Submit Your DOTD Games! 11 Apr 11:00 AM (6 days ago)

Hey folks! Seems every time I blink my eyes there's some amazing Day of the Devs event happening and then we gotta grab a fresh round of amazing indie games to curate and check out for the next event. We recently held our yearly in-person event live in San Francisco with a wonderful show at the Midway as well as a small little booth at the Game Developer's Conference.

There's very little downtime until our next showcase at Summer Games Fest in June, so the time has come to submit your amazing games! If you have a game you want to share with the world, you can send it to our lovely panel of industry experts for review. Games selected from this process will be featured in a huge digital showcase and a selection will also be chosen to appear at the in-person "Play Days" event. You can submit your games here.

The goal is the same as it always has been: to showcase games from developers all around the world and give a spotlight to a diverse range of play experiences. From intense horror shooters to cozy tea-making games and everything in-between, Day of the Devs is committed to sharing all kinds of games from developers of all backgrounds.

Day of the Devs became a non-profit charity not too long ago (At least relative to how long we've had events! We've been around a while!) and if you want to help support our mission with donations, you can contribute here. Thank you for all your love and support! We're very excited to see you games and to really show folks all the gems out there in the indie world.

DOTD: The Lineup! 6 Mar 1:26 PM (last month)

Day of the Devs: San Francisco Edition is just over a week away! On Sunday March 16th we return once again to our old haunt, The Midway, in San Francisco's Dogpatch, and we're bringing an incredible set of unreleased games for you to play!

Check out the sizzle reel below for a preview of everything in the lineup, including some of our alt-control games, one of which involves a see saw, and another asks you to pet a giant fluffy cat butt. What more could you you ask for?

Please join us on March 16th @ The Midway, from 3 - 9pm. Entry is FREE, we're open to ALL AGES, and if you happen to be here for GDC - no badge is needed.

You can RSVP here - mainly so you can get it in the calendar, and don't lose the address.

Hope to see you there!

Action Auction! 10 Feb 2:00 PM (2 months ago)

Last month's fires in Los Angeles were a horrible event which affected many of our friends, collaborators, and community members. In the face of something so big, it's hard to know what to do. For us here at Double Fine, we wanted to support friends and fans and help charities in a way that felt "Doubly Fine." So we've settled on a charity auction!

Starting today, we will be auctioning a highly curated selection of special items and rare swag on GalaBid. All proceeds will go to both the Go Fund Me General Fire Relief Fund and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to help affected families and individuals find the support they need including temporary shelter, food, water, and emergency kits.

What can you expect at the auction? Let's look at just a few of the cool items on the bidding docket. If you want to look at everything, check out the full auction page here or watch the video down below!

Among the items up for auction are a variety of employee-exclusive hoodies and gifts that have been handed out over the years. These including a lovely maroon hoodie with a dinosaur spin on our Two Headed Baby mascot drawn by senior animator Chris Lam. This will have folks stopping you on the street to ask "hey, what's that cool hoodie all about?" I know because that's happened to me. There's also special Hawaiin shirts and even a very rare hoodie from the second year of Double Fine's history. These have never been released in stores and the only other folks who have them work here!

There's also additional collector's items including a Stacking set of matryoshka dolls that's so old and rare we don't even really know when they were made or how many exist! And for folks who want something more huggable, we have Raz and Lili plushies. These were made initially as Psychonauts 2 backer rewards before a small portion was sold to the general public. You can't get these anymore and they're a perfect fit for anyone looking for cool swag. There's even a special P2 yoyo and pins that were handed out to guests at the Psychonauts 2 launch party. Incredibly exclusive stuff!

The auction period will last from today until February 14th. That means you don't need to rush too much but you probably also wanna be vigilant if you're looking to snag one of the more special items. We hope you'll enjoy the swag and we thank you ahead of time for your contributions. Together, we can help folks affected by the fires have a better quality of life.

Day of the Devs: SF Edition 27 Jan 1:52 PM (2 months ago)

It's that time again folks! Day of the Devs is returning to San Francisco this March for our big annual get together, and we're looking for cool games to show there too.

Day of the Devs: San Francisco Edition will take place on March 16th at The Midway with more than 60 hand-picked unreleased independently created games to play, live musical performances, and an abundance of food trucks to sustain your day of fun. As always, the event is FREE to attend, and open to all ages. More info and RSVP on Eventbrite.

Continuing the fun, Day of the Devs will also bring an arcade of 12 games to Moscone Center's West Hall for the Game Developers Conference, which will be playable all week long.

This Edition of DOTD is usually only accessible to GDC badge holders, but this year, for the first time, members of the public are welcome to come along too! On Monday 17th March, from 6:30-10pm, GDC Nights invites you to come and join the party!

Submissions are open now!

We have over 60 spots to fill up with amazing titles, so if you or someone you know is making a super cool game you think we might be interested in showing to people. please submit it to the show.

Submissions are open NOW until February 3rd, so move without delay!

Please note - Day of the Devs never charges for inclusion in the events and showcases, and all hardware is provided - you don't even have to be there (though you will of course be very much invited.)

Donate to the cause!

Day of the Devs is a non-profit with the mission to celebrate the creativity, diversity and magic of video games. Day of the Devs gives a voice to emerging or underrepresented talent with platforms that connect players with developers, and their games.

The shows and showcases rely entirely on donations, if you feel like giving and helping to assure the future of the shows, you can do so here: www.dayofthedevs.com

Thanks, see you all at the Midway in March!

A Second Run? 10 Dec 2024 12:34 PM (4 months ago)

Hello and wow! It's almost the end of the year, which means planning for the next year. That's how things work! For us, that means thinking about recent projects like Double Fine PsychOdyssey. Earlier this year, we released one final bonus episode for the series and shipped out our lovely collector's edition Blu-rays to diehard fans. It was a long but rewarding process and we remain really proud of the documentary.

The tricky thing with any "collector's edition" stuff is that supplies are limited. Which means that sometimes folks miss out. I hear from fans very often through emails and social media DMs. Most often that's folks trying to get me to say Brütal Legend 2 is in development, which it isn't. But some folks have asked "Hey, I would love a copy of that there documentary. Will you ever bring that back?"

The answer is... maybe! We really want to but that also means having a sense of how many copies we might need to make. Because we would really like to make more! So here's the deal: if you're interested in picking up a Blu-ray set for Double Fine PsychOdyssey in the event of a second run, sign up below. The more interest we see and the clearer picture we have, the more likely it is to happen.

The Big One 27 Nov 2024 9:30 AM (4 months ago)

Psychonauts 2 has been out for a while now and we've placed it on sale plenty of times. But maybe you haven't ever bought it because in your heart of hearts you thought "I should wait until it is on mega sale!" That day is today. Those fancy folks at Valve reached out to us and asked if we wanted to be part of a pretty bonkers-huge sale and we said sure. The result is that you can grab Psychonauts 2 on Steam right now for 90% off!

That's... basically free? Kinda? It's the price of like a cup of coffee or something like that. You can check out the sale (with us and ton of great games) here. Seriously, there's no excuse to not grab this game now if you haven't. It's probably never gonna be this cheap again until after the Water Wars in 2068.

The timing was good because we're also making another addition to the game as it exist on that platform. Some folks really love to have all kinda of collectible stuff in one place, keeping games side by side with soundtracks and other special features. So we've added Double Fine PsychOdyssey as a kind of "DLC" for download.

PsychOdyssey is such a massively in-depth look at the development of P2 and we've tried to host it in a variety of places. It's a YouTube series, you can download the biggest and rawest versions on the Internet Archive. But if you're someone who wants everything nestled together in one place, this is for you. It's all there right next to your game on Steam. Pretty nifty right?

In many ways this marks the real conclusion to our journey with Psychonauts 2. It was a huge development process (made possible by our amazing backers and fans) that's really changed our studio in many ways. Mostly good! You learn a lot from a project like that. So! If you haven't played, this is your chance to get the game for a killer discount and if you've not watched the documentary, that's right there for ya as well. We hope you enjoy!

To Blue Skies! 26 Nov 2024 11:26 AM (4 months ago)

If you've been on social media, you might have noticed that things are EXPLODING and people have been trying a variety of different places for their posting needs. That's because Twitter, which we will never call X here, has been on a bit of a downswing. No need to talk about the reasons why but it's not always the most stable platform or the place where real conversations are happening anymore.

Here at Double Fine, we've explored a variety of places until now. If you're an Instagram-head, you might also have seen us on their little side-spot 'Threads' and if you were part of a particularly cool group of folks you might have caught us on cohost while that was still active and around. Among these "second" and "third" places, an app for folks who mostly just Want Twitter Again But It Also Works.

