Decline Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

No ideia. First time I played it, took me almost 2 hours to get all the 21 jokes. That's like half of what Double Fine did with 3 million dollars for Act. 1 of Broken Age. And the jokes here are funnier and make full use of the verb system.

 

Can anyone tell me where this "Daedalic games are made by interns" thing comes from? This is the second time I see it on the Codex, but Google offers nothing on the matter.

 

Probs because your German blows.

It's mostly a second-hand thing in English.

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/goodbye_deponia_gog_release/post54

You can find lots of talk about ex-interns who say that Daedalic is 80% interns.

 

Google "Daedalic Praktikanten" and you get stuff like this:

http://forum.golem.de/kommentare/ga...-von-daedalic/60339,2923747,2923747,read.html

I've no idea to what extent that is true, though. If so, however, then their interns do one hell of a job!

 

Yeah, it's basically like one or two comments, not close to enough to convince me this is actually the case. Especially since Daedalic's adventure games show a very strong continuity in terms art style, writing, design, and so forth. I mean, it's pretty easy to see that mostly the same people worked on all the Deponia games. If they can accept a college student for a 4 month internship, train them to be able to work with their tools and processes, and still have them do enough useful work for a significant net gain, then that's an impressive feat in itself. The supposed 80% figure I will never believe, that's just logistically impossible.

 

It's slander and rumor started by one DF forum person in response to the Daedalic CEO's comments (when DF ran out of money).

 

Man, that one DF forum person has a lot of sway in the German adventure game community.

 

Here's where the discussion started in the Double Fine forums:

http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/9788/P500/#284995

 

And this is Daedalic's founder quote that got people so butthurt over there:

If armchair designers talk bad about Broken Age, they are wrong cause they never made a game before. If the fucking founder of Daedalic points out how bad Broken Age is, he is now a slave driver. Also, note that they are speaking out of their asses. The guy that starts all this rumor does it based on the fact that Daedalic's JOBS page was only hiring interims:

 

Now this guy is the real deal, his investigative skills are truly something to envy. I didn't know that programming and art experience on Germany grow on trees to the point of interns being able to substitute real programmers and artists.

"Most of them work for free in order to add something to their portfolio." This part is funny, you can see that he thinks that a portfolio is like a sticker album and the guy that never did a decent sized project is somehow a ace at programming that is just misunderstood and exploited.

 

Talked to a friend who works in IT in Germany, apparently Daedalic had a presentation there recently.
Anyway he said it's very unlikely for Daedalic to run on 80% interns, in most big cities IT engineers are really sought after, maybe 80% of art/sound design being interns at some point would be plausible since people in those depts actually do need quite a bit on their resume, which makes sense.
Also Daedalic was not looking for interns when they made a presentation at where he's working.

 

Let's just think of this a minute. So on average their games cost 270.000 euros? And the Daedalic games look pretty good, they have quite a lot of content, and they are in development for around 1-1,5 years. No way in hell you can pay acceptable salaries to a dozen people (I assume this is their team size) if they have a family to run. Either they use interns for a lot of things, who work for free, or really these devs live on bread and water, and slaving away for minimal wage (if I look the german salaries). I'm not an expert, but if we do basic math: 270K, for 12 people for 18 months of development: 1250 euros/month/person (and this is even lower if the tax comes off). In Germany? People earn more in hungary FFS! Sorry, not buying this.

 

Or they don't live in California or anyplace else in :kwanzania:

 

I told the same things earlier, and I was told that Germany is not that much cheaper then the US.

 

You can't really average the budget for such a wide range of games. The Breakout was a Java game with art based on 640x480 doodles, minimal animation, and most of the characters voiced by Daedalic programmers. If they'd spent 270k on that they'd be financially incompetent too.

All their post-Java games also share the same engine, which supposedly allows you to create games "without any programming knowledge whatsoever". This costs them a flat €1000 per game for a full commercial license.

edit: Hey, custom title

 

Yes I know my math was not accurate, I was just trying to make a very rough estimate. Still, if you have a small team of 10 or so people working for more then a year, you have to pay their monthly salary. And it would be very thin if you only pay them 1200 per month.

I'm not buying this. You have to make the art, even if you have the engine. You have to do the voiceover (even if it is inhouse), script the puzzles, maybe make some basic marketing.

 

It is a little mysterious how Daedalic can make games for so little, aside from their early cheap-o crappy ones. For the record, I don't actually believe their games are all made by interns, but even in the early 90s budgets for 2d adventure games were getting up towards $1m. There's probably a certain element of experience and efficiency involved, but they have to be cutting a lot of corners somewhere.

 

It wasn't. Original quote is in this thread, but it says the same as the English quote.

Is Stasis expected to get $900k+ from external sources? Their Kickstarter budget is only a third of the average Daedalic game. They're using the same engine, incidentally.

 

Actually Daedalic doesn't do their sound/music/voice-acting in house, if the credits on mobygames are to be believed. The cost of living in Hamburg is half of the one in San Francisco according to this website.
Maybe it's the small stuff, like Daedalic using a normal coffee machine while Double Fine is ordering from Starbucks .

Here's a better measuring stick: According to Tim on Twitter, his previous adventure games had the following budget:
100k for Monkey Island
600k for Day of the Tentacle
1.5 million for Full Throtle
3 million for Grim Fandango
Let's assume he didn't adjust those budget estimates for inflation. With some internet calculator I got this:
$180k MI
$970k DotT
$2,3 mil FT
4,3 mil GF
LucasArts was still in San Francisco. Take also into consideration that technology was much more out-to-date than it is now and probably much more expensive than what we have nowadays, as well as the developing techniques. Admiteddly, MI, Dott and FT were done on the Scumm engine by people that had quite some experience with it already. But Grim Fandango had a brand new engine, with 3d models and everything.


Tim tweeted those estimates during the kickstarter campaign, so I assume this was his way of saying "with the amount of money we have right now, we should be able to do a game like this one I did before". Does any of you feel like Broken Age has the same quality those titles did?

 

There's certainly a high amount of unpaid internships as well, though I doubt it's anywhere near 60%. A quick google search shows a bunch of aspiring artists happy to have gotten a chance to show off their work in Deponia and Memoria. And scripting in Visionaire really does look easy as hell, so I guess they could have pushed that off on interns too.

None of this is unusual in Germany, mind you. Especially not in an industry that a lot of people really, really want to get into.

 

And has been in development for years and years now in someone's spare time, and only has a couple people working on it. Apples to oranges. Daedalic pumps out games pretty quickly, and does it professionally.

 

Sure, and there is nothing wrong with it. But it is unfair from the company leader to laugh at DF, and say how little their own games cost, when half of their staff are interns, while obviousy it is not the case in DF's case.

 

Eh, I don't really want to fund a San Francisco lifestyle for some low level animator when I can get the same thing from a bright eyed intern for the price of a warm handshake. DF could easily have outsourced to Germany.