Double Fine Adventure time

I wasn't really surprised to see that the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter page had reached a million dollars by this morning. The speed at which it was increasing yesterday, before most of America had even woke up, it was kind of inevitable - especially after this tweet. I think there was a significant amount of hype involved in the feeling of jumping on this thing on the first day. I kinda wonder if there is anyone waking up this morning with 'backers remorse' thinking "I didn't play past the boat level of Stacking", "I hated Brutal Legend once it got to the RTS bits" or "I've never even played Monkey Island!"? No, just me?

I'm joking slightly of course, for $15, which is what - just under 10 quid in real money? I was happy to drop that to be able to play the final results however it turns out. Obviously there are plenty of people out there who are willing to donate much more to support their heroes and see a point and click game from them again. My personal favourite game of theirs would probably be Day of the Tentacle, I didn't have a PC at home until around '95 so I was a little late to the game (this happens a lot with me). For some reason the more out-there puzzles in that seemed to make some twisted kind of logical sense to me, whereas in other games I'd just get frustrated and go to gamefaqs (or go down to the library to use yahoo search back in those days probably). I appreciated the humour and characters of Sam & Max but wasn't grabbed as much by the game and the Monkey Island series just sits there as a beacon of shame, which I will probably never get around to playing. There's no way it could possibly live up to the years of hype I've read about it so in a strange sort of way I'd rather leave it than be disappointed.

I think for me, the insight into the development process will be the best part of the whole deal. It'll be very interesting to see publishers switched for users as the biggest influence on direction. As far as I can tell there's no legally binding contract for them to do what the fans want, I imagine it'll be more of a case of taking any suggestions under advisement but you never know - there might be some issues that Double Fine and the backers as a whole end up completely at odds over. At least once they've got the money that's it though, no threat of non-payment for 'missed milestones'. I also wonder how they will balance documenting the development without giving away all of the puzzles before you've even played it. Obviously trailers and developer interviews for other games manage to accomplish this but the scale of this sounds bigger than a lot of things that have been done before.

I think there will obviously be a big interest in fan funding after this, Nathan Brown at Edge asks whether Double Fine just killed the publisher and I also saw a good article on how it could be viewed as similar to zyngas free to play model. The second article also made me think about DLC in games, how it initially seemed like something that could be a nice bonus but more often than not just feels like something that should have been in the game in the first place. I wonder if more people will consider this added value strategy (aside from ridiculously overpriced special editions) and not be so scared of the basic edition having a lower price. Again with DLC, it might seem more acceptable if you weren't paying 'macro-transactions' on top of a game you've already spent £30 on. I'm already considering whether I should upgrade my backing status to get a HD copy of the documentary at the end of it... and then it's only a bit more to get my name in the credits (which are clearly going to be as long as an average Ubisoft game).