Well! We're there too and it seems to be the place that's really taking off, so we really want to tell you all that you can find us there. Ain't that grand?

Heading into the new year, we're not gonna be using Twitter for much more except news. So if you wanna talk directly to us at our most responsive, Bluesky is the place. Update your bookmarks accordingly.

To help you all get started, we've made... a starter pack! The Double Fine ACTION Starter Pack is a nice little widget that we're continually updating as more folks from the studio set up accounts. With little more than a click here, you can find tons of talented Double Fine programmers, artists, developers, support folks, and more. It's like we stuffed everyone into a little collectible card pack or something.

So! If you want up-to-date news and musings, I'd suggest hitting us up there. If you need to talk to us for serious stuff, our support email (support@doublefine.com) will always be the best place but if you just wanna chill, hit up those blue skies!

Day of the Devs At The Game Awards '24 20 Nov 2024 12:00 PM (4 months ago)

It's been another year and that year has contained many things. It's even contained video games! Which means we all need to gather around and dress up for a bit awards ceremony. The Game Awards is an exciting night where we celebrate games while also saying things like "No, no it's cool I didn't really want an award. Just being nominated was an honor." Which is true but also kinda not true. Be honest! You did want an award!

As part of our ongoing partnership with The Game Awards and Geoff Keighley, Day of the Devs will has a digital showcase featuring 19 incredible indie titles, with release date announcements and awesome trailers. This year, we're showing stuff from Annapurna, Andrea Love and Wooly Games, Céline & the Silly Stars, Dogubomb and Raw Fury, (Letibus Design, Icedrop Games and Draknek & Friends), Electric Saint, Fabraz, Funny Fintan Softworks, Heart Machine and Arc Games,  Kamibox, Nagai Industries, Panic, Redemption Road and Tinybuild, RiffRaff Games, and more! That a big list of folks!

And I'm just tryin' to gas things up when I say that these games rule. I'm one of the folks who helps select games for Day of the Devs' showcase and I've seen these games. There's something for everyone from tricky pocket-puzzlers to some absurd battlefield hi-jinks. Day of the Devs is dedicated to showing off all kinds of games and one of the fun things about getting submissions from creative folks all around the globe is that each showcase is very, very unique.

Day of the Devs: The Game Awards Edition will be presented online via livestream on Wednesday, December 11 at 9AM PT to kick things off before The Game Awards on December 12. Fans can tune in on The Game Awards YouTube and Twitch channels.

They're Here 13 Nov 2024 11:30 AM (5 months ago)

By the time I started working at Double Fine—which oh my god is almost five years ago—the astounding Fig campaign that helped make Psychonauts 2 possible was finished. A lot of my work on P2 was actually spent with folks at Microsoft, helping with advertising and making sure we knew how to tell the world about this amazing new game that was coming up. But many folks already knew! They'd donated to make it real in the first place! And from time to time, I'd write out updates telling folks how things were going but also when to expect various backer goodies.

Most of that went off without a hitch. In the case of the art book, that project even grew into something larger than I think anyone expected. There were camping trips and board-game days with Tim, special box sets, and more. But one piece of merch took quite a long time to reach our backers: the Raz and Lili plushies. I'm happy to say that folks have been receiving these throughout the week. Our long quest to bring Psychonauts 2 to life and give our backers cool stuff has come to an end. What a long road!

I'm not gonna jabber about all the reasons these hug-able pals took so long to end up on collector's shelves or in the clutches of happy golden retrievers but I will say that it was an eye-opening experience. The biggest factor was the Covid-19 pandemic itself, which  sent a years-long shock-wave through supply chains. It's hard to understate how the world is still feeling the effects of that to this very moment. But another reason is that we really, really, really, really, really went back and forth on the plushie designs. There's only so many of these and we wanted them perfect. Seriously, you should see the email threads with our artists' feedback. There was an intense vetting process. No detail was too small.

That's all done now! We had some extra plushies that were made available to non-backers but every one of them has been claimed and judging from the tweets and some emails I've gotten, they've started finding their owners. I have a pair in my office and although I'd love to keep them for myself, I think they're gonna make good Christmas gifts for my tiny nephew and niece. They're soft, have bendy arms, and have cool talk boxes. For you collector types, I hope they look good high and safe on a shelf but I also grant folks permission to get messy with these things. Our games are about many things but one of those things is joy and fun. If you wanna do something wild... I dunno, like... geo-caching a plushie... I'm not going to stop you. If the revolution doesn't have dancing, I don't wanna be a part of it! So consider this permission to play with your toys. Have at it!

Either way, this moment marks the end of a journey. From the bottom of my heart and on behalf of everyone here at Double Fine, I want to thank our backers who helped make Psychonauts 2 a real video game that people can play. I want to thank anyone who has played. We're really lucky to make weird games at a time where not everyone is able to do that. We're even more lucky that so many folks keep playing.

Enjoy the plushies! We'll see you eventually for the next big adventure!

15 Years Of Brütal Legend 16 Oct 2024 1:00 PM (6 months ago)

This Sunday marked the 15th anniversary of Brütal Legend, a length of time which truly alarms all of the folks here who worked on it. Time's river claims all things! But if you're lucky, you get to do some stuff which leaves a mark and when it comes to our games here at Double Fine it's fair to say Brütal's got one hell of a legacy. My inbox on social media gets pinged every day and I think at least 30% of those messages are request for Brütal Legend 2. Eddie Riggs' tale of heavy metal derring-do has really stuck with fans over the years, and keeps generating new metal heads as time goes on.

We've spoken about it over the years from time to time. How could we not? But part of my job here at Double Fine is to keep track of the studio's story. When there's time, I chat with folks here in semi-formal interviews so that they can tell me their firsthand experiences working on great games. When the pandemic started a few years ago, I collected a glut of stories from my coworkers. Learning the tale of Brütal Legend's development was really important to me, and so I'd like to break it down into something of an "official" account of the process from concept to release.

Let's get started!

Ideas Are Like Fish

..and to catch the really beautiful ones, the big ones, you need to go deep. Or so says David Lynch anyway. Tim understands this. He's always been a good idea man. It's tempting to believe these ideas appear fully-formed but the truth is it takes time, sometimes a lot of it. The inspirations that led Tim to Brütal Legend's core concept came from a variety of places and piled up over years before eventually coalescing when the time was right. But though the sources are scattered, the seed of the idea can be traced back to one special moment. It all started with Tim's brother introducing him to something new, something that would blow his tiny childhood mind.

While listening to Supertramp, the British rock band known more to progressive sounds and electric piano riffs, Tim's brother yelled downstairs: "Come up here and listen to this!" What was so important that Tim needed to hear it? Iron Man by Black Sabbath. There it was! Heavy metal music! Ozzy Osbourne's unforgettable vocals, Tony Iommi's guitar riffs. It kicked off a life-long love of the genre.

 "You fantasize when you listen to music," Tim told me. "I would imagine all kinds of different scenes when I was listening to songs."

Castles under siege, demons on the battlefield. They were images of high fantasy. Images that would swirl like fish in the pond of Tim's mind for a long time. It wouldn't be until Tim was a bit older and working in the games industry for a while that these images of battle axes and demons started to feel ripe for a video game. Audiences certainly seemed to like swords and magick missiles. Besides adventure games, players were flocking to RPGs.

When Tim was working at LucasArts, their games were often in competition with fantasy games even if he wasn't making games with swords and goblins. Experiences like Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights brought distinct, mechanics-driven dungeon crawls to players with home computers and while these were pretty different from LucasArts games, the overlap of audiences meant fans of Grim Fandango were usually also fans of dungeon-crawling and goblin bashing. Tim certainly wanted to make a fantasy game but that wasn't in the cards even if the kernel of an idea formed. What if you took that setting and cranked it up to absurd levels? What if those battles he imagined as a kid while listening to Ozzy could form the basis of a different kind of fantasy?

"If you’re going to compete with them, let’s really exaggerate it and really take it super far."

What would you name a game like that? What happens if you take something like Icewind Dale and really turn the dial all the way up? He kicked some ideas around in his noggin and mostly tried to consider names that would sound suitable absurd. Chief among them was Omen of Prophecy. Tim thought it was suitably silly since, as he pointed out: "an omen is a type of prophecy!" And so these little thoughts started building up but there wasn't a real idea of what the game could be. Inspiration on that front came from two sources: a coworker's tee-shirts and the 1987 comedy-horror film Evil Dead 2.

