Recently I watched the whole "Double Fine Adventure" documentary series about the Broken Age Kickstarter, which was kind of sad.

Guy wants to make great computers games and escape the commercial pressure put on him by publishers, so he raises three million dollars in advance so that he can concentrate on making a great game without having to worry about money or firing his developers!

And then he spends seven million dollars making it...

I think Tim Schafer would have a more peaceful life if he "cut his coat according to his cloth", and stopped trying to make AAA games for an AA audience. In a lot of cases Machinarium looks just as good as Broken Age, but it must have cost a fraction to make. Small developers just don't have the same overheads as a big studio.

Double-fine staff seem to spend half of their time having meetings about how much more work there is to do. Whenever they did that, I wanted to shout at them to get back on with the actual work.

Well said.

The whole time I was playing Broken Age I was thinking:
1. How the hell did they justify spending so much on art and animation for a simple point-and-click adventure?
2. Oh yeah, I guess they kind of didn't.

Having watched the documentary, I felt compelled to play the game again, so that I could appreciate all the art and animation that I just breezed past on my first 1.5 play-throughs. I kind of felt that I should have tried to get some of Tim's $7M worth.

Heh. Snake tits.

Also worth checking out: The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled. A reconstruction of an unfinished masterpiece of animation.

http://orangecow.org/board/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3