Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[Zed]

This isn't about honesty or ethics or anything like that. This is about being stupid as shit with money and having horrible management.

Well it is easy for you to say how to run a medium sized game company.

It isn't about running a company, it's about managing a project.
And I am quite capable of project management, actually.

 

[jfrisby]

Tim was practically born into corporate laid-back culture (lucking into a job @lucasarts), then immediately founded a new company and ran it off publisher money for a decade.. Not exactly a life that makes one aware of the realities of the rest of the world, especially in San Francisco. Still, they insist on calling themselves indie - while trashing the artistic side of things prior to it becoming their niche.

I think the game will probably turn out fine (although it'd be kind of hilarious if Tim Schafer killed the genre twice) - it's still an adventure game to look forward to. I think this announcement was probably calculated and determined to be good marketing (in lieu of an actual marketing budget, the world is talking). /conspiracy

 

[Dexter]

Eh, you people are being unnecessarily melodramatic.

What this boils down to (so far) is the game being delayed for about half a year, which happens quite a lot and is to be expected for large software projects.
They haven't sold out to a publisher, they haven't laid off half their team, cancelled the game or anything like that and they're being open and honest about it since people backed the game and that was one of the promises from the start.

And I agree with the one guy above, I've said several times that the documentary alone has been more than worth my pledge money (I was somewhat cautious cause it was a new concept and all that) and if they allowed for it I'd still likely raise my pledge to get something physical out of it.

 

[RPGMaster]

It's obvious that BUILDING A WHOLE NEW ENGINE burned through the money like Gabe Newell and a packet of Cheetos. They had only started working on the actual game when they began running into money issues in the documentary. Someone should have said, "Listen Tim, there are already perfectly good engines for adventure games that we can use for free now, and if you really want to build one for future projects we can do that when this game ships with the revenue it generates insteads of wasting backers' money on it."

3D art also takes far longer to produce than 2D art is and is something that could have immediately set off the warning alarms for anyone dealing with a limited budget. 3D art for this game was completely unessential (I'd wager the art style would look much better in 2D anyway) and when working with a small budget the unessestial stuff should be the first to go.

Schafer wanted the money to go to the moon, he got the money to go to Mars instead, then decided he wanted to go to Jupiter and ran out of fuel before he could leave orbit.

 

[Diablo169]

I would like to state plainly that if you make 833% of your initial funding target you can afford to hire a fucking project manager with a basic grasp of budgeting.

 

[keppj0nes]

I would like to state plainly that if you make 833% of your initial funding target you can afford to hire a fucking project manager with a basic grasp of budgeting.

They did hire 2 managerial people, a man and a woman, when the kickstarter finished. But it's hard to tell what all they do. They seem to spend a lot of time telling Tim things he doesn't want to hear.

 

[Mrowak]

Definite evidence that game designers are not managers, should never be trusted with large amounts of money or in charge of any budget, and gives a perfectly good reason for the piss poor pay they generally receive in the mainstream industry.

I will take a creative designer (who can occasionally make a good game, even if not on time) over a manager (who makes banal shit boring stuff because that is what the most profitable) any time.

So you'd take a good designer over a poor manager? No shit Sherlock.

Frankly I'd take a good manager over a bunch of well-meaning, talented designers who cannot organise their work efficiently (unless this is a very small project we are talking about).

But with the DF we still have a very good chance for getting a good game, even if it's late, but you won't get anything good from a profit oriented EA manager.

What word in the phrase "good manager" prompted you to think of EA?

Managers can't produce good games at all.

Sure they can. Because they actually manage whole teams of people and coordinate work between them while constantly checking the milestones against deadlines and financial constraints. That's actually a dictionary definition of a "producer" (one that produces). A really good manager is *always* involved in the design process coordinating work of the designers and understanding what they are talking about. In many respects he is a designer, but the one who represents "the voice of reason" rather than "the voice of artistic inspiration" or whatever.

Designers can produce good games, even if there is a chance that they fuck up.