At the end of Evil Dead 2, heroic everyman Ash Williams is tossed back in time to the year 1300 AD. He ends up in the middle of a battle between knights and demons, blasting away a monster with his shotgun. In the sequel Army Of Darkness, he uses his knowledge of modern technology to help defend against demonic forces led by an evil doppelgänger. He modifies his Oldsmobile into a "battle car" and uses modern tactics to defend a castle. The idea stuck with Tim and called to mind another story: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. This strange tale by Mark Twain has a similar idea except in that story it's a engineer from the 1800s who ends up in Camelot. He invents gunpowder and even uses a lightning rod to outsmart Merlin. In one sequence, he defends a cave by designing a minefield and gatling gun.

"It’s kinda gruesome," Tim recalls. "He wires up the castle with electricity and electrocutes knights who are attacking."

The core idea was fun though. The prospect of using modern knowledge in the past held a lot of potential. The only question was: what kind of person should end up traveling back in time or finding themself in a strange land. Tim's love of handymen and other humble working class folks led to a decision that a rock band roadie might work.

"What if a roadie was the Connecticut Yankee? Connecticut Roadie or whatever... A competent humble person is appealing. My uncles and stuff, people I admired were never aggressive but they knew how to rewire the lights and how to do stuff."

So there's the idea! A "Connecticut Roadie" and hard worker like people Tim knew in his life. But what would you call a game like that? Certainly not Omen of Prophecy. The answer came from a coworker at the computer store Tim worked at.

"In the back room there was a metalhead," Tim recalled to me. "He wore all these gruesome heavy metal tee shirts which he always referred to as "brutal.” In fact, any thing he liked, he called "brutal," so it stuck with me. That part of the name was in my head for years."

A brutal game about times of legend. But what would the gameplay look like?

The Art Of War

Herzog Zwei is a Sega Genesis game that released in 1989 and it's sometimes considered the first real-time strategy video game. Players pilot a transforming mech around a battlefield where they can give orders to units but also, importantly, sometimes contribute directly to the fight. For a game that kicked off a genre, that made it a bit unique compared to games that would follow such as Dune 2 or WarCraft, where players did not quite have a presence on the battlefield in the same way. As luck would have it, Tim was a big Herzog Zwei fan. Even if his strategy was very direct.

"I loved building up a mass of motorcycles outside a castle and just turning them loose," he told me. "I love automatons and robots working for you and I love that disconnection where there's one level between you and the fighting. But there was this option to take your jet and turn into a robot and shoot people on the battlefield. And I love that. That’s why Eddie flies."

As games like WarCraft took off and Tim's love for the genre grew, it was clear that he really wanted to make an RTS. The truth is that Brütal Legend was always built with the strategy elements first using Herzog Zwei as an inspiration. Smashing together that desire with a love of artist like Basil Wolverton, Stanley Mouse, and Big Daddy Roth made the final idea come together.

 "I love hot rods," Tim told me. "Custom cars and demons driving hotrods with tongues hanging out and eyes bloodshot was imprinted on me in the 70s as something very cool."

The full idea was formed: an RTS with rock inspirations where you were a modern person who helped turn the tide of massive battles, giving commands to all kinds of gnarly freaks. It took a lot of different ideas mixing together but there was a name, a sense of the setting and vibes, and direct inspiration for the gameplay.

"I’ll think of an element and it won’t go anywhere in my brain for years," Tim said. Then two ideas will crash into each other and NOW THAT’S A THING."

Metalheads And Sexy Demons

In order to have battles, you need a ton of different dudes. In order to have complex strategy game battles, those dudes need to be part of big factions. Orcs versus Humans. Greeks versus Persians. That sort of thing. Brütal Legend didn't start with a story idea but the mechanical one, and to build on top of that required conceptualizing who would be fighting on the battle. Not in a narrative sense but in terms of gnarly looks and potential units. To make that happen, the team's artists—Scott Campbell, Peter Chan, Nathan Stapley, Razmig Mavlian— started drawing anything and everything.

"They just started drawing," Tim recalls Anything that could look like it was on an album cover! Scott drew an axe car, which never made it into the game but that was an epiphany. A hotrod with a GIANT axe on it! Raz was drawing sexy demons!"

It was Peter Chan's professional instincts that helped bring the process together as he realized the team needed a bit more focus. The free-association art jam sessions started to get organized into themes and potential factions. All of these were based off different genres of metal music, which Tim gleefully educated the team on. New Age, Death Metal, even ideas from the Psychobilly fusion genre. Four factions were chosen: the heavy metal Ironheads, gothic Drowning Doom, and the demonically death metal-inspired Tainted Coil. These are factions that folks know from the game itself but there was one last faction that never made it into the game: the hotrod loving Motorfreaks.

Brütal Legend's art director was Lee Petty, who came into the project after this initial period. His job would be to marry the content of the initial artbook with gameplay needs, as well as build out the design of the world itself. He was the person who told me about the Motorfreaks, who ultimately were cut from the game.

"I think they were probably bit distant off visually from other things in the game," Lee remembers. "They were, for lack of a better word, the most cartoony in some ways. But they were a lot of fun to play and were really weird."

While the Motorfreaks were meant to show up in a sequel, they live on only in pieces of concept art now. Like this!

Beyond the factions, artists needed to design the world and this was a process that Lee guided quite actively. The idea was to take images you might see on album covers—skull-faced mountains, salacious citadels with devils and succubi, firepits—and find a way to build a world around them. This was a somewhat complicated process as the game grew. While Brütal Legend's earliest days were animation tests of dismemberment and rudimentary greybox battles, programmers were soon building an entirely new engine for the game: the Buddha Engine. In video games, "engines" are the heart that keeps a game pumping, a collecting of tools and procedures from which everything flows. Buddha was built for a large game with semi-open world spaces and the challenge Lee faced as art director was finding a way to have heavy-metal vistas that looks good both while you were driving around and while flying high on the battlefield.

"We could fly doing [RTS battles] but that meant we were seeing a game, running on a new open world engine from a height that's not flattering," Lee outlined to me in a chat. "So you need to cull more stuff and keeping that good looking and epic while also being readable and performant was hard. Any time in game art when you're trying to convey a player affordance, any sort of symbolic or readable thing it's often a challenge."

That's the reality of building a world for a video game. Concept art has one angle and view; it's right there on the page. Video games are interactive. You can walk around, possibly fly up high, or approach things from an angle different than what was in the art that inspired that part of the world. You might have memory of fidelity limitations that mean adjusting how a thing looks as an in-game asset. As artists compiled factions and the spaces they would live in, art direction focused on capturing the feel that work while taking into account those limitations. The goal, according to Lee, is not to impose uniformity. The Tainted Coil had a look inspired by Hieronymus Bosch painting but there weren't rules about specific shades of purple or black they needed to be or anything so strict. The goal for Brütal's world was instead "unity" and a shared metal vibe. Not too strict, with room for things to be just slightly off.

"We could break a lot of rules," Lee recalls. The result was a twisting world that players loved exploring.

Putting The Pieces Together

The practical realities of video game development mean cobbling together all sorts of pieces into one big whole. For Brütal Legend, that meant figuring out how to create a strategy game and combining that with other challenges such a boss fights. In those early Double Fine days, the experience was (in both a positive and sometimes hectic fashion) very free-wheeling. Chad Dawson was one of many programmers working on the game, joining the studio in the middle of the process. Having worked on strategy games before, he recalls both the challenges of creating artificial intelligence for units on the battlefield as well as working with world builders like Geoff Soulis on key moments. Each brought unique challenges. For strategy elements, he recalls a process where the art came first instead of a production that designed units based on their function.

"Other studios don't work that way where you take a weird picture an artist drew and ask how can we make that into a game?" he told me. "That's what Brütal Legend was. What can we do with this strange creature that was drawn?"

In many strategy games, you have a sense of what units you need to create for your army. If you're making a historical game, you might have defensive spear-wielders, berserker axe-fighters, and long rage archers. These can form a baseline "rock, paper scissors" arrangement that you can then build around while peppering in some faction-specific units. Brütal Legend lacked the concrete units you might find in a game like Empire Earth, and its collection of demons and gnarly dudes meant that while you knew the vibe for a faction, there were a lot of questions to answer. How do you balance a hulking Black Tree, one of the Drowning Doom factions most iconic units, when compared to swarm of demonic Battle Nuns?

"Tim's a good storyteller but he really wanted this to be an RTS," Chad told me. "Working on that kind of game involves a lot of mechanics... In a historical strategy game, you have the Romans or the Greeks or whatever and they're pretty similar; they just have different bonuses.  In Brütal [factions] were completely different! These challenges was what I was looking for in my career as a game maker. I wanted to make something new! And, oh man, I was getting to make something new."

