Tim Schafer and Double Fine Productions

how stuff Works and I love all things tech. And in our last episode, we learned about how game designer Tim Schafer got his start in the business, first with a decade of work at Lucas Arts, creating adventure games like Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle, and then as he launched his own game studio called Double Fine Productions. We left off talking about how the second title from that studio, Brutal Legend, had a laborious development process that

culminated in a struggle to find a publisher. The studio had produced two games at this point, Psycho Nuts and the aforementioned Brutal Legend, and they both received a favorable response from critics, but they only enjoyed somewhat luke warm sales. But let's take a quick step back into those early days at Double Fine since I didn't really get to dive into too much detail at the end of the last episode, and this is going to help us understand the journey Tim Shaefer and his company have been on

since its founding. When the company looked for its first office space in the San Francisco area in two thousand one, they found there weren't many affordable options. This was right toward the end of the dot com bubble inflating, so you had a lot of young companies flush with cash and they were just taking up office space left and right in the Bay area. So originally, Double Find Productions rented out an old warehouse on Clara Street, which was

in a kind of rough neighborhood. The warehouse had no heat, and the space heaters they tried to plug in drew too much power and would trip the circuit breakers, so they couldn't use them. There was a rat problem apparently, and the neighborhood was home to troubled individuals and criminals. It just was not a good scene. And yet this was where the company began to work on its first game, the platform er Psycho Knots, set in the various imaginations

of different characters. For about two years, Double Fine Productions stuck around in this warehouse, but in two thousand three the price of office space fell dramatically. The dot com bubble had burst by then, and many startup companies that had driven up the rental prices now no longer even existed, so it opened up a vacuum in the office space market in San Francisco, and Double Fine Productions was still around, so they were able to move into a nicer space.

They still had not yet launched their game. However, that same year, the company experienced a really nasty internal shake up, all due to a failed attempt to make game design more efficient. During the development process, certain people became level designers on Psycho Knots, so it was their job to come up with a concept for a specific level within

the game. They were to write out all the action pathways that you could potentially take through that level, and they were also supposed to describe all the different game events, and then they would hand over this work to an artist to bring those ideas to life, and the artists were given the job of creating the visual geometry for the levels. But that rubbed the designers the wrong way, who felt their ideas were being superseded by the artists.

So you suddenly had this this this struggle between designers and artists about how a vision should be realized. The level designers and the artists used the same set of tools, which turned out to be a bad thing, because soon there was this ugly pattern of levels being written and overwritten and redesigned repeatedly by both designers and artists competing to get their version into the game, and it led

to unplayable levels. And then one day in two thousand three, all but one of the level designer were fired after this process had nearly torn the project apart. There was no producer on the game at that point, and Tim Schaefer was busy handling corporate level issues, so he couldn't dedicate his time to overseeing the project directly. He was trying to be all things to all people, the lead developer on a game while also being the head of

that company. The one remaining level designer left on staff was Eric Robson, who was put in charge of artists, and a new department was created called world Builder and that became responsible for level design. Things went a little bit more smoothly from that point forward, but the shakedown and staff understandably upset many on the team. Now at the time, Microsoft was signed on to be the publisher

of Psycho Knots. It was meant to be an Xbox exclusive game, Microsoft requested a demonstration of the quote fund factor end quote of the game, or else it was going to cancel this agreement and say, all right, we're not gonna undo your development anymore. So the development team got to work and built out a level. It was specifically the black Velvetopia level in Psycho Knots. If you

played the game, maybe you're familiar with it. Microsoft appeared to be satisfied and the arrangement continued for a short while. In February four, just as things were really coming together, Microsoft canceled its agreement to publish the game, and this was a huge blow to the team. As Tim Schaefer would explain in a talk at the Game Developers Conference, the way games get made typically follows this process. You have a developer that gets an idea for a game.

