Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[suejak]

Well, not every company can make games with European interns.

 

[buzz]

Nothing spells "indie company with money problems but big dreams" than living and having the studio set in the most expensive city of USA and one of the most expensive in the world.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Well, not every company can make games with European interns.

And yet another retarded post. I don't think you can actually go above this.

Especially when you mentioned Daedalic, which makes EVERYTHING better than this shit, including the art which would be the most expensive.

Yeah, it's because the high quality standards DF has that their games are and look much worse than much cheaper games.

 

[suejak]

Fuck, you are such a vacuous loser. You get one chance to understand before I cut you off. You got me on a generous day.

Daedalic doesn't animate. They describe events with (unanimated) narrative and have you solve puzzles by using generic animations and teleporting items onto things. Their average animation has about 4 frames. This makes great screenshots but looks pretty janky in action.

Most of their scenes are static and they don't change cameras.

Educate yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XbnbGkVLfY

Weird walk, repetitive "pick up" and "manipulate" animations, generic talking animation, etc.

I'm not saying these things are important for a game, but that's where DF stuck its money. Every dialogue and every scene is hand-animated, full of moving parts, and has multiple custom camera changes. I'm not saying they needed to have the face/body animated to match the words spoken in every dialogue, but that's what they did.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=FC_di0ecAoM#t=4510

The difference in budget-per-scene is very obvious. Denying this is just boring, not realtalk. You're wrong. Daedalic is a factory that pays peanuts to make budget games.

Even still, Daedalic a) employs an army of interns to do their games, and b) runs out of money, requiring publisher intervention.

 

[buzz]

All that I can get is that Daedalic is doing adventure games the "old-school" effective way, with less frames of animation because it's not an interactive cartoon, whereas Double Fine wanks over irrelevant shit. Broken Age is to adventure games what Call of Duty is to shooters.

 

[suejak]

I agree that Daedalic games are more old-school and more better.

What I'm saying is the REASON Broken Age had to cut over 50% of content (and presumably puzzles) from Act 1 is that their marginal costs of production were too high. They paid high-salary San Fran hipsters to put way too much time and effort into every little detail, resulting in each room, puzzle, and dialogue costing too much for the budget to fund the entire vision. The product is a really carefully constructed and short non-game.

 

[FeelTheRads]

The difference in budget-per-scene is very obvious.

Yes, it's obvious that better looking stuff can be made cheap.
And you're so fucking retarded, showing that video from Deponia which starts with a lot of custom animations, which the game has quite a lot of btw. Way to fucking destroy your point. Retard.

Daedalic is a factory that pays peanuts to make budget games.

Curious how those budget games are better and better looking than BA, huh? Oh, right, but they're not lip-synced.

Even still, Daedalic a) employs an army of interns to do their games,

And this is bad or what?

and b) runs out of money, requiring publisher intervention.

Like when?

You get one chance to understand before I cut you off. You got me on a generous day.

Lawl. Maybe you can threaten to ignore me too. It's gonna be horr

 

[suejak]

You don't even try to understand, you braindead cocksucker. Deponia has a tiny fraction of the custom animations that BA has, because it relies almost entirely on generic animations and unoptimized stuff like the protagonist's slidewalk.

Whether an army of interns is bad or not is a judgement call, but not every company can make games on a shoestring budget with free labour. Double Fine pays its long-term employees a lot of money. (Most or many of its employees have been there for 5+ years.)

Here is a story of a time Daedalic entered into a highly restrictive deal with a publisher in order to finish a game: http://forum.daedalic.de/viewtopic.php?p=10404&sid=e5d194e5974d33033bf4f66db7d93aef#p10404.
They are not independent, if that's your impression.

Here's Tim saying he cut 50% of content and at least one puzzle from the game: http://www.doublefine.com/forums/viewthread/12568/#321769

 

[Infinitron]

I'm not sure that Irvine and Newport Beach are that much cheaper than San Fran.

 

[suejak]

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-livin...ountry2=United+States&city2=San+Francisco,+CA

 

[J_C]

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United States&city1=Irvine, CA&country2=United States&city2=San Francisco, CA

inb4 haters ask why don't they move to another city. Like it is easy to pack up whole families and start a new life in a city far away.

 

[Aeschylus]

I'm not sure that Irvine and Newport Beach are that much cheaper than San Fran.

Having lived in both areas (SF and greater LA), they are quite a bit cheaper. San Fransisco is one of the most expensive cities in the US, if not the world. LA and its surrounding 'burbs are relatively cheap, aside from a few areas.

 

[suejak]

I mean, you could live in an abandoned butcher's shop in Utah and make games with free interns and probably get something pretty good, with Tim's writing talent.

There's more to life than making incline vidya games, unfortunately.

 

[buzz]

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United States&city1=Irvine, CA&country2=United States&city2=San Francisco, CA

inb4 haters ask why don't they move to another city. Like it is easy to pack up whole families and start a new life in a city far away.

Well, it is somewhat common for americans to do that:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/162488/381-million-adults-worldwide-migrate-within-countries.aspx

I'm just saying, you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't complain that you're working for peanuts but also complain that your iPhone bill and your massage therapist are too expensive. Double Fine has its headquarters in the same city Zynga does, that's IMO a sign that it's a bad business decision to make risky indie games in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Broken Age was supposed to be a 400k dollars game. What exactly were they supposed to give us with that money, one fucking "Escape the room" adventure in flash?

 

[J_C]

Broken Age was supposed to be a 400k dollars game. What exactly were they supposed to give us with that money, one fucking "Escape the room" adventure in flash?

Well, to be honest I think we would have gotten a more oldschool type of game, both in graphics and in gameplay. Getting more money meant that they wanted the game to appeal to a lot of people

 

[felipepepe]

Broken Age was supposed to be a 400k dollars game. What exactly were they supposed to give us with that money, one fucking "Escape the room" adventure in flash?

They actually did one of these, FOR FREE: http://www.doublefine.com/games/host_master

400k should have bought us 3-4hs of a game like that. And it would definitely be better than Broken Age.

 

[J_C]

Broken Age was supposed to be a 400k dollars game. What exactly were they supposed to give us with that money, one fucking "Escape the room" adventure in flash?

They actually did one of these, FOR FREE: http://www.doublefine.com/games/host_master

400k should have bought us 3-4hs of a game like that. And it would definitely be better than Broken Age.

This is awesome. :D Why didn't they make BA like this?

 

[felipepepe]

This is awesome. :D Why didn't they make BA like this?

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.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

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.

 

[suejak]

Probs because your German blows.

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

http://af.gog.com/forum/general/goodbye_deponia_gog_release/post54?as=1649904300

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

 

[Crooked Bee]

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.

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

[Daedalic] die in der branche dafuer bekannt sind, das der grossteil ihrer "mitarbeiter" nur durchlauf-praktikanten sind.

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!

 

[Cowboy Moment]

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.

 

[jfrisby]

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).

 

[suejak]

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

 

[Boleskine]

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

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