But the game faced another challenge beyond this: how do you teach players all of this? As Brütal Legend's development continued, user tests rated the experience highly but there was anxiety about a tutorial. Vivendi was the initial publisher working with Double Fine on Brütal Legend and their feedback was clear. The game needed a tutorial. This led to the creation of the game's single player campaign, a decision which both created a narrative that players love until this day but (alongside a demo which lacked RTS elements) led some people to believe Brütal was nothing more than a single player hack and slash game with comedy trickled in. While players have warmed to the RTS elements over time, Tim's pretty pensive when looking back on the development. Which remains one of the game's most talked about aspects.

"I thought the surprise would be okay because of ActRaiser," Tim told me.

ActRaiser is a 1990s Super Nintendo game where players initially slash through side-scrolling levels but it eventually becomes a civilization builder in between these sequences. You place structures and build settlements, all with the hope of making your civilization strong enough to overtake and seal off monster-spawning dens. There's still boss fights and slashing but there's elements of strategy and SimCity-esque gameplay. Brütal Legend, in some ways, inherits that gameplay spirit.

"I’m always telling people that if you’re doing game development, you can’t die on every hill," Tim said to me. " What is the core spirit at the heart of it? If my core thing was this multiplayer RTS thing… was it right to stick to that? Or should I have pivoted completely to a single player game?"

One proposed solution, whose expense to implement left it on the cutting room floor, was to add an option where Mangus, the Ironheade engineer, could take charge of ordering units around the battlefield instead of the player. That would have left the option for fans of hacking and slashing to focus only on the action. Instead, we have Brütal 's iconic and eclectic mix of narrative and strategy. Which, let's be honest, is what the game was meant to be all along. And to this day, particularly on Rocktober 13th, you can boot up the multiplayer for intense heavy metal strategy match.

Sometimes against Tim himself! If you're lucky enough to match with him.

You Cannot Kill The Metal

Another one of Brütal Legend's lasting qualities is the licensed soundtrack with countless metal tracks, as well as the celebrity-laden voice cast. In terms of bringing rock stars and silver-screen actors into the game, the process started with a bit of good luck. Jack Black was also a reference point for Eddie Riggs but Vivendi had experience with celebrity work coming off their game Scarface: The World Is Yours, which had Al Pacino's likeness and voice acting from many members of the film's cast. Why not get Jack Black in the game? You're using him as inspiration for Eddie, right?

Tim met with Jack at Four Seasons in Los Angeles, chatting with on the roof and sharing that ever-important art book packed with creations from folks like Scott and Peter. It ignited enthusiasm in Jack, who signed on the project and became a huge champion for the game both with his energy in the recording booth but also a events like the MTV Awards. With Jack secure, arrangements were made to meet with another Eddie Riggs' inspiration: Motörhead front-man Lemmy Kilmister, who also joined the cast. In Brütal, he became the Kill Master, a powerful musician who can soothe and heal allies with his astounding bass guitar.

"Our producer had worked with him before," Tim told me. He was “You just get him some Jack and Coke and some Cheez-Its and turn on the mic. He’ll make himself a drink and when he’s ready to start he’ll go so make sure that mic is on.”

The result was a breezy and loose recording session full of stories and even a trip back to Lemmy's apartment, which was packed with fliers from old concerts, rows of hardcore jackets and boots, and a Nintendo GameCube with Star Fox Assault in the tray. Lemmy was a rock star but he was also a bit of a gamer. After he and Jack got involved, the word about this weird game spread and slowly but surely the cast started growing.

Rob Halford, lead vocalist of Judas Priest, joined in and contrary to his stage presence, Tim recalls he was very soft spoken. Late to a voice session, he called up and quietly apologized for being perhaps five minutes late. In the booth, Tim's made his shout some random things including "DOUUUBLE FIIIINE!" Which led to the game's famous opening voice sting.

Ozzy Osbourne was added to the cast, joining Tim for a voice session in London. Growing up with dyslexia, Ozzy was somewhat hesitant in the booth at first. A process was worked out: Tim would give a read and Ozzy would repeat it and build on it. I have a lot of stories like this from conversations with Tim, most of them pretty sweet. And while there was some drama in having so many rich and boisterous celebrities on a project, his memories are very fond.

You always think of celebrities as these ethereal, otherworldly species of people," Tim said. And then you meet them and they're just creative people who want to put on a show. It was mostly lovely. Great times with great people, especially Jack."

Rock On!

When Brütal Legend released in 2009, the reception was explosive! The game's world was rich and the characters went on an epic tale that people talk about to this day. Players loved the hack-and-slash part of the gameplay, but we surprised a lot of them when the game's strategic side emerged. While that caused some folks to turn away forever, others stuck with it, mastering it, finding deep strategies and tactics. There's even a mod community on PC for the game that helps keep it alive. And every Rocktober 13 they still come out to play with Tim, earning and spreading the viral, "Six Degrees of Schafer" achievement. It's one of Double Fine's best selling games and the one that people ask me about most. When is Brütal Legend 2!? When! Harper please! And while that's not in the card for now, it's certainly a universe many folks here at the studio wonder about returning to.

Tim thinks often about how Mister Rogers could add new places to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and knows that the world of Brütal Legend can expand. The challenge is figuring out what that might even look like. There was more DLC ideas for the original game, and it was always meant to be a world that could be further built upon. But after 15 years, it's tricky to know what's expected.

"People ask about Brütal Legend 2 all the time and I'm torn about that," Tim told me. "I know some of them want it with an evolution of the RTS stuff and some of them just want God of War with Eddie Riggs. I understand the logic of making the second option, but I'm much more excited about the first."

Chad had a few ideas, wondering less about player expectations and more about the vast options that might excite the studio. "There's so much of a world to explore that could be done in many ways," he mused. "It could be an RPG, it could be an RTS. Or even an auto battler!"

That's all hypothetical. What isn't? Players love of the original game and the lasting effect it's had on them and folks here at the studio. We've been lucky here at Double Fine to have many games that stick with people over the years, and which gather new players over time. What's that feel like? Knowing you made something fun and metal and long-lasting? I asked.

"I think every game we made mattered to somebody," Tim told me. They’re all personal, they’re all games we put a distinct spin on. Art is about making connections. You put yourself into this work of art and someone says “I see myself in that!” and that’s a beautiful thing. So it’s nice."

Mysterious Hole Discovered! 2 Oct 2024 2:00 PM (6 months ago)

In the early days of Double Fine, whose time you can find documented in some of Tim's old posts, the studio was in a different office than we are now. To hear the old-timers talk about it, that place was a disaster. Double Fine was a scrappy place and that meant an office with some pain points. The one that folks like Kee or Rusty tell me about are the toilets. If it rained too much, they would basically explode. I will leave it to your imagination to paint the proper picture.

But we've been at our current office for quite a while. Twenty years and probably more than that. We do not have exploding toilets or other strangeness. Even if we take into account that time Tim saw a rat fight. It's a pretty normal place except for our exceptionally bright decor. That was, at least, until this week. I don't know who first found it but I was on my way to the kitchen and found everyone gathered by one of our brick walls.

There was a hole in the wall.

It's there. Small but not some kind of half-way job. You can look through it to the outside world! The hot Californian air smacked right into your eyeball. No one has noticed the hole until now. Years and years of hanging stuff on art boards on that very wall! Years and years of at least a few tall people who were at the right height to see it. Seriously, how did Greg Rice not see this? He's almost seven feet tall! Why didn't one of those hummingbirds slip in somehow? What is going on?! Is this corporate espionage?

The hole has become a sort of office tourist spot both for the strangeness and because it invites folks to wonder. In a boring world, this is probably some something that was bored into the brick so that wires or something could come through at one time or another. In another word, a wall-clinging mouse chewed the stone for fifteen years to get through.

It's a bit worrisome that this mysterious gateway, certainly accessible to any enterprising spirits or ghost, arrives right at the start of Halloween time. I vote in favor of barricading the hole! I'm not getting grabbed by ghoulies!

Of course, that's not up to me. But we can't do nothing? Can we? The hole is FACT of our lives now... Waiting there... Maybe I should go admire it more right now. The wind! Yes, the howling wind is calling...

Huh? Was I saying something? Well, the point is that there's a dang hole in the wall! And who knows what'll happen next here at the studio. Snakes in the ceiling? Only time will tell!

Fantastic Games Roundup! 30 Sep 2024 12:30 PM (6 months ago)

Surprise! There was a sneaky and spooky Day of the Devs celebration last week in Austin, Texas. Day of the Devs usually hits a few times throughout the year typically tied to video game events like GDC, Summer Games Fest and The Game Awards. Highlighting smaller developers and international creators is a cornerstone of Day of the Devs’ mission; our participation during those events is meant to make sure that gaming’s biggest celebrations expand beyond the scope of AAA. But from time to time, we’ve been also sneaking in a few extra pop-up sessions, such as last year's appearance at Bit Summit.