They pitched their idea to a publisher, and if the publisher likes this idea, they agreed to fund the development of the game. The developer gets money from the publisher and they use that money to build out the agreed upon game. All that money goes to developing tools, paying people salaries, et cetera. Now, once the game is ready

to ship, it's gone. Gold. The publisher takes this completed game and then sells it to customers, which can actually be a multi step process as you can go through various distributors like retail stores, but we're simplifying this for this example. Customers then by the game and the publisher once it has recouped the cost of funding, the game starts to share a portion of the profits with the developer, and so a developer only sees profit if the game

sales go really well. Otherwise, the only money the developer gets is during the actual development phase of the game. That's not profit, that's just covering the cost of development. So when Microsoft canceled its publisher agreement with Double Fine, it left the studio without funding to complete the game. Ed Freeze, a Microsoft executive who had been in favor of publishing the game, had left Microsoft, and Double Fine

found itself with no more supporters at the company. As Psycho Knots executive producer Caroline as Murdoch said to Game Developer Magazine back in two thousand five, the remaining executives at Microsoft appeared to view Double Fine as being late to delivery and too expensive and not worth the investment. So the studio had to look around for another publisher. For months, Schaefer and as Murdoch worked to keep the

project moving forward even in the absence of funding. They tried to keep the development team focused on meeting deadlines. It was hard to do, as no one was even sure their work was ever going to be seen or experienced by anyone, and not everyone was on the same page and the development team there were disagreements about elements within the game itself. It was also hard to find a publisher willing to take a risk on a quirky game that did not rely upon an established intellectual property.

But eventually, in July two thousand, four months after Microsoft had already pulled out, Double Fine found a new publisher in Majesco Entertainment. While the company received funding once again, it came with some conditions, and one of those was there wasn't enough money to hire on additional staff to

help finish the game. Another condition was that the promised deliverables were still in play, so that meant the development team had to do more work than they anticipated to get the game done on time, which resulted in what, as Murdoch said, was quote the most insane crunch I have ever witnessed end quote and crunches when you've got everybody working on a project over time in order to

get it to ship on deadline. The team pushed themselves hard for nearly another year, with Psycho Knots going gold in two thousand five. According to as Murdoch, this was done without ever once missing a single payroll day, which is a testament to Schaefer and as Murdoch's work to manage money carefully during the arduous process. As Murdoch pointed out, one of the big problems during the development of Psycho Knots was that Schaefer had been unwilling to delegate responsibilities.

He wanted to define the culture of Double Fine. He wanted to make it a special place to work, and he was worried that if he brought on executives to head up the various departments like HR, finance, operations, web development, et cetera, before he could define what the work culture at Double Fine should be like, that would cause big problems. They would end up defining the culture rather than Schaefer.

So he decided he would do it all, but that meant he was constantly dealing with one emergency situation after another, and he couldn't focus on game development to the detriment of the company. And as tough as Psycho Nauts was, things would not go easier during the development of Brutal Legend, the real time strategy adventure game married fantasy elements with heavy metal music, and Double Find was having a real

hard time finding a publisher. They shot the idea around for a while, but they finally were able to find somebody interested in publishing this game, and that was Vivendi Universal Games. But it didn't turn out to be the publisher that would eventually actually publish that game. I'll explain more in just a second, but first let's take a

quick break to thank our sponsor. The Brutal Legend team decided first to focus on the multiplayer part of the game because Double Find hadn't done a multiplayer game before. Schaefer had not done it before, and so they took nearly a year and a half to work on the multiplayer concept, after which Vivendi said to the team, hey, how about now you focus on the solo player experience. We want to see what that's going to look like.

In October two thousand and six, Double Fine started work on the solo campaign and began casting the voice talent, including casting Jack Black as the game's protagonist. It wasn't until June two thousand and seven that the team had something to show Vivendi to give an indication of where the solo campaign was heading. By that time, the development team had changed the shape of the game significantly, which

of course, had delayed things. The game missed its ship date twice and was delayed by nearly a year and a half. In that time, Vivendi dropped the game as publisher because Vivindi itself had been acquired by Activision, and then Electronic Arts stepped in as the new publisher. Double Find adopted the scrums system of development. Now. I covered this when I talked about agile systems in a recent podcast.

