After the prototypes are finished, do we just forget or are they being shopped around now to publishers? Or is DF self publishing?

The answer is who knows.

My guess is that, for each prototype, one of the following happens:

1. It’s determined to not have enough potential, so nothing further happens.
2. It’s shopped around to publishers to get funding.
3. It becomes Double Fine’s next Kickstarter project.

It wouldn’t surprise me if part of the goal of the AF Humble Bundle is to start building an audience for the next Kickstarter(s). Pretty brilliant if you ask me.

I think it would be neat if they self-published some of them and released them in a humble bundle.

The first kickstarter game’s going to have to be stellar to ensure strong support for a second.

edsrzf - 04 December 2012 06:01 PM

My guess is that, for each prototype, one of the following happens:

1. It’s determined to not have enough potential, so nothing further happens.
2. It’s shopped around to publishers to get funding.
3. It becomes Double Fine’s next Kickstarter project.

It wouldn’t surprise me if part of the goal of the AF Humble Bundle is to start building an audience for the next Kickstarter(s). Pretty brilliant if you ask me.

If you look at the projects, at least three of them - White Birch, Black Lake, Autonomous, looks like projects that need to have a budget that´s at least on par with DFA, so it would be interesting to see how kickstarters for those would be received. I think DF would get very little of the “you can fund it yourself” critique, and since they´re all original ideas and new IP´s they wouldn´t have to deal with “oh ffs nostalgia” backlash like many other developers have had to defend themselves against. But the funding goals for the project would most likely be very high.

Spacebase seems like a nice fit for alpha funding like Minecraft and Prison Architect, but then they need to get to the alpha stage in the development before they can start charging people.

But that´s just me speculating and guessing of course.

I wonder if we will get to vote on which games, if any, we think are awesome enough to be worked on further.

I hope the fact that they’re so open about this years AF Prototypes won’t scare off publishers. They seem to keep quiet about all the past prototypes (aside from the ones that got made, and Brazen) and I assume that is why.

I think I heard in one of the steams/episodes/interviews that they’ve had 1 or 2 games come out of every Amnesia Fortnight they’ve had so far. So I expect that afterwards that a couple of them might turn into full fledged games. More immediately afterwards though, they’ll probably just go back to working on what they were before the Amnesia Fortnight started.

I hope that they don’t do another Kickstarter - especially before Reds is out.

My hope is that a publisher is using this experience to do some market research.

Who knows, maybe they’ve been approached as soon as the pitch videos were up and are waiting to see where they go with them.

Hopefully at the end of the process Tim will give a grand speech saying that X publisher is interested in this, and X publisher is interested in that. Hopefully.

Hope some of these games will be picked up or brazen at least. They gonna have to do new projects anyway soon because middle manager of justice and cave are running on the end of their production cycle.

4) It gets private investment
5) They try an alpha funding model (like Minecraft) as someone else mentioned.
6) ???

Kickstarter is cool and publishers can be useful, but there’s more than 2 ways to pay for a game, possibly ones we haven’t even thought of yet. Pretty exciting to imagine what they might want to do with these, but I imagine we’ll here nothing for a while, while everyone goes back to their previous projects. Sounds like The Cave is wrapping up though.

The best thing we can do for these games is to show how excited we are about them and spread the word.  That could potentially show a publisher that there’s enough interest in these projects to make investing in them a sure thing.

I thought the people who backed the Humble Bumble would get access to these 5 prototypes, and thus Double Fine will receive feedback from the gamer community on which prototype is the best. My assumption would be that Double Fine would try to get every prototype a publisher, but the best one or two may be the only prototypes to seek a release for.

TrueStoryGuy - 05 December 2012 07:31 AM

I thought the people who backed the Humble Bumble would get access to these 5 prototypes, and thus Double Fine will receive feedback from the gamer community on which prototype is the best. My assumption would be that Double Fine would try to get every prototype a publisher, but the best one or two may be the only prototypes to seek a release for.

Well, different prototypes might be good for different reasons, or might suggest different funding models. So it’s not quite as clear cut as the best prototypes get move forward. And it’s not certain that publishing would be the best route for every game to go down.

Seems like alpha funding (sell the game while it’s still in development) might be a really cool way to go for Spacebase or even Autonomous, as they have a lot of room for cool emergent things happening (and having lots of users on them to discover where the ‘fun’ can be found is a good way of figuring out what directions to take them)

Seems like White Birch or Black Lake might be received well by publishers who will have seen that smaller but very stylistic and atmospheric games have lately done very well.

Something like Hack ‘n’ Slash is a bit of a harder sell to a publisher but might be the sort of thing that a Kickstarter crowd would respond very well to, and could probably be done on a smaller team and budget than DFA, so maybe they’ll be tempted to do that way.

That’s assuming all these prototypes produce something viable, of course, and that there will be the staff available to work on them. But my point is that it’s not quite as simple as seeing what people like the most and pitching those to publishers.

SurplusGamer - 05 December 2012 09:37 AM

Something like Hack ‘n’ Slash is a bit of a harder sell to a publisher but might be the sort of thing that a Kickstarter crowd would respond very well to, and could probably be done on a smaller team and budget than DFA, so maybe they’ll be tempted to do that way.

