ThunderPeel2001

Broken Age - Double Fine Adventure!

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I presume they had a story outline back at the start of the year; I'd imagine a lot of that writing was fairly easy and some of Vella's side needed some work.

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Yeah, one they say "Tim needs to finish the writing" I'm pretty sure they mean specific lines of dialogue, not general story stuff.

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Indeed, based on what little I know about Schafer (i.e. Grim Fandango) the story is fleshed out in a pretty in-depth amount of detail way before all the actual dialogue is written. I guess the concepts of the dialogue are established early, but all those amazing quips Schafer is great at take longer to brew. The beta/whatever version of Monkey Island 2 was similar, practically the whole game was developed yet missing a lot of dialogue.

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Yeah, although I imagine with a game like Broken Age, which needs to animate and record all that dialogue, having it take longer creates a much bigger bottleneck.

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Indeed, based on what little I know about Schafer (i.e. Grim Fandango) the story is fleshed out in a pretty in-depth amount of detail way before all the actual dialogue is written. I guess the concepts of the dialogue are established early, but all those amazing quips Schafer is great at take longer to brew. The beta/whatever version of Monkey Island 2 was similar, practically the whole game was developed yet missing a lot of dialogue.

Nice missing dialogue.

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Have any other backers found that they can't log into the DFA subforum any more? It just keeps asking me for my username and password, despite me already being logged in.

 

DF don't appear to have a contact email address on their website any more. Not really sure how to contact them about it.

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Have any other backers found that they can't log into the DFA subforum any more? It just keeps asking me for my username and password, despite me already being logged in.

 

DF don't appear to have a contact email address on their website any more. Not really sure how to contact them about it.

 

There are a bunch of e-mails on this About page.

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There are a bunch of e-mails on this About page.

Muggins here looked at that page but scrolled down to the bottom, because that's where contact details tend to be.

 

Thanks.

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The Broken Age documentary episodes are now getting released for free, weekly on YouTube. Or you can pay $10 to get them all at once, in 1080p with all the extras, which I highly recommend. Either way, the doc is fantastic (although rather spoilery if you haven't played the game yet).

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Yeah totally agree. Even if the game had turned out poorly (which it hasn't so far), the doc at least is really well done and insightful. If you're at all interested in how the sausage that is video games is made, it's worth checking out.

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Is everything that is on VHX.com in terms of extras and bonus content going to be available on the blu-ray that is supposed to be released at some point? Well for Kickstarter backers at least.

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The sidequests won't be because there's so much uncleared content in there. There's a thread on the forums where they're asking people what they'd like to be on there, so I guess it's not all nailed down yet.

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19 or 20. The most recent backer episode is #18, there's at least 1 coming.

So, that about 19*~25 ~= 8 hours of documentary

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Well dang I guess I'll have to go and download all the sidequest episodes. I was pretty much starting to wonder how they were going to fit all of that HD video on a blu-ray.

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19 or 20. The most recent backer episode is #18, there's at least 1 coming.

So, that about 19*~25 ~= 8 hours of documentary

IIRC, they said that there'd be 2 coming. One covering the leadup to release and a second covering the release and wrapping up.

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This may have come up before in the deluge of posts, so, sorry if it has, but I was thinking yesterday how the title Broken Age doesn't seem quite up to snuff with Schafer classics like Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts, Brütal Legend, and I wonder why they went with this. Sidebar: I haven't seen the documentary yet, shame on me. I'll just spend one (glorious, amazing) day at some point binging it all and seeing people age visibly on the screen.

 

But: Broken Age, it's not very evocative, is it? Broken is relatively fine, though it reminds me of Broken Sword, a really quite famous and still running adventure game series. It's the Age that bothers me. In our current day and age long time span, age has become a hollow, meaningless, let's-turn-my-brain-off word, used exclusively to make something seem more epic than it is. Age of this, age of that. Transformers: Age of Extinction. Really, was it really an age? And I'd be surprised, truly surprised, if the Age of Ultron didn't turn out to be the Occurrence of Ultron, which incidentally would've made for a more interesting title.

 

Broken Age does neat things with the concept of an age, at least, and they're also broken for that matter. But using these terms is still... kind of boring. I often have a hard time remembering what the game is called, and then when I do remember I feel little for it. What was the rationale behind it, is that known?

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It's not evocative but it's descriptive on quite a few levels, so I think it fits. Full Throttle isn't better if you ask me. Grim Fandango is just inspired.

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The naming of the game's covered in the documentary. The game didn't have a moment where Schafer was clear that he'd found the perfect name; he made a big list of potential names, pared it down to the least worse ones, and Broken Age was the least worst of those.

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I agree that Broken Age isn't great, but I think the only name that's really amazing in your list, Roderick, is Grim Fandango. The rest are just pretty good.

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