Scrums involve sprints. These are work sessions during which teams focus on specific deliverables rather than the full project, and they have daily meetings to discuss deadlines, obstacles, and progress on those deliverables. The change to scrum helped Double Find focus on what needed to happen and allowed for more regular progress on the game development, but there were still many setbacks. The team depended heavily on middleware, so this is software created by other companies to do much of

the work for Brutal Legend. So a lot of the elements that allowed the developers to build game elements in the game came from middleware, and about half the middleware worked great, but the other half didn't, and that slowed

things down. In addition, while the team had made Psycho Knots for the Xbox, Brutal Legend was supposed to come out on the Xbox three sixty and the PlayStation three, which required new tools, new processes, it required new training so that the game could run on this more advanced hardware. And then there was that lawsuit that Activision brought against Double Fine and e A Games. It would eventually be settled out of court, but the stress took its toll

on Tim Shaefer and the executive team. This is what led to Schaefer declaring the entire company would participate in Amnesia Fortnite, in which everybody split up into four teams and each team attempted to make a game. What's more, people could step outside their normal roles at Double Fine and try their hand at something else, so a game designer could become an artist, and artists could become a designer, etcetera.

And so the four teams got to work creating games completely unrelated to Brutal Legend other than the fact that it was using the game engine, and it ended up being an incredible success. The teams were happy to work on something new and try on new responsibilities. Each team produced a playable prototype game. The four prototypes were called Tiny, Personal, Ninja, Happy Song, Threnched, and Operation Your Desk Is Disgusting. Everybody

was able to go back to work re energized. E A published Brutal Legend, and the team began to rev up to develop Brutal Legend too, But then they had the rug pulled out from under them again. Electronic Arts canceled the game. They didn't even want to push out the patches that Double Fine had created for the original

Brutal Legend game. Schaefer held another Amnesia Fortnite, which would end up becoming a regular tradition at Double Fine, and miraculously, all all four prototypes they came out of this exercise ended up getting picked up by publishers, so they became actual games, not just projects within Double Fine. Those four games were called Costume Quest, Stacking Iron Brigade, and Sesame

Street Once Upon a Monster. The morale exercise literally ended up saving the company, as Double Fine wouldn't have been able to make payroll once the sequel to Brutal Legend got the acts, so to speak, an actual acts, not a not a guitar. You know, heavy metal squidly did we do? Double Fine continued to make games both for consoles and mobile platforms, with the occasional port to PC.

Schaefer meanwhile, kept his hand on the helm of the company, which meant he didn't have a whole lot of time to do what he loved in the first place, which was making games. In two thousand and twelve, he did take the lead on a game concept he came up with while thinking about his daughter, who was about two years old at the time. He wanted a game he could play with her. His decision was to develop a

game for the Xbox three sixty Connect system. The Connect, for those who do not remember, was a special peripheral device for the Xbox three sixty, and then there was another version that was later made for the Xbox One. It contains several sensors such as a microphone and special cameras. One of those cameras was an infrared camera that could help the connect since depth, and here's how it worked

in a nutshell. The Connect had an infrared projector which projected light in the infrared spectrum, so that essentially a grid of reference points would overlay the area in front of the connect. So if you had your Microsoft Xbox three sixty in your living room and you had to Connect attached to it, it was actually projecting a grid

of infrared light across your living room. The grids invisible to humans because we cannot see in the infrared range, at least not without technological help, but the infrared camera on the Connect could pick it up just fine. As objects moved within the view of the camera, they would deform the grid. The Connect could send the information onto the Xbox, which could interpret the movements as commands, including movements that were toward or away from the camera, by

looking at the way the grid was deformed. The Connect never got a whole lot of traction in the gaming community, partly because many gamers felt that there were very few titles that made good use of the technology, But hackers loved the Connect as it gave them access to an inexpensive sensor array that could be used in all sorts of applications, from creating your own three D scanner to a sensor array for robotics. Anyway, back to the game that Schaefer wanted to make for his daughter. He called

it Double Fine Happy Action Theater. Sometimes it's just called Happy Action Theater. The game includes many activities that take advantage of the connects capabilities without requiring the player to calibrate before gameplay with each session, which Schaefer felt was a barrier for kids who lacked the patients and attention span to stay in one place long enough to calibrate the system. So if you wanted to play the floors

