Amnesia Fortnight Bundle

Since I couldn't find a thread...

A new ...thing...appears. Pay what you want and vote on which four prototypes Double Fine will look at next ! And download prototypes of two older games. Seriously ! i have to admit that I am not sure if i think this is really, really cynical, or if I admire this idea. Perhaps both. And yes, I did chime in out of curiosity, but for a tiny amount. And at least some of the 23 presented ideas seem like they could be fun.

Edit: maybe more information would be good. It is a Humble Bundle 'pay what you want'. In this case to Double Fine. If you pay you get two former prototypes ('Costume Quest' and 'Happy Song'). Note: Prototypes ! Further more you get access to 23 sales pitches by their team members. Then you can vote for four of them. The four ideas with the most votes will be turned into prototypes, and all suck...marks...custom...people who payed will get these. Perhaps DF will even consider one or several for actual production, but who knows.

Nice! Wow, I love it! I remember when Mojang did this and I scoffed, but I will totally buy into the Double Fine version.

Edit: Ok, no I won't, but I do think it's a cool idea. But I must restrain myself and not throw money around for unfinished games. If this came with a copy of the game they end up actually releasing, I'd bite.

Well, I consider the dollar I gave them a price willingly payed, mainly since I was so surprised. The one thing that irks me a bit is that I watched the sales pitches and voted, but funnily enough I voted for the four most popular options. Hurray ! I am official Joe Average Gamer !

Anybody else and I would have a hard time getting even slightly interested but Doublefine? Hell yeah, sign me up!

Jesus how is it possible that the Costume Quest prototype is EVEN CUTER?

Also I watched the video for Battle Bros. first because the guy's name is Geoff, and holy shit I want to play that game right now.

Alright, watched 'em all and my votes are in: Battle Bros, Hack n Slash, Kaiju Piledriver, and The Knockover. Only one of those (Hack n Slash, which sounds amazing and ingenius if they can actually pull it off) is in the top four right now, but that's ok because most of these are great ideas. I really liked Bragging and Fighting too, but four's the limit. :/

My picks are the Knockover (my favorite), Black Lake, White Birch, and Battle Bros.

Fortunately the remake of Startopia, I mean Spacebase DF-9, is one of the leaders.

This. A thousand times this, and this again. If I could give four votes to one title, it would have to be that one.

That's more or less an idea for a game that I had a year or two ago and have often wished existed since, so I was super-psyched to see it here. Seems unlikely that it's going to get there but it's still cool.

I'll say something about Double Fine High, which is currently in last place: I don't think many people really want to play that type of game (and I don't especially), but all of Doublefine's characters in high school together is a tremendous setting for any small game they care to use it for. I hope they don't abandon that premise.

I'm kind of surprised that this one is winning because it does look so much like a straight remake of Startopia. Isn't Doublefine known for breaking molds and doing new things?

Sure.

But people _really_ like Startopia.

I guess so. And to be fair the one that first piqued my interest was "Remember those awesome D&D arcade games? What if we made a game just like that... but longer!" and I just about squealed with delight, so I guess I didn't really vote for innovation either.

Also they name drop Dwarf Fortress in the Startopia-look alike pitch. At that point it does not really matter anymore that others might be more creative.

Innovations is great, but it's not everything. There's something to be said for taking an existing premise and doing it really well, especially if its a premise that hasn't been used recently.

I'm now convinced that DF does all these things in public because Tim just loves doing the silly pitch/promo videos.

You have to admit, the man does great pitch videos. (And great games).

I paid up and cast my votes. It looks like White Birch is going to make it (good, because I really like that one). Black Lake could break into the top four. I'd rather play than than Autonomous, personally. The Knockover is probably not going to make the top four, which is a damn shame. Spacebase DF-9 is in the lead, so that one is probably a shoe-in.

Seems like the top two are assured at this point (which is good because I'm really interested in Hack n Slash) and The White Birch is probably safe too. Autonomous seems vulnerable to either number five or number six. I'm holding out a hope for Kaiju Piledriver because it sounds totally awesome. I don't think anything currently ranked below six is really in play.