This year presented us with an opportunity that felt like a perfect match, a collaboration with Fantastic Fest, one of the largest genre film festivals in the country. Focused on science fiction, horror and plain fantastic films, this festival has traditionally been the place for premiering movies like Zombieland or John Wick. Day of the Devs joined in the fun this year, adding a small curated selection of predominantly science fiction and horror focused games to the festival. A mini-burst of gaming goodness!

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s tricky to slink off to Texas for a film fest unless you’re a big-time cinephile and I gotta imagine plenty of y’all missed the in-person only fun. So we’d like to take a moment to highlight the awesome games that wowed the crowd at Fantastic Fest, some of which have demos you can download to play at home today.

Channel: Death by Night City, Big Sir Games

Starting off, we have a horror game with an interesting twist. Channel: Death is a sort of “escape room” installation that mixes video games with pen and paper puzzle solving, played on a stack of CRT TVs and controlled with a TV Remote. As players work to stop the villainous Broadcast Killer, they leave notes for each other throughout the course of each play session. Which means that the game is out in the open for an extended period of time at events, and the folks coming and going leave hints for each other in the hopes of completing the game before the festival ends.

We often think of videos games as digital only affairs but mixing and matching the “video” with the real world, be it through odd play structures or controllers, is one of our favorite things to show off at Day of the Devs. If you ever find this one at a festival, pick up the TV remote and try to leave a clue for the next puzzle-solving player.

darkwebSTREAMER by We Have Always Lived in the Forest

This one is all about exploring a procedurally generated faux-internet and untangling dark rituals. In darkwebSTREAMER, you'll take the role of an occult internet sleuth. Players navigate through random events and stressful situations, trying to maintain their stats as they dive deeper into the twisted mysteries of the dark web that changes on each playthrough.

Fear the Spotlight by Cozy Game Pals and Blumhouse Games

Pulling from classic third-person horror, Fear the Spotlight follows two young students exploring their school late after-hours. Featuring a retro-3D style—we’re finally in an age where the crinkling visuals of early PlayStation games is sweeping the indie space—this is a wonderful evocation of the genre’s classical roots.There’s old-school puzzle and strange monsters wandering the halls. If you’re looking for something to scratch that OG horror itch? Look no further than Fear The Spotlight.

Grunn by Sokpop Collective

I’m a big Sokpop Collective fan. They’ve made tons of games and somehow each and every one of them feel different while also undeniably being “Sokpop.” Grunn is no exception, mixing everyday whimsy with strange happenings. You take the role of a gardener doing some work over the weekend… except there’s something off. The garden owner isn’t around and he’s not left you any tools to do your work.

Your job is to hunt around their mysterious house and the adjacent town in order to find what you need to trim the hedges and water the flowers. Except something is watching you, and if you’re not careful this job could be your last. It’s a mix of chill and chilling!

Hollowbody by Headware Games

Hollowbody brought sci-fi horror to our game collection with techno vibes in ruined future cities. You’re a black market rogue caught stranded in a desolate exclusion zone, scavenging to survive and escape back to safety. Featuring classic fixed camera angles and crumbling cities, Hollowbody is a blast of urban-horror perfect for speculative fiction fanatics. 

Holstin by Sonka

One look at Holstin in action should be enough to excite anyone looking for dreadfully exciting combat. Set in a worn-down Polish town, the action shifts between an isometric angle and over the shoulder shooting. Immaculate pixelated visuals transform and twist from moment to moment and that means you can rotate your perspective to get a great sense of the environment before an up-close burst of blood.

Horses by Santa Ragione

This one brings us back to the realm of strange farms and yard work. Horses starts as an idyllic black and white summertime on the farm before it morphs into something strange and transgressive. Unsettling glances, bodies in wheelbarrows. The farm might claim you before the end of things! It’s hard to explain so be sure to watch the trailer for the vibes. It’s like a slow drip of cold water on your spine. Everything about this one is just a little off in very uncomfortable ways.

KARMA: The Dark World by Pollard Studio, Wired Productions and Gamera Games

Bouncing back to corporate dystopia, KARMA: The Dark World tells the story of a vicious megacorporation in Europe that’s up to no good. You’re an agent investigating time and memory, unraveling odd mysteries and navigating the cold, creepy concrete halls in search of truth. It’s a real cinematic horror, pulling from mind-bending films to create a world of amazing visuals.

Pinball M by Zen Studios

This is more a collection of offerings than any one thing. Pinball’s great but if you’re unable to hunt down a Twilight Zone table in your city, there’s tons of horror-focused options in the Pinball M catalog. The Thing, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, System Shock. Pinball M’s DLC offers an eclectic mix of horror and sci-fi options that bring unique spins to the game

Post Trauma by Red Soul Games and Raw Fury

One of the first things that catches the eye with Post Trauma is the mix of real-world visuals and fleshy bits. You take the role of Roman, a train conductor awakening after a panic attack that seems to have transported him into another realm. Classic fixed-angle horror ensues through a paradoxical world mixing the mundane and murderous.

Skate Story by Sam Eng and Devolver Digital

There’s demons to destroy and kickflips to flip in Skate Story, a gorgeous skateboarding adventure that has players exploring the amazingly fractal Underworld. You’ll sell your soul for upgrades and crush through the ashen haze all while landing tricks. If you’re not convinced of how beautiful this game is after two seconds of looking at it, I dunno what to tell you. Yeah, there’s horror and strangeness but there’s also beauty and expression and a wonderful chance to pop an ollie that defeats the Devil.

Tom the postgirl by Oopsie Daisies

Tom wants to show you around her village, a place she knows frighteningly well. She’s been stalking and obsessing over the locals for a while now! Tom the postgirl (yes that's meant to be all lowercase) features hand-drawn exploration game that both is adorable and a little odd. You’ll spy on villagers and deliver packages to disturbed residents, all while avoiding the temptation to misbehave. 

Five Nights At Freddy's: Secret of the Mimic by Steel Wool

Last but certainly not least we have another in the screamingly devilish, lore-packed Five Nights at Freddy's series. This preview was kept a bit under wraps, showing off the Mimic. I'm a bit behind on my story knowledge of Five Nights these days but I know that he's a kind of endoskeleton baddie who has taken on a few different forms. This game will unravel some of the mysteries behind this fan-favorite villain. But what that means will need to be revealed elsewhere...

Still! That's our showcase. The variety of games on display was really something. Classic horror, skateboarding, pinball, and more. Video games are a flexible medium with all kinds of ways to explore sci-fi and spooks. We thank all the folks who showed up and ask you keep your eyes open and wishlist whatever games you really loved. Hell, wishlist all of them!

Our next digital showcase is coming around the time of the Game Awards in December. If you have a cool came to show off, please consider submitting your game here. The form is open until September 30th. We'd love to share your talent with the world on a big stage, so don't hesitate to apply. Until next time: thank you and keep being awesome!

Animating the PsychOdyssey 28 Aug 2024 12:00 PM (7 months ago)

Our documentary series, Double Fine PsychOdyssey, just added a 33rd episode to its roster, and if you’ve seen even half of the show, it’s quite likely that title song which accompanies the animated intro is now an ever-living part of your very being; an audiovisual ear-worm that will always be with you. It’s also quite likely that you’ve noticed no two animated intros are the same.

These title sequences share a structure and the same fantastic theme song from Drew “Orange Drink” Prusko, but every episode also has a unique animation to kick it off, featuring different characters, and moments which foreshadow the story about to unfold. 

This ridiculous undertaking is the work of Michael Firman, an artist who first game to our attention from his fan art of our characters, like Raz, but then later his sketches of Tim and other folks on the team, which he doodled  while watching our former docu-series, Double Fine Adventure, and then shared with us on Twitter. 

To better understand how Michael went from sketching fan art to working with us so closely, and better share the behind the scenes story, I grabbed some time with the one and only Paul Levering, Producer and co-creator of the PsychOdyssey series, and a founding member of 2 Player Productions, the film crew that lives among us here at Double Fine.

“His style has always felt unique but familiar, it felt as though it could have come from an artist at Double Fine” said Paul when I asked him about how Michael first came to our attention  “More importantly perhaps, he somehow captured people like he knew them in person, instead of just seeing them on a YouTube video. Tim and other folks started using them as avatars, and then everyone wanted him to do them next. Eventually it became a right of passage”

It was that particular skill that led us to work with him more purposefully, first on portraits for Amnesia Fortnight 2014 trading cards, all the way up to very recently creating a portrait of everyone at the studio for a special holiday gift last year. We use them everywhere. (Scroll up and you’ll see one of me on this very page!)

Ultimately though, it was his love of Psychonauts that made us think of him for a particularly special task; the Previously on intro video that every player sees when they start Psychonauts 2 for the first time, and which catches them up with the story so far.

