Friday, January 17, 2014

Broken Age

The first part of Broken Age finally came out, which has inspired me to actually catch up on what's been happening with its development.
Two years ago Fangamer got the call to get involved in another 2 Player Productions project. To be honest, Double Fine wasn't even on my radar before that time, so I had no idea what to expect. Even now, the only Double Fine game I've played has been Psychonauts, and I've still never finished it.

Still, when the Double Fine Adventure project launched on Kickstarter, I got swept up in the hype. Kickstarters fascinated me, and I was still enjoying the ride from the Order of the Stick Kickstarter, which ended shortly after DFA broke $1 million. So, I backed DFA personally (this was before my Kickstarter account became the official Fangamer Kickstarter account), even though I've never really played nor had much interest in adventure games.

I still don't, really, but I'm glad I backed the project. What many people forget is that there was two parts to that project. There was the game, of course, which is what most people backed the project for. The project had a goal of $400,000, and half of that was to go into the production of the game that became Broken Age. The project exceeded that goal by several million dollars, though, and pretty much all of that excess went to Double Fine to pay for this game, which had since dramatically expanded in scope.

The rest, the $200,000, went to the documentary crew, 2 Player Productions, our friends that got Fangamer involved in the project in the first place.

Of course, as the scope of the game expanded, so did the scope of the documentary. I have no idea how that worked out, exactly, but the impression I get is that the budget for the documentary remained about the same, leaving 2PP to just sort of make it work. Which is really unfortunate, since I was really backing the project for the documentary.

I'm sure I'll enjoy Broken Age when I play it but, as I said, I'm neither a terribly big fan of Double Fine nor adventure games in general. I don't have anything against either one (I work with Double Fine on a daily basis these days), but for the moment I'm just enjoying watching the game development process unfold. 2PP have a truly engaging style, and their episodes so far have endeared Double Fine to me in a way that playing their games likely never would have. It certainly makes running their store easier, in any case.

I'm still a little behind on the episodes of the documentary, and even though "the future" is happening around me right now, I'm still interested to see what will happen to my friends at Double Fine as the story of Broken Age continues to unfold. I suspect the story behind Broken Age will be just as fascinating (or more!) to me as the story in the game itself.

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