next, is KING Art really relying on the tears of tortured kittens to fuel their puzzle design and has Wadjet Eye Games sacrificed children to appease the dark lords in order to keep their budget down? Stay tuned to find out more.

 

Well there is a difference between german salary and US salary.
But let's cut this short, I never disagreed about the bad financial management of this project. I'm just saying that this doesn't make DF the worse managed company ever.

 

Germany is not Potatoland.

 

I remember Hobgoblin42, Lord bless his soul, quoting some figures regarding programmer and artist salaries, and those were comparable to US ones.

 

Now it's more likely.

 

I know, but neither the US, especially a high profile company like DF.

 

You can't make a game like Skyrim with 3 people, nor a Battlefield clone or something like Civilization. Those are expensive and complex games, even with shitty graphics.

But adventure games? They are probably the cheapest kind of game to make, comparable only to roguelikes and jRPGs on RPG Maker. There are fucking countless of adventure games made on AGS, all for free, for fun. Hell, I made a 1-hour adventure game on AGS three years ago. So excuse me, but Tim Schafer saying that "Adventure games are time consuming and expensive" is a load of crap. What is expensive is the inflated and misguided structure that he had to sustain, with expensive Los Angeles hipsters doing waaaaaaay to much animation.

 

I assume you watched the documentary, so you should know that building the engine, figuring out how to make these kind of visuals possible was not an easy task. Sure, he put much emphasis on animation and visuals, but he wanted to make an unique looking game, which DF is always known for. He probably could make a run of the mill pixelated retro game, and you probably would have liked that. But if you look the games of DF, they always tried something knew. Psychonauts looked different than Brutal Legend, Costume Quest was also very different, so as Stacking.

 

Then again, Double Fine's way of making adventure games was expensive, not the genre. The honest answer here would be "we got excited, lost control and aimed too high, it was a mistake", not "adventure games are expensive".

 

The medium does not dictate how unique a game can look. Monkey Island looks completely different from Gemini Rue. Both use pixal art.

 

True.

 

Your new-found compliance won't get you your avatar back, J_C

 

When you see Daedalic making adventure games with real puzzles and great visuals for a fraction of DF budget, Tim is making excuses. There is a reason to why California is fucked the way it is, it's impossible to keep costs down, we are talking about a kickstarter project that was supposed to keep a decent sized developer financially afloat with California wages and costs. There is a reason to why Obsidian didn't stopped making AAA games even with kickstarter money.

The cave was a flop, Spacebase DF-9 is a really small project, hack 'n Slash as well, there is no new other big project to keep things going, they could have some resources left but with the way they manage their finances I'm really not sure. Tim must be betting entirely on Broken Age for Double Fine survival, with all that loans he took he must be expecting it to be a hit, now you can see why the puzzles are so easy. This was totally Tim's fault that didn't realized since Psychonauts days that his company has serious issues, he assumed a lot of compromises and now he is between a rock and a hard place: To make Broken Age in the way it must had been done, it would mean a lot of difficult changes in Double Fine or another big project with publisher money to keep things going and either things happened.

Kotick is the devil incarnate but:
"Vivendi had advanced him like 15 or 20 million dollars," Kotick explained. "He missed all the milestones, missed all the deadlines, as Tim has a reputation of doing."

On the change to EA after Activision dumped Brutal Legend: "Look: If you go and do a deal with somebody else, pay back the money that was advanced to you.' That was all we were looking for. We ultimately got a fraction of the money that had been advanced to him, and as far as I know, that was the end of it. "

Yeah, I think the backers of Double Fine weren't the first ones to be fooled by the Double Fine hipsters.

 

Stop pulling thing out from your ass. You can't even know their full financial situation, and it is sure as hell that Broken Age is not an all or nothing bet form them. They consantly manage 3-4 small projects for years know, and they are still standing.

And yet 10 months after going to EA, the game was ready, bug free, with all the content in it.

What? They paid the salary of the devs, who worked on the game. And after Activision dumping the game, they want that money back? Fuck them, and everybody who stands on Kotick's side.

 

I don't want it back. I have the most unique avatar on the Codex.

 

Cool avatar, amirite?