The phone-call said that actually, they'd changed their minds. They were previously told it was a done-deal that they'd be doing a Brutal Legend 2.
After that, there was another quick go at the 2-week game thing. And they were fun and the team found themselves motivated. They experimented with team structure, with leaders or no leaders. Doublefine has managed to achieve a 100% being dropped by publishers, going through four of them – though, as Schafer notes, since they still exist, so maybe there's a business plan there after all.ĭoublefine's future was buried in a break in development where, to enliven things, they split the company into four teams, each of who had two weeks to make an actual game. Executives who loved your game may leave, which challenges its possible future. Also, there's the changing nature of the staff at a publisher. Getting a big enough advance to lead to the proverbial AAA game is tricky – it normally leads to less risky games and giving up the IP rights. And imagine what it'll be like to be working on a metalhead-based game for four years when you're not the biggest metalhead in the world.Īs well as that, there's the aspect of the publisher relationships.
“They have to kill that lead programmer to advance – though that's not always a bad thing,”notes Schafer, before noting that homicide inside the staff does tend to hit morale hard. The limited career advancement possibilities. The cash-flow issues around games only coming out so irregularly. They existed primarily as a one game studio, which lead to a mass of problems. Schafer basically tells the story of Doublefine so far, which has stretched ten years so far, leading to a total of two games – Psychonauts and Brutal Legend. However, we do learn from him – not least, the first information of the four (count 'em!) games Doublefine are working on. As a pallid spirit powered solely by the ghost of spirits, I fear he has nothing to learn from me – bar, don't do it. I zombie-walk into the back of the hall, to have Doublefine's industry-legend tm Tim Schafer on stage saying something along the lines of “You always have something to learn about hard drinking from the British”.
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