“We went to Firman with a simple-ish idea. Raz would be flipping through a notebook that was his fan-made copy of a True Psychic Tales magazine, filled with doodles, telling us about his adventures with the Psychonauts. The idea required only minimal animation, as he wasn’t an animator - we were thinking jiggly 2 frame characters and the occasional page flip. But we knew he was a Psychonauts super-fan, and we felt he could lean heavily into that passion to pull this off” Recalls Paul. “Of course what he ended up making was far more special than we ever imagined it could be”

The Previously on video is such a perfect opener for the game, and I think it’s clear to anyone who watches it that Michael blew it out of the water. It’s important to note that it was the first real animation the guy had ever made!

In summer 2021, with Psychonauts 2 about to go gold, Paul had a new idea to pitch to Michael. The Psychodyssey was taking shape, but it needed an intro of its own.

“The Previously On video was so good and it inspired me to think of Firman for our own needs. I really liked the idea of having a cozy intro, Cheers style, but was also thinking of shows like The 100 or BoJack Horseman, where each intro would change a little as the narrative moved forwards and be different each time. Not different like The Simpsons couch gags but literally reflecting story beats from the show in the intro”

Michael started to experiment with options and styles, but he wasn’t ever quite happy with how it looked, and it wasn’t until he took an unexpected leap that things truly came together.

“At some point Firman disappeared for a little while, and weeks went by with no contact. We started to joke that knowing him and how ambitious he is, he’d probably decided to learn 3D rendering, to make the entire office space so he could rotoscope it…” muses Paul “Then he got back in touch, and that was exactly what he’d done.”

The joke had become a reality. Michael had indeed taught himself Blender and made an incredibly detailed model of our entire office space, having never been there in person, so based entirely on videos of the place. He then captured a fly through of the hallway, and rotoscoped that into an animation, with 2 frames per second.

“We couldn’t believe it. All the rooms, the objects. For someone without blueprints on hand, it was shockingly accurate. He did all of that simply to get the lighting and perspectives right. When you look at a screenshot from it, it looks like actual reality. But when he painted over it, that’s when it became really special. That’s when it feels not just realistic, but conveys the spirit of the place too”

Just like he had done with the Psychonauts 2 animation, Michael went to work filling every shot with in-jokes, easter eggs, and nerdy details about the office, and it brought the whole thing to life. And with one pilot episode complete it was time to start on the rest. 31 in total for the initial run, and every single one of them is different in some way.

To keep track of the plot points and in-jokes, Michael hand-drew himself a huge spreadsheet of shots for each intro.

“We tried to plan for ways we could reuse backgrounds and treat it a bit like traditional animation cells- This painting of a room would stay the same but elements could get swapped out, certain decorations and people. The team would make suggestions to Firman on shots that could be reused across episodes, but he just kept making new ones. Every time he turned something in it would make us all laugh, we loved it, so it was clear he had tapped into the winning formula.”

The first 32 episodes of Psychodyssey launched in February 2023, free to everyone on our Youtube channel.

“We would watch the comments and every so often someone would post - “I made it up to episode 15 and I just realized the intros are always different!” and someone else would reply ‘They’re different!?!’ This was both heartbreaking and amusing, since people would either skip the intros or just not pay attention, trained by shows in general to ignore them. It was fun to see people go back just to watch them all.”

Episode 33 was always something we had planned, but we needed some more time to elapse before we started production on it, and then naturally it would need a new intro. There was just one problem - in the time between the launch of Psychonauts 2, and the start of Filming Episode 33, we’d renovated the entire studio space, and taken over some more of our building, adding new spaces too.

Michael’s 3D model was suddenly very out of date. So, of course, he started over from scratch, making new versions of spaces both old and new. This new 3D model is way, way more detailed than you would expect. It has moveable monitor arms, standing desks that actually work, and every single detail is astoundingly accurate.

And then there's the pièce de résistance, the Hallway fly through shot.

“I don’t know exactly how long he spent remaking that hallway shot, but the level of artistry on display is staggering. It’s the kind of thing where people probably won’t even notice it’s new, but the detail and technique is so leveled up from his previous work. He’s the type of person who is always improving his style, but it doesn’t make his old work less great. His voice is always there.” 

Michael’s animated intros bring so much to our series. The show itself goes through a lot of ups and downs, and takes you on a roller coaster ride of emotions. But each new episode starts with a cozy, charming, and increasingly familiar intro, that in and of itself, it turns out, can deliver a strong dose of emotional impact.

“With Episode 33 releasing last month, fans of the series were returning to it 18 months after the bulk of it was released. So many of the comments this time around were about how just watching the intro made them smile, or even burst into tears. They were so happy to be back with us, and that was so special to hear”

Hats off to both Michael Firman and Drew Prusko (and 2 Player Productions, naturally) for their incredible work on our series. We’re so grateful and lucky to have such talented people to collaborate with. Before you go, please enjoy the various videos and galleries on this page showing the meticulous detailed work that went into animating all these intros, and keep your eyes and ears peeled for more work from these two folks in our future work, I’m sure they’ll show up again before too long.

Oh, and please check out Episode 33 of the Double Fine PsychOdyssey!

Lenticular Mayhem! 20 Aug 2024 9:00 AM (8 months ago)

Psychonauts 2 is almost three years old. Which is wild to think about because it feels like we just got back from the launch party but that's how time goes. Raz's continued adventures captivated a lot of players, taking them to all kinds of mental worlds. One of the most distinct was the mind of Helmut Fullbear. His synesthesia-inspired level was full of wild colors and cel-shaded glory. It really was a feast for the senses.

To celebrate the upcoming anniversary, we've partnered with Fangamer to produce a special new piece of swag: a 3-D poster of the Eye Shrine! This lenticular print wibbles and wobbles and transforms depending on the angle you view it at. S'a little hard to show off on your computer screen but the video below will give you a sense of what that's like.

I actually have one of these in my office since I sometimes get to peep the new swag and I really like this one. If you're looking to add a fresh splash of excitement to your Psychonauts collection, this is a good fit. I imagine it will also really confuse your cats if you have any. You can grab this awesome print right here in Fangamer's store. Expand your mind! Site and ponder how they even make posters like this! Because I don't know how any of it works. I just know that it's hella cool.

A RADical Contest 16 Aug 2024 2:32 PM (8 months ago)

Hey folks! Harper here with a small but fun update. Next week, our lovely neon-lit roguelike RAD turns five years old. To celebrate this wonderful birthday (which, oh gosh also means I've been at DF for nearly five years) we're putting on a little contest. We have five wonderful Pinny Arcade RAD pin to give away. I think they're pretty hard to find so if you're a collector, this is your moment. But! How can you win one of these pins?

It's pretty straightfoward. This is a game about going on runs and surviving and getting a high score. Which has meant a rotating schedule of daily challenges for players since release. These daily challenges often has special conditions called "quirks" that change how things play out. If you want to win one of these pins, you'll need to play the Daily Challenge on August 20th! This one is actually a "no quirk" challenge. That’s a straight up wasteland run with no shenanigans. Only your rad skills will lead to a high score and one of our shiny trinkets.

Boot up RAD, leap into the daily challenge mode, and either DM your score to us on Twitter (we're never calling it X!) or send them to support@doublefine.com. We'll look over entries and contact the five top-scoring mutants who have shown their most radical skills and send off one of these lovely pins. It's a small but cheeky way to celebrate a game near and dear to our hearts. Good luck!

Exit Interview: Malena Annable 13 Aug 2024 1:00 PM (8 months ago)

One of the most interesting things about working at Double Fine is how our staff is packed with people who’ve been through all sorts of adventures in the industry. Among our numbers remain a few old-school Double Finers who have been with the studio since basically the beginning. Whether it’s Kee Chi and his programming skills or the lovely artwork of Nathan “Bagel” Stapley, we’ve had many people here at Double Fine that you might call “fixtures.” Folks whose legacy can be traced all the way back to the original Psychonauts. One of these amazing people is Malena Annable, whose guiding hand as a producer has smoothed out development on many of our games throughout the years.

Malena recently left Double Fine after twenty years of amazing work to pursue a career that is pretty different from game development. She’s gone from wrangling Tim and making sure he submits his writing on deadline to working with saws and belt-sanders and renovating patios. Shifting from a world of computers to handiwork is a surprising jump! In the lead up to her new gig, I sat down with Malena to talk about her pathway to Double Fine, lessons learned here, and what’s next.

Malena, like a few folks at Double Fine, previously worked at LucasArts. This meant, of course, working on Star Wars games but it also meant some adventure titles like Escape from Monkey Island and the ill-fated Full Throttle 2. But Malena will be the first to say that her path to Double Fine was “atypical.” She knew of Tim by reputation but her path towards Double Fine rested with folks like Scott Campbell and Bagel, both of whom her husband Graham had made comics with. Scott eventually left Lucas Learning and made his way to Double Fine.