Last-minute upsets are not completely beyond the pale. People are allowed to change their votes, remember.

The spacebase guy had me at Hi.
Also, the good game idea to vote ratio sucks, I want to see so many of those games made :(

Oh are they? That I did not know. Thanks, I'll keep a closer watch in that case.

Seriously, how the hell do so many uninspired or unimaginative games get made when Doublefine apparently has several times more great game ideas than they can even prototype let alone make and release?

Follow the money.

Well there's a prototype for "Silent But Deadly" now. I'm still not voting for it.

Yeah, that's the one that I definitely don't want to play. Press P to poop? No, not for me thanks. 23/23.

This is a great idea, and I'm just as excited for the livestreams of the jam as the prototypes themselves. I ended up voting for quite a few projects, there are so many cool ideas. I was hoping Echelon would make it.

Trivia: that guy is the level designer who made the Arcadia level for Bioshock. Later, he made a doom 2 version of that same level.

I just found this thing. Tim Schafer makes the best promo videos.

Why can't all of these ideas get prototypes?! They all look so interesting! Well, maybe not the pooping game.

Voted for Echelon, The White Birch, The Black Lake, and Hack n' Slash. I really hope The Black Lake makes it. It's my favourite concept out of the lot of them; makes me think of a combination of Okami and The Path.

I think I may just still be 12 years old mentally, but "You are full. Press P to poop" actually may push me over the edge to vote for it.

Voting's closed and the winners are:

Noooooo!!!!! Exactly what I voted for ! I am damned to be the most mainstream of mainstream gamers !

Hurray!

I didn't vote for this one simply because it should have obviously been the 2 key and anyone who can't get that right isn't the right person for the job.

Very interesting idea. Did anyone else notice that there weren't any women doing a pitch? I kind of figured that Double Fine's games had cross-gender appeal, and the studio would probably have a higher percentage of female staffers than most game companies. Maybe I was wrong.

I noticed that, too. Then again, half of the top four games have female protagonists, which is nice to see (the #5 spot does as well).

EDIT: Just noticed that The Black Lake edged in as well! Yes! That one was my top pick.

So, voting's over, time to throw my money at them. I'm seriously more excited for the upcoming videos on the making of those, than the games themselves (except Black Lake. And Spacebase... I played Startopia to death.). I did not want to vote though. I just didn't feel most of the pitches - the guys with artistic skills who had awesome sketches to show were clearly overpowered in this kind of competition.

Ah, very nice. I was disappointed that Autonomous edged it out, since I thought that both that and the White Birch one were projects that DoubleFine would be able to pull off really well. A game about programming robots seems kind of dry by comparison, and has been done before.

Is anyone else watching the streams? One video update is available on your humble bundle page already as well.
It's pretty great to see how different the teams are going about their tasks depending on their team leader. The hack/slash-game seems well on its way, with its project leader being a senior programmer. His daily update is basically that he has nearly just programmed most of it. The rest of his team seems to be massively slacking off, due to him doing everything himself ("Uh, I didn't get to it yet, because I'm basically also working on this other project, but I'm confident I'll do something today...")
Black Lake on the other hand is just the project leader (Senior Artists) handing out cool movies on how he wants the thing to look. :D I wonder if this will see the light of the day. White Birch still seems not so clear to me either, concept-wise.
I don't care much for Autonomous, and their meeting was just a long painfully detailed talk about what kind of head models they're implementing. I didn't quite get whether they want to stick with an arena mode only, or do something else.
The space station guys seem to progress nicely too.

Well, right now they are playing one of last years prototype live (Costume Quest), but in a few minutes they have one of the artists for the spacestation game livestream some drawings.

BTW, last time I got a chance to split up into small teams and just crank out a game prototype, I had a ton of fun. Makes me want to go indie sometimes.

That poor dyslexic art designer that's painting little green space engineer girls live on stream at the moment... at least he got "Engineer" right the second time. Next challenge: "How do you spell bartender?" :D
Well that's a thing.