Thought this might be of interest, not so much on the crowd sourcing/kickstarter nature of the project which has been around for a while, but that its Tim Schafer’s (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango) company, Double Fine (Pyschonauts, Brutal Legend, Stacking) doing it.
Not sure when it started but they are over 75% towards their funding target with a month left to go.
Going to be very interesting to follow this and see what happens.
I cant belive they have $300,000 holy moly thats insaine 
YYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!
Finally, after decades passed, another point&click adventure from Tim Schafer. He definately made his best games for this genre. Sometimes wishes come true. :O)
Please support him too and fund it!
Wow they are now past the goal in less than a hour?
No idea when they started but who cares, it hasn’t stopped yet and now a.o. we’re heading for a Mac version and more quality. I would love to see this explode in terms of
a) As a statement for that DoubleFine should make much more adventure games. Contrary to TTG they really could deliver a experience like you were used to from the golden LucasArts era.
b) As a valid alternative to get less dumb games with a larger scale done because there is a demand for creative games between sizes of a Battlefield 3 and more typical iOS games. DoubleFine has this interesting critical size which enables them to making great (at least unique and creative with a soul) games which a typical indie normally can’t do.
c) Just because it’s so cool!
And btw. even if you aren’t interested in adventure games, the documentary about the development process of a experienced developer like DoubleFine alone could be worth the money for you.
I fully support this, because I am a huge fan of Schafer and point and click games. However, I feel like it sets a precedent that terrifies me, and I cringe at the idea of large greedy publishers jumping on the same bandwagon to save money.
“Come on guys, only $800,000 more for the next Call of Duty!”
Here here, I purchased the TTG point and clicks, but I never found them as appealing as the ones LucasArts made back in the day.
And they’ve doubled that already.
WTF?
Wow, since my first post less than 8hrs ago they doubled their total pledges ($600,000) and gained almost 10k backers! It would also appear that this has only been going for 24 hrs, amazing progress.
Interesting when looking at the pledge page the $10k dinner with Tim has gone and they’ve got 7 x $5k and 40 x $1k pledges! Just hope there aren’t too many bogus pledges, if that’s even possible?
I wonder if this might lead to other (established) game developers following suit for games that have a decent following but for whatever reason publishers will no longer fund production on?
@Vdek
The problem with TTG is that over five years ago it started all very promising. A small company with some ex LucasArts devs, whilst they built the technology, they produce their first games like the Texas Hold’em and later on their first adventure Bone. Bone was a very promising start as it had this extra quality and feeling almost every adventure game being produced after the golden era lacked. But it was way too short and easy. This wasn’t much of an issue as everybody knew this company needs to start and grow first, they don’t want to scare away new gamers with to hard games and so on.
After some time and after getting licenes like SamMax on board things looked a lot better but still the games were pretty easy, to easy for a reasonable amount of those who were buying those games. Whilst they were good, they also were never fully fulfilling but at least good enough to keep you buying them and hoping that they take the feedback serious. Later on they even got licences like Monkey Island. They had a increased budget, needed less marketing due to the big name, had Michael Land as a composer on board, original speakers and so on but even then things again were to easy, lacked creativity and more excitement, they ditched the beloved point&click steering in favour of a terrible direct control implementation, over and over again reused their do-it-three-times formula and this was one of their better adventures.
Instead of fulfilling what a noticeable amount of their customers where hoping for over the years they got more and more boring, instead of coming up with original ips they went the safe licence route with already installed fan bases with audiences who didn’t care about adventures in the first place. Therefore they had to dumb down the games significantly in order to not scare away those customers. They delivered games for the least common denominator. They wanted to get adventures to get working the same as TV series with a mass market appeal and on consoles. They continued ignoring some core mechanics of a adventure game and instead went for aspects which are important in films but they did this on quite a horrible quality level. So in this process they gave up almost everything which adventure gamers liked about this genre, like point&click, like inventory combinations, like innovative puzzles, like some challenge, like a good story and interesting characters and so on. Looking at things it can feel like they misused adventure gamers pretty much. Some designers who didn’t like the direction left, new ones seemed to be less experienced, the products also got more crappy from their technical aspect like a increasing number of crash bugs, glitches, stuttering framerates on iOS and so on. They grew to fast and felt to clever.
You could see the problems coming up before and recently they also were facing problems with Jurassic Park not doing all this well, even getting critics from otherwise more forgiving fans and so on. You can notice these things pretty well, when they try to get more communicative and open to critics again. In the end there is nothing better than money to make people think about certain issues but it’s extremely disappointing that things evolved this way at all.
So this morning they’ve hit $1.2 million - thats in 24 hrs and there are still 32 days to go! I wonder what the final value will be, easily 2 million probably more, I guess it depends on how many ‘fans’ have yet to discover the Adventure Game project. Not only a great success for Double Fine, but also for Kickstarter I’d imagine, great publicity all round I think.
That’s rather crazy.
I’ve not been around long but I have never heard of this guy… (sorry) I have heard of grim fandango though but still 1.2million is loads this is absolutely mental they make a thousend in a matter of seconds… if I did this I bet I couldn’t even make $2
You just made my day!
Oh and I’ve played The Secret of Monkey Island and monkey island 2… but still i didn’t even know this guy made them until i googled him.
But by saying that imagine if shigeru miyamoto did something like this? he could get trillions but then no company(Nintendo) could not fund a game by him considering every ones success
I think Kickstarter is a pretty secure way of raising funds. I was reading the FAQ in there and they are using a transaction method which involves Amazon. Kickstarter takes 5% of the total money and Amazon takes some processing fees. They only do this if you reach at least your intended goal, if not, all the money gets returned to the people who pledged. They also confirm phone numbers and credit cards, typical security stuff even with the people who pledge.
It’s nice that some people actually successfully reach their target funds. I’m just wondering though, what if the project leader was someone known to be rich, like Bill Gates or some other mainstream game developer? Do you think people will still give them money or not? This is a very interesting situation going on lol:smile:
I think it depends, just because you are a successful game dev doesn’t mean you are rich maybe your game is free and has no adds or maybe you donate loads of money.
If someone that is rich though like bill gates I don’t believe in donating to it as they have enough money to make it(on less you get the game for cheaper than normal).
There was a guy who posted in the showcase forum using kickstarter and he couldnt even raise 6k. I guess without any clout you are not going anywhere.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/indestructiblecannon/narz
The money shouldn’t even be taken out of your account until the deadline, and only then if the goal has been reached, so for ‘backers’ its very safe, unless you back some unscrupulous person of course.
I’d be a little more concerned for the ‘creator’ though, as you say Kickstarter take 5%, but then Amazon will also take 3-5% and in both cases I suspect thats of the total amount and not that Amazon gets 3-5% of total, then Kickstarter gets 5% of the remainder. So worse case you’ll looking at losing 10% of pledges, which at $1 million is a heck of a lot of money! Of course this also assumes that every pledge is honoured too.
Thinking about it kickstarters FAQ really doesn’t give enough details to know where a ‘creator’ would stand. hopefully it would be fully explained in terms conditions.
Either way I feel both charges become rather large for ‘high value projects’ and honestly would have thought some negotiation could/should take place. Of course compared to other sources of funding 10% is probably very good, especially as you have no need for collateral or to give away a percentage of your business.
Yep ‘clout’ can be a deal breaker, but like anything else success on kickstarter would rely on several aspects I assume;
Sure there are more.
LOL - only just realised the big image on the kickstarter page is actually a promo video, hadn’t even watched it before pledging.