No, games are actually made by the people who create assets. Pure designers limit themselves to *designing* games. Sure, they know a lot about programming and other considerations but a day has only 24 hours so they cannot really contribute in any other way than creating a design, supervising that their design is implemented and making design changes that are foced on account of reported development difficulties (e.g. the framework we are using does not support radiant AI; we need to make do with something different) and production difficulties (e.g. the manager says we don't have enough time/money to go with those quests so we need to dumb it down streamline it).

Of course, this is a little bit different in 2-3 men projects.

Imagine that there are two teams. Both teams have programmers, artists and shit, but team I only has manager types, while team II has a few good designers. From 10 out of 10 occasions, team I will produce a dumbed down, safe, popamole game, because that is the least risky and easy to do.

Not if the manager weighs risk factor properly and consults the marketing department if its worth fighting for a particular niche in the market. It may well be that with the limited resources he has this will become the best course of action. It's the matter of indentifying project's goals.

Note the assumption here: our hypothetical manager does not represent an "external party" in this case, but the studio itself.

Team II will try to make a good game and even if their fail at their attempt, they will get it next time.

They won't because no one in their right mind will give them money.

Look, I know it's a popular image that a manager is a clueless fag, a free-loader who doesn't know jack shit about games and is there to whine about irrelevant issues deprived of any context. Having worked with a few competent people who actually bother analyzing project documentation, get acquainted with all teams and have they way around with people I can say that a good manager can be a saviour - just the thing that makes a hopeless endeavour turn into a great undertaking.

 

[buzz]

This is bad news not just for the people who were interested in Broken Age, but for Kickstarter people overall. Double Fine's game was and still is probably the one that people think about when we talk about crowdfunding - only to turn into a dud with cut content, poor management, bad concepts and implementation, delays and so on. If this bombs, well that will certainly fuck up a lot of everyone's expectations about crowdfunding.

I also have to wonder about the other guys outside of Double Fine. If a bunch of people who are supposedly experienced into making games and surviving in a modern digital age can't into budget and everything, what about everyone else? I haven't followed other adventure Kickstarter campaigns, but what are the odds that stuff like Tex Murphy, Jane Jensen's people in a farm making games, SpaceVenture, Hero U and others which barely passed their initial goal are going to fare any better with much bigger and harder concepts to master? Nevermind the stuff that we already were more than skeptical about, like Shroud of the Avatar, Godus, Takedown or Republique.

How many big flops can this take before it comes crashing down along with the industry in general?

 

[Blackthorne]

Documentary-schmockumenary. If I wanted to watch a video of a trainwreck, I'd put on "The Fugative". Or maybe "Ishtar".


Bt

 

[felipepepe]

How funny that Tim bashes publishers on his newspost, when people like him are the reason publisher exists... if with 800% of your budget you can't make one fucking game, then clearly you are incapable of handling money and must work under a tight leash, controlled by people with an actual sense of how managing stuff...

 

[abnaxus]

What an embarrassment. Clearly the sign was on the wall.

 

[AstroZombie]

Documentary-schmockumenary. If I wanted to watch a video of a trainwreck, I'd put on "The Fugative". Or maybe "Ishtar".


Bt

How many games would you be able to make with the 400k they've set aside for the documentary?

 

[wergle]

What the fuck happened

 

[DeepOcean]

What the fuck happened

Just the usual, Double Fine ran out of money, people are mad this time because it is their money wasted instead of EA/THQ money.

 

[ghostdog]

I'm more mad about the fact they're going to release the game in two episodes. I hate that kind of episodic crap.

 

[evdk]

I'm more mad about the fact they're going to release the game in two episodes. I hate that kind of episodic crap.

Well from the descriptions and previews the game has been split in two parts almost from the beginning (Space Boy and Sacrifice Girl - makes you wonder how sour of the moment the decision to get more money by going with episodic release really was) so there should noz be much change in gameplay. I seriously doubt they planned to let you switch between characters freelly and let you exchange inventory items DotT style, so no big loss there.

 

[ghostdog]

Well from the descriptions and previews the game has been split in two parts almost from the beginning (Space Boy and Sacrifice Girl - makes you wonder how sour of the moment the decision to get more money by going with episodic release really was) so there should noz be much change in gameplay. I seriously doubt they planned to let you switch between characters freelly and let you exchange inventory items DotT style, so no big loss there.

