Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[J_C]

Adventure games are time consuming and expensive.

Meanwhile, 5 people can make Heroine's Quest for free, and bro Pyke will make Stasis on a 100k budget.

And lets conveniently forget that DF is a company, where people work for a living. Tim can't just pay 20k a year for one people, and than ask them to work on the project for 2 years.

If I had game development skills, and got 100K dollars, of course I could make a project on my own for that much money. That money is my 15 year salary (!), I could work on a project for that long. But if several people works on a project, and each have a fix salary (like 60-70K a year), that 100K wouldn't be enought for shit.

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).

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.

 

[evdk]

Well there is a difference between german salary and US salary.

Germany is not Potatoland.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

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

 

[DeepOcean]

RPGCodex: THE place for game designer stalkers, fanboys, pseudo-intillectuals to come and sperg!

Pseudo-intellectual describes most of the posters on this forum who aren't me. I'm a contrarian who applies Sawyer critical thinking to concepts.

Now it's more likely.

 

[J_C]

Well there is a difference between german salary and US salary.

Germany is not Potatoland.

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

 

[Zed]

high profile doesn't mean high business

 

[felipepepe]

Adventure games are time consuming and expensive.

Meanwhile, 5 people can make Heroine's Quest for free, and bro Pyke will make Stasis on a 100k budget.

And lets conveniently forget that DF is a company, where people work for a living. Tim can't just pay 20k a year for one people, and than ask them to work on the project for 2 years.

If I had game development skills, and got 100K dollars, of course I could make a project on my own for that much money. That money is my 15 year salary (!), I could work on a project for that long. But if several people works on a project, and each have a fix salary (like 60-70K a year), that 100K wouldn't be enought for shit.

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.

 

[J_C]

Adventure games are time consuming and expensive.

Meanwhile, 5 people can make Heroine's Quest for free, and bro Pyke will make Stasis on a 100k budget.

And lets conveniently forget that DF is a company, where people work for a living. Tim can't just pay 20k a year for one people, and than ask them to work on the project for 2 years.

If I had game development skills, and got 100K dollars, of course I could make a project on my own for that much money. That money is my 15 year salary (!), I could work on a project for that long. But if several people works on a project, and each have a fix salary (like 60-70K a year), that 100K wouldn't be enought for shit.

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.

 

[felipepepe]

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".

 

[RPGMaster]

Adventure games are time consuming and expensive.

Meanwhile, 5 people can make Heroine's Quest for free, and bro Pyke will make Stasis on a 100k budget.

And lets conveniently forget that DF is a company, where people work for a living. Tim can't just pay 20k a year for one people, and than ask them to work on the project for 2 years.

If I had game development skills, and got 100K dollars, of course I could make a project on my own for that much money. That money is my 15 year salary (!), I could work on a project for that long. But if several people works on a project, and each have a fix salary (like 60-70K a year), that 100K wouldn't be enought for shit.

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.

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

 

[J_C]

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".

True.

 

[Darth Roxor]

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

 

[DeepOcean]

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.

 

[J_C]

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,

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.

Kotick is the devil incarnate but:
"He missed all the milestones, missed all the deadlines, as Tim has a reputation of doing."

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

"Look: If you go and do a deal with somebody else, pay back the money that was advanced to you.'

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.

 

[J_C]

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

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

 

[DeepOcean]

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,

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.

Kotick is the devil incarnate but:
"He missed all the milestones, missed all the deadlines, as Tim has a reputation of doing."

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

"Look: If you go and do a deal with somebody else, pay back the money that was advanced to you.'

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.

 

[J_C]

Cool avatar, amirite?

 

[Aeschylus]

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.

They did state outright in the documentary that the future of the company hinged on this game.

 

[tuluse]

They did state outright in the documentary that the future of the company hinged on this game.

I think they meant "are we going to be an independent self-published company or a publisher slave" not would the company go out of business.

 

[Metro]

Bottom line is Schafer is terrible at budgeting. Nothing says they have to stay in San Francisco. Their staff is overpaid. It's basically a form of welfare. You can cut the cost of everything there by 30% and still be able to make a good adventure game. Hell, you could cut the cost by 70% and still make a game as poor as the one they just made.

 

[DeepOcean]

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.

No, I'm not sure and just speculating but I see you are really sure everything is going fine over there.

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

When I played Brutal Legend there was something that I noticed, a quite empty world that screamed: CUT CONTENT.

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.

It could be Kotick just being a jerk but imagine another scenario:
Kotick: Well, we advanced them a lot of money, there is no way they wasted all of that, let's get what wasn't wasted back .
Tim: Sorry bros, we wasted all the money on our hipster checkered shirts. It wasn't on purpose, now do you want 10 bucks that are on my wallet?

 

[felipepepe]

On a regular day I would brofist Tim Schafer for wasting Kotick's money, but now that he waste MY fucking money, I just consider both of them assholes.

 

[DeepOcean]

On a regular day I would brofist Tim Schafer for wasting Kotick's money, but now that he waste MY fucking money, I just consider both of them assholes.

Well, I feel no symphaties for Kotick too but one sell shit and people know very well what they are buying and the other promise the heavens and sell shit. Who is worse J_C?

 

[J_C]

On a regular day I would brofist Tim Schafer for wasting Kotick's money, but now that he waste MY fucking money, I just consider both of them assholes.

Well, I feel no symphaties for Kotick too but one sell shit and people know very well what they are buying and the other promise the heavens and sell shit. Who is worse J_C?

I'm done arguing about this. Broken Age is not shit at all. If you feel that way, fine. My money on the KS was money well spent.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

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.

And it stands to reason that they should thus own the IP, source code, and all the assets, yes? Of course, this depends on the contract between DF and Vivendi, but that's how these kinds of agreements usually work - the party commissioning the work owns the results.