While her friendships kept her in the orbit of Double Fine, it wasn't until 2004 that Malena ended up working at the studio.

“It got to a point at LucasArts where I said I need to quit and I have nothing lined up and I’m miserable,” Malena explains. “I told [Psychonauts executive producer] Caroline Esmurdoc’s husband and he was like “Do you want to go to Double Fine?”

“I did an interview,” she recalls. “It’s not like I had a spiderweb of connections where everyone was just like “cool!” But I have to say it was amazing to come to Double Fine… they were like “Yeah, do all the things! Do it all! We’re not gonna stand in your way.” And I was like “Damn, you all have faith in me.”

Malena feels that interview process, which involved everyone at the entire studio, was emblematic of the studio’s attitude towards team-building early on. “Back then it was important everyone in the company had a say in who got hired,” Malena said. “I know we’re too big for that now, but I believe it was an early reason for our success… We hired people that had had a chance to prove themselves to & talk with everyone else at the company.”

If there’s something I hear a lot from folks describing the old days of Double Fine, it’s that there was a great deal of trust afforded to everyone working in those trenches on Psychonauts. For good and for ill, it really was that rock and roll style of game design where bouts of amazing creativity were taking things in amazing new directions and that sometimes meant ambitious scope from some folks who were still figuring out what this new era of game development would look like. Malena joined as an associate producer on Psychonauts and has remained a force helping to guide development, narrative, and voice production here at Double Fine ever since. Recalling Psychonauts, Malena remembers a process that certainly needed a bit more wrangling.

“I asked, "How long will this game be?” and they were like “we’re almost ready to ship” and I remember one point—I think it was a [build compilation] night so it was like one in the morning—and I said “you lied to me.” I started in July of 2004. We did our gold master in March or April of 2005.”

That whirlwind period from mid-July towards master was laser-focused on sharpening Psychonauts into one hell of a game. There were difficulties but it’s also a time that really defined what the Double Fine creative ethos was. Those late nights were shared by amazing members of the studio and the lasting effects of their hard work and their creative friendships extends all the way to Double Fine in the modern day.

“We felt that we were making something special,” Malena remembers. She paints a picture of mutual respect and trust running through the development of Psychonauts.

“It was really special to be shoulder to shoulder with people in the trenches,” she said. “There might have been a hierarchy but there was a pervading sense of humanity in how you treated people. So even if you disagreed with somebody, you ultimately came to a resolution that was for the better of the game and you never lost your sense of self or soul in that process.”

What exactly was the moment that Malena realized that Psychonauts was special? For Malena, that came late at night as she listened to Tim’s script come to life via voice actor recordings. It was one thing to see the lines as Tim worked through his writing but as she listened to seasoned voice actor Steve Blum (Cowboy Bebop, Star Wars Rebels) drone out lines from the the hilariously monotone G-men wandering Boyd Cooper’s mind in The Milkman Conspiracy, the humor really set in.

“That was a moment that touched my soul,” Malena recalls.

As a producer whose work often meant directly working with Tim and the script-writing process, Malena was both in the very thick of things at Double Fine but also in a unique position to observe the studio over the years. She compares the job to that of a detective finding clues and seeking out information. In some cases, that meant seeking out chaos and providing guardrails. Her work orbited programming, scripting, audio, and other fields and provided a good opportunity to see both the strengths and gaps in the studio’s structure over the years.

“For the last few weeks I've been documenting what I do,” Malena told me as the time to her departure drew closer. “And what I’m realizing is that… I wish we had a narrative department. Double Fine is known for witty writing and dialogue and my job has been to create a system that supports that but I wish it had been an actual department.”

We have a cadre of writers here at Double Fine from Tim himself to folks like Lee Petty and Gabe Cinquepalmi. Malena’s role and responsibilities are being spread to a few folks in the company. I don’t know if that means we’ll have a full department for narrative but it does open the door for more folks to get involved in that process much like Malena was. But that’s her main note for the studio as she leaves: narrative, baby!

But where the heck is Malena even going? That’s a unique situation as well. A recent house renovation for a screened-in back porch led to a desire to place cedar shingles on the exterior. That led to conversations with renovation professionals that ignited Malena’s desire to get her hands dirty. “I’ve spent a lot of time on Double Fine’s tools and now I’m going to spend time with power tools,” she mused. “I’ve been renovating Victorian porches and building decks."

Everyone seeks out new adventures from time to time. Game development is an exciting but not super stable field where you see folks depart from teams for all kinds of reasons. In Malena’s case, this is a chance to flex new creative muscles and work with a fresh team of innovative people. Except instead of designing levels, they’re helping to reshape homes.

“It makes my soul sing in the same way that Double Fine does,” she says. “But I might lose a finger.”

When I asked Malena to sum up her experience with Double Fine in one word, there was some hesitation. Eventually, she decided that “humanity” was the right word for the job.

“There’s so much love at this studio. Even when it’s hard…it’s still been there. You can never stomp it out."

We will miss Malena deeply. She’s been a part of the studio’s DNA for two decades and her fingerprints are all over our games. Her insightful guiding hand helped make many projects truly great. I do not own a house but if I did, I would be like “Hey, Malena. What do you think about putting a fancy French-style extension here?” And she’ll probably explain the history of mahogany to me before getting to work and making the most beautiful thing ever. Because that’s what Malena Annable does: she makes things beautiful! Which is a very poetic way of saying that she’s pretty dang cool and always welcome at the company picnic.

To conclude, I want to share a list that Malena made for a microtalk she gave on her last week. From time to time, we will have people at the studio give three minutes talk at our start-of-week meeting on Mondays. Topics can range from the history of regional cuisine to information on personal hobbies and more. Malena made a list of the ten things she will miss about Double Fine. I've condensed that list here! Enjoy.

Ten Things Malena Will Miss about Double Fine

The birthday cakes that the studio sends to folks on their birthdays. "I really appreciate that DF says "We like you, please eat something" with cake."

"It's a wardrobe & lifestyle." Double Fine folks end up with a variety of cool looking hoodies and other unique knick-knack that sometimes lead fans to get pretty excited when they bump into you on the street. "I will miss feeling like I’m part of an ultra exclusive club."

Parties & social outings. "We may have to work together, but we choose to hang out with one another."

Tim's concept of time. "First task when I started was to schedule a VO session, which also meant I needed Tim to write more. I carefully put together a calendar and showed it to Tim, who responded with, “Oh look, boxes with numbers.”

Our pet/animal picture sharing chat channel aka 'Thugz' "I thank you for finding the best the internet has to offer.."

Weekly 3 Minute Microtalks. "From James Marion’s inaugural “snowy owl” to Fiona’s Cincinnati chili – they’ve been hilarious, informative, and so very DF. They’re also a helluva lot of work... thank you for demonstrating so clearly that the world is full of things to know about and reinforcing that DF is filled with inquisitive and very smart people."

The laughter.  "No matter how serious the meeting, Tim still finds a way to make us laugh. And the laughter you hear throughout the office – at someone’s desk, or at lunch. Geoff’s laugh is probably one of the things that’ll get replayed as my life flashes before my eyes on my deathbed. And I mean that in the best possible way."

Parent Funtimes (our chatroom for parents) "Being a parent is really, really hard. You second guess yourself on the best of days and when imposter syndrome hits, it hits HARD.... The words of support and advice in parent-funtimes is REAL."

The mad dash up to shipping & post-release. "There’s a thrill and a high that comes when we’re firing on all cylinders as we near a game’s release date. And then the rush of good feelings as we watch the public play it. It is such a good feeling."

 DF's humanity – "All of the previous 9 items have one thread in common and it’s humanity. I’ll miss witnessing these daily moments – because what we do somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts. I’ve said that about our games but it’s true of the studio as well. There’s a spark as we problem solve. There’s an infectious (in a good way) spirit as our games take shape & we build off one another’s work. DF has been a place that cares about people – we’re not just line items on a spreadsheet..."

Day of the Devs at Fantastic Fest 30 Jul 2024 2:38 PM (8 months ago)

We here at Double Fine teaming up with Fantastic Fest to bring Day of the Devs to Austin, Texas! It's fantastic times in a self-proclaimed "weird" city. If you don't know, Fantastic Fest is the largest genre film festival in the U.S which has hosted some really great premieres and movie-makers. Day of the Devs now is joining the fray to show off video games as well.

Dubbed Fantastic Games, our in-person only showcase will feature 12 horror themed games, all of which will be playable inside the Alamo Drafthouse for Fantastic Fest goers from Sept 20-22, later this year.