I seriously doubt they'll release the boy and girl segments separately because they already have the first girl and the first boy part. It would certainly be pretty disappointing if you can't freely swap between characters and interact somehow with each other in order to solve puzzles. The only thing that has me hoping is that it's the integration of such mechanics that made them fall behind in schedule (or at least one of the reasons).

 

[evdk]

It would certainly be pretty disappointing if you can't freely swap between characters and interact somehow with each other in order to solve puzzles. The only thing that has me hoping is that it's the integration of such mechanics that made them fall behind in schedule (or at least one of the reasons).

Ï can practically guarantee there will be no such mechanics in the final release and you can quote me. The preview that I've read certainly never mentioned any such thing.

 

[Cosmic Misogynerd]

Eh, you people are being unnecessarily melodramatic.

What this boils down to (so far) is the game being delayed for about half a year, which happens quite a lot and is to be expected for large software projects.
They haven't sold out to a publisher, they haven't laid off half their team, cancelled the game or anything like that and they're being open and honest about it since people backed the game and that was one of the promises from the start.

Is not only the delay. Is the fact that the game is going to be cut and only the first half is going to be released, in a early access fashion (a late alpha or beta). If this was just a delay, fine, but is also the fact that they admitted to be utterly unable of managing a project on time and with a given budget.

 

[Jarpie]

J_C

For there to be a good game the project needs both, a very good and competent manager who keeps taps on the schedule, expendature, what kind of course corrections they need to make, what they can do etc. and a very good creative designer who can then design the fucking game within the fucking restrcitions the budget and schedule gives.

I know that it's normal for game to go over budget and over schedule because some things doesn't work in practice as it was designed, doing something takes longer than expected, or there are some other unexpected delays but this Double Fine's Broken Age seems to have been mismanaged to hell and back.

Competent project manager should've at least hit within the 20-30% over/under budget, maybe even 50% could be acceptable but if it's true that they're doing 5-6 million game when they had 1,8 million for the game is just utterly fucking ridiculous, especially for someone who has worked in the industry for over 20 years who should know better.

 

[toro]

DF is now in the posture of an retarded child that gets beaten to a pulp.

 

[felipepepe]

I'm more mad about the fact they're going to release the game in two episodes. I hate that kind of episodic crap.

Well from the descriptions and previews the game has been split in two parts almost from the beginning (Space Boy and Sacrifice Girl - makes you wonder how sour of the moment the decision to get more money by going with episodic release really was) so there should noz be much change in gameplay. I seriously doubt they planned to let you switch between characters freelly and let you exchange inventory items DotT style, so no big loss there.

I doubt they will split it this way... will probably be something like King Quest 7, with both stories running in parallel.

 

[tuluse]

I thought being able to switch between the characters was confirmed. Tim talked about how a flaw in many PnC adventure games was that you had to focus on a single puzzle and he wanted a mechanic where you had more than 1 at a time so if you were stuck on one you could work on the other. (holy run-on sentence batman)

 

[Dexter]

Is not only the delay. Is the fact that the game is going to be cut and only the first half is going to be released, in a early access fashion (a late alpha or beta). If this was just a delay, fine, but is also the fact that they admitted to be utterly unable of managing a project on time and with a given budget.

Every game has features and likely locations cut when time potentially runs out and there's a shitload of games on Steam Early Access for likely the same reason: http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Early Access
There's even a few KickStarters in there like Planetary Annihilation, War for the Overworld or Xenonauts.

The only difference is that Double Fine are being honest and open about what is going on while people like Fargo and others keep it to themselves.

 

[RPGMaster]

Is not only the delay. Is the fact that the game is going to be cut and only the first half is going to be released, in a early access fashion (a late alpha or beta). If this was just a delay, fine, but is also the fact that they admitted to be utterly unable of managing a project on time and with a given budget.

Every game has features and likely locations cut when time potentially runs out and there's a shitload of games on Steam Early Access for likely the same reason: http://store.steampowered.com/genre/Early Access
There's even a few KickStarters in there like Planetary Annihilation, War for the Overworld or Xenonauts.

The only difference is that Double Fine are being honest and open about what is going on while people like Fargo and others keep it to themselves.

No the difference is that they are spending twice their budget, which was already ten times more than they originally asked for!