lava or create a montage of clones, you can. The game has an eighty on Metacritic, which aggregates reviews of games and the signs of score between one and one hundred. A lot of the games are really more activities than any kind of actual gameplay, but they were the sort of things that would appeal to very young players. Also, in February two thousand twelve, Tim Schaeffer decided to try

something different from the normal game development process. Double Fine had been encountering problems with publishers, both with Psycho Nuts and Brutal Legend, and so Tim Schaeffer decided to try something new and he launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund the company's next game, which was a point and click adventure style game that at the time was called Double Fine Adventure. They said their fundraising goal to four hundred thousand dollars. They hit their goal in less than eight hours.

When the campaign ended, Double Fine ended up raising three point three million dollars. It was a record setting Kickstarter campaign at the time, and it was the beginning of another story filled with challenges and headaches, not to mention some serious criticism from the gaming community. Now this is the beginning of the story of Broken Age, which I will tell you in a second. But first let's take

another quick break to thank our sponsor. The whole decision to go with a crowdfunding approach actually came from outside the company. A documentary production company called Two Player Productions approached Double Fine with the desire to produce a documentary about the process of game development. Two Player Productions funded their documentaries largely through crowdfunding. This inspired Schaeffer to take

a serious stab at crowdfunding himself. He had previously considered it, but was discouraged from doing so because the general consensus was that crowdfunding would work for really small independent games with modest budgets, you know, something in the tens of thousands of dollars, but it wasn't a viable option if you wanted to make something closer to a Triple A title video game. Schaefer decided to give it a shot anyway, and he launched the campaign in February two thousand twelve.

At the launch of the kick started campaign, Tim Schaefer had said that he wanted to lead a small team of developers to make an adventure game that was fun and compelling, but not necessarily epic in scope. This would be a return to the puzzle based gameplay of classic titles like Grim Van Dango, Monkey Island, and Day of the Tentacle. Schaefer estimated that development time would take between six and eight months. In reality, it would take much longer than that. The plan was to launch the game

in October two thousand twelve. At that time, the game was still working under the title Double Fine Adventure. It wouldn't get the name Broken Age until March and the game still wasn't ready to launch at that point. In July, Double Find made an announcement that raised many eyebrows. The company was going to release Broken Age in two parts, or acts. The kick started campaign would have effectively funded

the first half or act of the game. The second act would draw its funding partly from the sales of the first act. In other words, campaign backers would only get half a game to start out with, though they were assured they'd have access to the full game once it was ready to go. The first half would go on sale in early when the second half promised for lateen but then pushed to early So what the heck

was going on? Well? Basically, the runaway success of that funding campaign inspired the team to make a more ambitious project than they had originally pitched. They had originally thought they would use three hundred thousand dollars to fund the game and the other hundred thousand dollars would fund the documentary, but they made three point three million. There was so much support and excitement for an adventure game that Shaefer and his team wanted to step up their work and

create something really special. And, as Shaefer would later say, he just designed too much game, and so they began to increase the scope of the game, which took more time and created more challenges during the development cycle, and eventually the scope and work outgrew the funding for the game so and not only did they increase it, they went beyond the three point three million that they actually gathered, and that's when Shaefer and his team had to make

the tough decision to split the game into two segments and use sales of the first half to fund the completion of the second half. In addition to making the game grander and scale, Shaver made the decision that they would use some of the funds to develop the game for other operating systems such as mac os, ten, lenox iOS, and Android. In addition, you can watch the two player

productions documentary for free online. There are twenty episodes on YouTube and they range from about twenty five minutes long to more than an hour long, and it's pretty fascinating stuff. I recommend checking it out. According to Schaefer, Double Fine ended up spending about twice as much money developing the game as it had raised during the kickstarted campaign, so somewhere in the six million dollar range, and that sales of the game would mean the company would essentially break

even on Broken Age. The game allows players to take control of two different characters who are in two very different environments. After the act break in the game, the two characters find their roles somewhat switched, and players get to experience what it's like when one character is thrust into the other character's world. The game got good reviews, though some people express frustration with the nature of the

