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Double Fine Adventure is… Broken Age

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after a brisk nap - 04 March 2015 08:35 AM

They were always blurred (obviously this was a much bigger deal back when the first part of the game wasn’t out, and the people watching were the biggest fans).

While there shouldn’t be any concrete, specific spoilers for major things in the game, you do get some general descriptions of things like certain areas or characters that appear, or that certain actors are doing voiceovers, or Tim discussing themes he’s exploring in the story, etc. Basically the kind of info you would get from a review, except from the inside. If you watch all the episodes of the documentary before playing, you will be somewhat familiar with much of what’s in the game ahead of time, and this may reduce feelings of surprise as you play. If you’re very hardcore about coming in with no prior knowledge, I’d stay away, but otherwise you should be fine.

Yeah - I just watched most of the first episode, and Tim talked a bit about the themes. I personally think knowing a story’s theme(s) can be spoiler territory, so I’ll watch the rest after I’ve played both episodes.

     

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nomadsoul - 04 March 2015 04:39 AM

All the Sony and other Docs included in game or uploaded on youtube are open and free, and much more high in production.

I won’t speak for the content, but the BA documentary has top notch production values (if that’s what you meant), as good or better than the ones you mentioned.

     
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Was thinking that releasing the doco for free was a good move for people to see the challenges the game went through and perhaps repair a bit of Double Fine’s image in the minds of those eager to burn Kickstarter to the ground.

     

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eh i think those who are eager to burn kickstarter probably always were either way, and will continue to be.
For me, the bottom line is kickstarter projects can produce awesome games. Just like any model, it can produce bad games… (or no games) too. But i really like what iv seen from many of these released games.

     
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thejobloshow - 04 March 2015 06:18 PM

Was thinking that releasing the doco for free was a good move for people to see the challenges the game went through and perhaps repair a bit of Double Fine’s image in the minds of those eager to burn Kickstarter to the ground.

I think those who jumped to pithy conclusions about Double Fine are not the same people likely to watch a 20 hour documentary about the game.

     

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I’m a backer and like the game but 20h is a bit lengthy to me… Would be nice if a summary of 3hrs max would become available as well. I don’t think I’m gonna watch it without even though I’m interested.

     
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While we heavily anticipate part 2 of BA, I noticed Double Fine had to let go several employees that did work at some point for Broken age.

JP Lebreton is currently running a patreon to work on his own game: https://www.patreon.com/jpl

John Bernhelm/Swisshelm seems to be looking for a job, based on his website: http://www.swisshelm.com/. (seems that the action adventure he was working on was canned)
although based on his twitter steam, he might be working with Telltale now?

Patrick Hackett & Drew Skillman also started their own company. http://skillmanandhackett.com/

Jane Ng and Chris Remo now work for Campo Santo http://www.camposanto.com/
And Lydia Choy now works at Oculus. https://twitter.com/choy

I understand the game industry can be a risky business, but is this a typical thing to let go so many employees?

     

Max: Right! We’ll travel through this dimensional portal on the top of the bar!
Sam: That’s spilled beer, rockhead.
Max: Oh in that case ...

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Were any of them working on Broken Age?
They finished some projects (HacknSlash, Costume Quest 2, Massive Chalice, Spacebase DF-9), could be the case that they moved on to other stuff (like Ron after The Cave).

     
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If there’s no project for them to work with, yes. For an example inXile has done their hardest to keep both, designers and developers occupied with overlapping projects so, that when the design work isn’t required as much and the coders and the artists get cracking on full speed, the designers can start on a new game. For them it was Wasteland 2 and Torment.

After the design work is done for Torment they hope to jump in Bard’s Tale, but if that doesn’t happen some of them are obviously out of job as there wouldn’t be that much for them to do.

To my understanding game business, because of the project nature of the work, is pretty harsh environment to work in. That’s why many devs opt to jump out from the business and go to somewhere more predictable.

     
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Oh, and many of the DF layouts were because of cancelled projects, that were not even yet announced.

     
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jaap - 10 March 2015 04:17 PM

While we heavily anticipate part 2 of BA, I noticed Double Fine had to let go several employees that did work at some point for Broken age.

JP Lebreton is currently running a patreon to work on his own game: https://www.patreon.com/jpl

John Bernhelm/Swisshelm seems to be looking for a job, based on his website: http://www.swisshelm.com/. (seems that the action adventure he was working on was canned)
although based on his twitter steam, he might be working with Telltale now?

