An actor rarely accepts a role without first seeing the script, but Wood needed no second invitation. During early recording sessions, Wood constantly made reference to lines and characters that Schafer had written in his LucasArts heyday. Broken Age isn't the first game Wood has voiced, though he describes the opportunity to work with Schafer as "extraordinary". "He turned out to be a big nerd in the best possible way!" Schafer enthuses, and it seems the admiration is mutual. "We didn't know whether he might just want to do a cameo or something," adds Schafer, "but he, 'No, I'll do Shay!' and he was great." "He asked if I'd be interested, and I said I'd be honoured," Wood recalls. I mean, I was a huge fan of Tim's games – Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle shaped my teenage years, and he was the first game designer I really knew by name." Wood tweeted enthusiastically about the campaign, and Schafer noticed and reached out to him. "Even though it had far exceeded its, I contributed as well. "It all really started when I saw Tim's Kickstarter campaign," Elijah Wood says. Experienced voice-over artist Masasa Moyo was recruited to play the spirited Vella (Schafer pays generous tribute to her performance), but the casting of Shay, a likeable everyman smothered by overbearing parents, was rather unorthodox. Schafer had conceived Broken Age's story as two intertwining coming-of-age tales. more like, 'Wow, we can do this thing right.'" ![]() It may be surprising, but getting millions of dollars all at once is an incredibly pleasant sensation. And when it got over-funded, we thought, 'Hey, this is the same budget we had for Grim Fandango.'" But Schafer felt no additional pressure. ![]() "That was the right amount of money for the game. "We didn't ask for less than we needed," he explains. Schafer envisaged a game built in Flash over three months or so, akin to the free titles it had featured on its website, albeit more polished and substantial. " His mind naturally turned to the point-and-click adventure, the genre in which he'd made his name, with the likes of Day of the Tentacle and The Secret of Monkey Island, but which no longer seemed financially viable.ĭouble Fine set a modest target of $400,000, which would include the production costs for the documentary. "That made me think about the games we get requests for, that we have a passionate following telling us to make but don't have the money. "What people were doing with Kickstarter at the time was enabling things to happen that couldn't happen," Schafer says. Having been successfully funded for the Minecraft documentary, 2 Player Productions suggested Kickstarter as a platform for the campaign. So we decided to a game as well – not as an afterthought, but as a secondary idea." "It wouldn't be very good if we had to get them to approve everything, as they wouldn't agree to anything that might portray the game in a less positive light. But Schafer knew that publisher involvement in the documentary would present a false picture. The troubled development of Double Fine's 2009 adventure Brütal Legend is well documented, with Electronic Arts stepping in to publish the game after Activision cancelled the project, prompting lawsuits, countersuits and an eventual out-of-court settlement. ![]() ![]() It seemed a good opportunity to throw the factory doors open."įor Schafer, it also represented an opportunity to highlight the pressures studios often face from publishers. "But also I wanted to show people that games were both easy and hard to make, so people could see the dedication of the team, and how much work and care goes into all the games you play. "It sounded really appealing to me, because I like attention," Schafer jokes. The company wanted to make a warts-and-all story about a game's development from inception to release. The story began when documentary maker 2 Player Productions interviewed Schafer for its 2012 film Minecraft: The Story of Mojang.
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