That’s assuming all these prototypes produce something viable, of course, and that there will be the staff available to work on them. But my point is that it’s not quite as simple as seeing what people like the most and pitching those to publishers.

On the other hand, publishers/investors having the assurance that there are already AT LEAST 9,000 guaranteed sales makes for a slightly sexier proposition, if only slightly. I mean, granted, 9,000 isn’t exactly the hugest number, but Hack n’ Slash isn’t exactly the hugest game. And there aren’t exactly a lot of heads working on it, so the billed hours aren’t necessarily huge either. Between DFA and AF, none of those hours really need to go toward developing the 2D engine, so that’s hardly a cost.

If the game was sold on Steam and could be played on Linux, it’s a pretty safe bet that the PC nerd community would be sufficiently hungry for a game of that kind from a well-known and proven studio.

I think Hack n’ Slash is the most unorthodox title in the mix, but I think if you planned well, you could make a persuasive argument for it.

*posts like he knows what he’s talking about*

SurplusGamer - 05 December 2012 09:37 AM

TrueStoryGuy - 05 December 2012 07:31 AM

I thought the people who backed the Humble Bumble would get access to these 5 prototypes, and thus Double Fine will receive feedback from the gamer community on which prototype is the best. My assumption would be that Double Fine would try to get every prototype a publisher, but the best one or two may be the only prototypes to seek a release for.

Well, different prototypes might be good for different reasons, or might suggest different funding models. So it’s not quite as clear cut as the best prototypes get move forward. And it’s not certain that publishing would be the best route for every game to go down.

Seems like alpha funding (sell the game while it’s still in development) might be a really cool way to go for Spacebase or even Autonomous, as they have a lot of room for cool emergent things happening (and having lots of users on them to discover where the ‘fun’ can be found is a good way of figuring out what directions to take them)

Seems like White Birch or Black Lake might be received well by publishers who will have seen that smaller but very stylistic and atmospheric games have lately done very well.

Something like Hack ‘n’ Slash is a bit of a harder sell to a publisher but might be the sort of thing that a Kickstarter crowd would respond very well to, and could probably be done on a smaller team and budget than DFA, so maybe they’ll be tempted to do that way.

That’s assuming all these prototypes produce something viable, of course, and that there will be the staff available to work on them. But my point is that it’s not quite as simple as seeing what people like the most and pitching those to publishers.

All excellent ideas and points. Although, keep in mind, even if all of the prototypes ended up getting greenlit for full production (which is unfortunately unlikely due to the nature of business), we likely won’t hear word of them for quite some time. DF has lots of other projects in various states of completion, and the AF is held every year.

However, it sounds like this year’s AF prototypes are shaping up to be particularly strong, and with DF’s new movement towards strong community involvement we may see more about these games sooner rather then later. I know I personally would eventually buy and play full versions of all of them based just on what I’ve seen so far.

SurplusGamer - 05 December 2012 06:56 AM

4) It gets private investment
5) They try an alpha funding model (like Minecraft) as someone else mentioned.
6) ???

Kickstarter is cool and publishers can be useful, but there’s more than 2 ways to pay for a game, possibly ones we haven’t even thought of yet. Pretty exciting to imagine what they might want to do with these, but I imagine we’ll here nothing for a while, while everyone goes back to their previous projects. Sounds like The Cave is wrapping up though.

7) Profit!!!

I can’t believe no one said that yet.  Anyway, I would be highly surprised if publishers weren’t paying close attention to this.  These are games we paid to vote for.

It occurs to me that we are, in part, publishing these prototypes which effectively makes us publishers.  Crowd-publishing?

Xastabus - 06 December 2012 09:27 AM

SurplusGamer - 05 December 2012 06:56 AM

4) It gets private investment
5) They try an alpha funding model (like Minecraft) as someone else mentioned.
6) ???

Kickstarter is cool and publishers can be useful, but there’s more than 2 ways to pay for a game, possibly ones we haven’t even thought of yet. Pretty exciting to imagine what they might want to do with these, but I imagine we’ll here nothing for a while, while everyone goes back to their previous projects. Sounds like The Cave is wrapping up though.

7) Profit!!!

I can’t believe no one said that yet.  Anyway, I would be highly surprised if publishers weren’t paying close attention to this.  These are games we paid to vote for.

It occurs to me that we are, in part, publishing these prototypes which effectively makes us publishers.  Crowd-publishing?

I’m not so sure about that. “Publish” means a little bit more than “give money to”.

Zonr_0 - 05 December 2012 03:26 PM

...know I personally would eventually buy and play full versions of all of them based just on what I’ve seen so far.

Ideas that sound really fantastic on paper at the concept stage, don’t always end up being fun when they’re actually made.  I fully expect 2 or 3 of these prototypes to demonstrate this.  That’s why the prototyping stage is very important

At the moment I’m excited about Autonomous and Spacebase.  I expect that once I’ve played the prototypes, the list of games that I find most promising will be quite different.