Double Fine brought in a documentary crew to film the making of Broken Age and the behind-the-scenes footage was periodically released to the project's backers. The 20- to 45-minute long episodes shed light on how a game goes from idea to finished product, what's often a closed and secretive process.
Backers watched as the Broken Age team brainstormed, came up with concept art, programmed, ironed out bugs and recorded the music and vocal talent (Elijah Wood and Jack Black's voices are both in the game, among others). The documentary also tracks how the project expanded in scope and how the company struggled to manage its budget, leading to a decision to split the product into two halves (Act II is promised later this year as a free update for players who buy Act I).
In a particularly brutal scene from one of the latest documentary episodes, the development team gathers as one of the game's animators presents a cutscene he's particularly proud of. The scene is one of the first character interactions between the boy, Shay, and a mysterious talking wolf. The camera focuses on the animator's face, and he smiles as the cutscene plays on a large monitor.
At the end of the scene, Schafer tells the animator that while the work is good, the wolf's exaggerated movements don't fit with the character's personality. Visibly crestfallen, the animator attempts to negotiate — maybe he can make some small tweaks — and that's when Schafer firmly tells him that the entire scene needs to be re-animated. The animator resigns himself to redoing hours of work. It's a moment that's instantly relatable to anyone who's been involved in a collaborative creative process.
Double Fine has also struggled with how to work with the press while keeping its promise to make sure the project's backers are the first to know about the game's developments. Progress updates were made available to the project's 87,142 Kickstarter backers (plus people who backed the game after the Kickstarter campaign ended) with the expectation that the news they contained wouldn't be shared until the company made formal public announcements. That didn't stop video game journalists from using backer updates as a source to report on the game's budgetary woes.
In one episode of the documentary, Double Fine staffers lament the actions of journalists as a "violation of our terms of use" and a betrayal of the agreement they made with backers. One of the company's employees, formerly a video game journalist himself, reminds the team that not publishing information — especially after it's already been "leaked" — would make a reporter feel "derelict in their duties."
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