Patrick Hackett & Drew Skillman also started their own company. http://skillmanandhackett.com/

Jane Ng and Chris Remo now work for Campo Santo http://www.camposanto.com/
And Lydia Choy now works at Oculus. https://twitter.com/choy

I understand the game industry can be a risky business, but is this a typical thing to let go so many employees?

The layoffs you’re referring to happened in November 2014 and were unrelated to Broken Age. They were due to a publisher cancelling an unannounced project, most likely the action/adventure you mentioned. Obviously we’ve never been told who the publisher was, but I think it’s a pretty good guess it was Midnight City (the publisher of Costume Quest 2) or its parent company Majesco. Prior to the layoffs, reports came out that Midnight City was in serious financial trouble, and then right after the layoffs Midnight City shut down. It’s therefore very unlikely the cancellation had anything to do with the unannounced game’s quality, but merely with the publisher’s financial demise.

Likewise the employees laid off were probably just the ones unlucky enough to be on the cancelled project. (Or, in JP’s case, he may have been between projects since Spacebase was wrapping up.) It’s arbitrary and harsh, but it’s generally better project management to keep people on their existing projects and lay off the ones whose project was cancelled than to lay off a couple people per project, shuffle people around, and then slow all your projects down while the new transfers ramp up on each project. Besides, it’s not like the people on the other projects would really deserve to be laid off instead. There’s no good solution, somebody’s gotta go.

12 people were laid off from Double Fine, including JP LeBreton and John Bernhelm who confirmed this on Twitter, as I recall. We don’t know the names of the other 10, nor is it really any of our business to know.

The other people you mention above were not part of the layoffs. They left earlier, for the reasons you describe, and the timing of them leaving is sufficiently far apart that I doubt it’s any sign of them jumping from a sinking ship, it’s just normal for people to move on and do other things.

As for whether layoffs like this are normal in the game industry . . . well, at one point someone made a whole website dedicated to tracking game industry layoffs, so I’d say yeah, kinda. I’m not sure of the stats, but if anything I’d suspect other layoffs tend to be even more severe on average. A lot of larger game studios only build one big game at a time, unlike Double Fine, so what seems to be common is that the game is cancelled or it even successfully ships and then almost everybody (except sometimes the senior staff) gets laid off. Frown This seems to happen when the studio didn’t have a good plan for starting up a new game while the first game is finishing.* Or sometimes they did have a good plan at one point but it got disrupted.

*Extra Credits touched indirectly on this problem of hiring and firing in a video describing why games sometimes don’t have a long enough pre-production period before they go into full production. “What do you do with all of your programmers?” indeed. (Not to mention your artists, level designers, etc.)

Multiple small teams within a larger game studio, like Double Fine, are designed to make it easier to move people from one project to the next so that layoffs are less common. And as much as it may look like that system failed here, I think this might be the first layoff Double Fine has had, and it’s been around a long time. So ironically, as much as people act as if Double Fine is bad at project management and finances, the fact that they avoided any layoffs for so many years in a brutal industry suggests they may actually be pretty good at those things.

     
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00SCX8KPO/ref=s9_simh_bw_p63_d17_i7?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-5&pf_rd_r=0D58EJVW5M0BN0XGAE6K&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=559400347&pf_rd_i=300703

Wonder if this is accurate.

It would suggest an April release date for Part 2.

     

An adventure game is nothing more than a good story set with engaging puzzles that fit seamlessly in with the story and the characters, and looks and sounds beautiful.
Roberta Williams

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I hope that’s not it, that would mean amazon is more informed than the backers…
(It’s probably around that time)

     
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Lucien21 - 16 March 2015 06:07 AM

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00SCX8KPO/ref=s9_simh_bw_p63_d17_i7?pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-5&pf_rd_r=0D58EJVW5M0BN0XGAE6K&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=559400347&pf_rd_i=300703

Wonder if this is accurate.

It would suggest an April release date for Part 2.

They’ve said previously they were shooting for April, so I’m going to guess it’s accurate, but we’ll probably know soon because they said they have to go gold some weeks in advance in order to launch at the same time digital and retail.

     
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April would be wonderful, I really liked the first part.

     

I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.

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