puzzles in the game. And if you listen to the first episode I did on Tim Schaefer, you know that those puzzles are his favorite part of adventure games. He loved the experience of experimentation figuring out what you have to do to progress further. But not everyone is crazy about that type of gameplay, and these days games tend to hold a player's hand a lot more in long tutorials and hint options. The crowdfunding experiment was a success, and Double Fine repeated it by going that route again

to fund a game called Massive Chalice. They launched the crowdfunding campaign for Massive Chalice in while Broken Age was still in development. They opted not to show quite as much exclusive material to backers. After having faced criticisms in the game community for giving so much material to people who had funded Broken Age. The game met with some delays,

but was released in November. Now, Schaefer was not directly involved in that particular game, so I'm not going to cover it any further, since this is really more about Schaefer than Double Fine. Schaefer has said that one big benefit of the crowdfunding approach is that it makes it easier to actually land a publisher. When publishers see that players are willing to financially support game development, they are

more eager to become part of the process. After all, they stand a profit from sales of the game, so crowdfunding can help a developer pitch their next project to a publisher. Moreover, publishers are more likely to back a game that has received crowdfunding because it shows a certain level of dedication from the developers, and it removes some of the risk they would otherwise shoulder if they were

to fund the game entirely by themselves. In twenty fifteen, Double Fine released a remastered version of Grim van Dango, Shaefer's masterpiece game from Lucas Arts, and again, if you haven't played that game, I recommend giving it a try. The puzzles can be devilishly tricky, but the art style and the humor of that game are absolutely fantastic. But it doesn't mean that every pitch will be accepted or that developers will get all they want just because you've

had some crowdfunding success. That was the case with Psycho Knots. To Schaefer really wanted to return to the world of Psycho Knots and create a game that would be a worthy successor to Double Finds first title. Schaefer couldn't find a publisher that was willing to invest the amount he felt would be necessary to bring this sequel to life, and so Double find held another fundraiser. This time, they used an investment platform called fig and raised nearly four

million dollars. In addition to that money, Double find invested some of its own cash into the project, and there was a third party that also invested money into it. Schaefer wanted to avoid the problems of broken Age, in which a game that was originally intended to be of a modest size grew after receiving more funding than was anticipated, and so he attempted to establish the expectations of the

game's scope. Psycho Nuts too from the outset and based the budget on that estimate, Taking into account the additional funds from Double Fine and the third party, and the campaign's length was set to thirty eight days, and Double Fine met their goal with five days to spare. While Double Fine originally hoped to bring the game to market in twenty eighteen, the company announced in late twenty seventeen

that a twenty nineteen launch is more likely. Schaefer, meanwhile, has recently said that he does think he's made his best game yet. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from BAFTA. That's the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. It's the highest honor the organization bestows upon individuals. That's what prompted Shaffer to say that while the award is deeply appreciated, he estimates his best work is still ahead of him.

Schaefer sees value in both independent game developers and the big studios. He has said that any developers tend to lead in innovation. They take on risks and try new things on modest games that don't cost as much to make and have fewer executives making demands over what should and should not be in the game, and then the bigger studios can take some of that innovation and boost

it into the stratosphere in big budget titles. And it's point out that there's been some really cool innovations in games in recent years, including the big budget games such as the Nemesis system that's in the Shadow of Mord or games in which the player can encounter antagonists whose behavior changes as the player makes various choices within the game. Schaefer has also advised independent gamers to avoid building in too many expectations for fame and glory with their games.

He said that we need those independent perspectives, but it's not necessarily realistic to expect to become rich off a new innovative title. So will we see yet more adventure style games from Schaefer in the future, or will he switch gears and take a personal interest in an entirely different style of game. Whatever the answer, we should expect games touched by Schaffer to include wicked humor, fiendishly clever puzzles,

and the occasional heavy metal guitar solo. Squidly did they do that wraps up the story on Tim Schaefer so far. If you guys have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, let me know. Send me an email the addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com. If there's a technology you want me to cover, a company, a person, maybe there's someone you would like me to interview, let me know and I'll do my best to make it happen. Or draw me a line on Twitter or Facebook.

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