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Tim Schafer, founder of Double Fine Productions, has revealed how his independent studio went from a single title dev house to working on four titles concurrently.
At a Develop Conference keynote this morning Schafer said it all began with an internal ‘Amnesia Fortnight Project,’ during which time the studio was going through a rough patch. They took some time to break off into smaller teams and make mini-games.
Shortly after, Double Fine got some bad news: Brutal Legend wasn’t getting a sequel. At this point Tim realised that Double Fine had all these crazy prototypes sitting around, so they took the best four of them on the road to show to publishers.
And within months, all of them had been signed, and the studio became a multi-project developer.
There’s not much info on the games right now, but this is what we know: One is being led by Lee Petty, art director on Brutal Legend; one by Nathan Marks (quite cutting edge, says Tim) who also worked on Brutal Legend ; another from Brad Muir, a designer on Brutal Legend; and one by Tasher Harris, animator on Brutal Legend.
Some of these games will be released digitally and some will make it to retail.
Regarding publishing, Schafer didn’t say with whom the games were signed, but did reveal the studio has retained the copyright for all its IP and will look into self publishing future titles once it has the money to do so.
