Double Fine on honesty in development
Posted: Thu May 22, 2014 3:46 pm
In this interview, Double Fine talks about Massive Chalice, their Game of Thrones-meets-XCOM strategy game that got kickstarted, and how they changed their game development strategy after Broken Age.
As everyone remembers, Broken Age kind of made a little more than their funding goal (just a few tiny millions of dollars more), and so Double Fine got more and more ambitious, and after several months, completely out of the blue, shamefully revealed to the public that they had run out of money and started a second crowdfunding thing to make up the difference. This came as a shock to a lot of people, since the updates they released never hinted that anything was going wrong up to the point.
Well, it seems they've learned their lesson and taken a lesson out of Matt's book regarding the trust of the backers, as well as generally keeping the game in the public eye, and then some, and decided to basically have the most open, transparent game development ever. They're constantly having livestreams on their twitch.tv channel giving updates on the game's development, they answer questions from the viewers, show off pre-alpha build stuff, talk about the engine, the way the game works, and pretty much nothing is off the table in terms of what they will or won't talk about or show.
Thoughts? Are we hoping this becomes a trend?
As everyone remembers, Broken Age kind of made a little more than their funding goal (just a few tiny millions of dollars more), and so Double Fine got more and more ambitious, and after several months, completely out of the blue, shamefully revealed to the public that they had run out of money and started a second crowdfunding thing to make up the difference. This came as a shock to a lot of people, since the updates they released never hinted that anything was going wrong up to the point.
Well, it seems they've learned their lesson and taken a lesson out of Matt's book regarding the trust of the backers, as well as generally keeping the game in the public eye, and then some, and decided to basically have the most open, transparent game development ever. They're constantly having livestreams on their twitch.tv channel giving updates on the game's development, they answer questions from the viewers, show off pre-alpha build stuff, talk about the engine, the way the game works, and pretty much nothing is off the table in terms of what they will or won't talk about or show.
Thoughts? Are we hoping this becomes a trend?