“As huge fans of Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest, we’re thrilled to team up and help bring games back to the festival,” Day of the Devs co-founder Greg Rice added. “We’re always looking at how Day of the Devs can help spotlight the best of independent games, and are excited to bring some spooky, terrifying, and downright fantastic games. We’re so looking forward to September and celebrating with the community in Austin!”

We're looking for games to feature in our lineup, and submissions are open now! Day of the Devs's mission to highlight amazing creators means that anyone and everyone can submit their game. However! There is a bit of a twist this time around to tie things into Fantastic Fests' theme.

As always, developers from diverse backgrounds are especially encouraged to apply, however only games/projects in the horror, fantasy, sci-fi and action genres will be considered, and games fitting this year’s Carnival theme are double-extra-especially encouraged to apply! Day of the Devs covers games of all kinds but this is an opportunity to share some very specific vibes. If you have something that you think fits the criteria, please submit.

Hope to see you there!

A Psychic Blu-Ray Bonanza 26 Jul 2024 6:05 AM (8 months ago)

Hello, folks! Harper here with an announcement that many people have been waiting for. Ever since the release of Double Fine PsychOdyssey, we’ve received tons of messages asking if there’d ever be a physical edition like the one we had for Double Fine Adventure. So I’m happy to announce the Double Fine PsychOdyssey Limited Edition Blu-ray Collector's Set is available to pre-order today!

Together with Limited Run Games and Copycats Media, we’ve assembled the definitive version of PsychOdyssey. Perfect for folks looking to add something to their collection or anyone who wants a closer look at the hard work that goes into making a video game.

The collector’s set also comes packed with a variety of special features including:

1. Deluxe packaging containing an exclusive SteelBook® and an individually numbered Slipcase featuring Michael Firman’s artwork adapted by our very own Tom Kiss.
2. The complete Double Fine PsychOdyssey series newly mastered for Blu-ray presentation with included English subtitles.
3. Deleted scenes from the series and all new interviews with the Psychonauts 2 team.
4. Unreleased internal videos of Psychonauts 2’s gameplay at various stages of development.
5. An 80-page color booklet of behind-the-scenes essays by the 2 Player Productions team.

There are only 2,000 copies of this lovely collection available from Limited Run Games, each of them individually numbered. The story of Psychonauts 2 is a lengthy one and this Blu-ray set expands the already exhaustive documentary to create the most complete experience imaginable. 

Pre-orders close on August 25th at midnight so you have a little bit of time but not a lot. Buy one! Buy all 2,000! The choice is yours, PSI-Cadets.

But wait, there’s more!!

PsychOdyssey pulled back the curtain of Psychonauts 2’s development and showed all the wonderful highs and more difficult lows of the creative process. Response has been incredibly positive ever since release and we’ve been incredibly flattered by everyone’s kind words. 2 Player Productions took years and years of footage and assembled them into an amazing journey.

But the 2PP cameras never stopped rolling after the release of Psychonauts 2, and we’re excited to launch a surprise 33rd episode of the Double Fine PsychOdyssey. It’s live, right now!

This new feature-length episode is the perfect epilogue to the Psychonauts 2 story, and covers the events at Double Fine from the game's launch up till, well, recently. Fans of the series should be in for a treat as familiar faces return alongside new hires, not to mention the fresh coat of paint on the studio itself.

This episode will also be included in the Blu-ray set, making it the complete physical statement on the PsychOdyssey chapter of the Double Fine story This is it. The whole banana. On a bunch of lovely collectible discs.

It’s been a long road to this moment. We are incredibly proud of 2 Player Productions and their incredible work on this documentary, and we’re so happy to have so many curious fans along for the ride too. Thank you, we hope you enjoy this final episode of the PsychOdyssey!

Behind the Code: On The Move! 20 Jun 2024 12:30 PM (10 months ago)

Devin Kelly-Sneed has been at Double Fine since 2016 and he's one hell of a programmer. Some of you might remember his Amnesia Fortnight project from 2017, Darwin's Dinner. For Psychonauts 2, Devin acted as the Player Movement and Powers Feature Lead, helping to make sure that Raz leapt with acrobatic grace and blasted bad thoughts with flashy flair. He's kindly written outlines on the implementation of a few features. Today, we're gonna have him guide us through the design of Raz's different motion options.

Raz is an acrobat. He runs, jumps, climbs, rolls, swings, and slides through the world. Each type of motion Raz uses was implemented as a Move Mode. In this article we’ll cover how the move mode system worked and go over a few specific modes to get a sense of how they are implemented.

Unreal CharacterMovementComponent

Our starting point was the Unreal Character Movement Component, which handles a lot of basic movement logic like running and falling. It has a concept of Movement Modes which define the different types of motion update to run (MOVE_Walking, MOVE_Falling, MOVE_Swimming, etc.). As an example, when the current Movement Mode is set to MOVE_Falling, the PhysFalling movement logic will run when the component ticks. It applies gravity and causes the character to accelerate downward. The walking mode handles how the character should slide across the ground based on the player’s input.

UCharacterMovementComponent also provides the concept of the mode MOVE_Custom which is intended for authoring new types of movement. When setting the current mode to MOVE_Custom you can provide an integer to specify which of your custom modes you want. Then you can override the PhysCustom function (or use the UpdateCustomMovement blueprint event on the Character) to define your own movement logic.

An interesting side note for folks who haven’t made 3D games before: Characters in Unreal are represented as a capsule for the purposes of movement and collision. A capsule is a cylinder with a hemisphere at each end. The character mesh that you see animating doesn’t collide with the world and plays no part in the movement logic in most circumstances. When working on any kind of movement logic we often enabled a debug view that draws the capsule, transform, and a trail showing a couple seconds of transform history. This lets us easily see the collision shape’s path through the world.

P2 Move Mode System

We realized early on that Raz needed a lot of custom movement logic. And we quickly found custom mode logic was making our P2CharacterMovementComponent (child class of Unreal’s UCharacterMovementComponent) a bit of a mess. Our solution was to implement modes like a state machine. The base class P2MoveMode is a UObject that has overridable functions for EnterMode, ExitMode, Tick, PhysUpdate (and a ton of other things). This allowed us to keep the logic for each mode in its own class.

P2CharacterMovementComponent overrides UCharacterMovementComponent’s SetMovementMode function to handle the state transitions (i.e. calling ExitMode and EnterMode appropriately). There was actually a fair amount of complexity in ensuring this worked smoothly due to edge cases where setting the movement mode actually caused another SetMovementMode call. We tracked pending move mode changes to be able to catch and handle reentrant calls to the function. Our movement component also forwards relevant function calls to the current mode (Tick, OnLanded, JumpPressed, etc). 

We added the EP2MovementMode enum which mirrors the entries of Unreal's EMovementMode enum, and then extends to add all of our modes. This meant that almost all of our code didn’t need to think about PHYS_Custom or the appropriate custom index. We’d call SetP2MovementMode with a parameter like P2MOVE_SlopeSlide and behind the scenes we converted that to PHYS_Custom with the appropriate custom index and called SetMovementMode().

Each mode had a settings object derived from P2MoveSettings. The base class had a large number of options that work on any mode. Most modes created their own settings subclass to add mode-specific options. We ended up with about 30 different movement modes for Raz.

Here you can see the base settings available for any move mode to use.

Example: Slope Slide

The Slope Slide move mode is used when Raz is on a steep slope. Once on the slope, Raz will automatically slide downward. The player has some speed control and can steer left and right.

The basic movement logic is this:

1. Determine the slope direction and angle
2. Calculate the passive acceleration along the slope due to gravity
3. Read input to determine acceleration due to player control
4. Combine the acceleration sources and update character velocity
5. Project the velocity onto the local plane of the slope
6. Update the player capsule location based on velocity
7. Handle any collisions that occurred when moving the capsule
8. Make sure we’re still on a slope - switch to Ground or Falling mode if not

Enabling Debug Draw for the mode allows us to see some of the vectors involved in the movement calculation such as slope direction and acceleration

Initially we determined slope direction simply by comparing the normal of the slope collision to the local gravity direction. There were two major issues that led us to a new approach. First was that collision is sometimes a bit messy and inconsistent which meant that the calculated direction and acceleration could be jittery. Second was that we wanted to be able to have ramps that slope upward during a slide. We didn’t want the ramp to cause Raz to suddenly slow down and go the opposite direction of the overall slope. To solve this we allow the downward direction of a slope to be determined by either a spline or arrow component on the actor. This smoothed out jitters and allowed designers to determine the natural sliding direction even if the actual slope didn’t match.

We experimented with entering Slope Slide move mode any time you ended up on ground steeper than a specific angle. But that proved to be unreliable, creating sliding in areas we didn’t want, and not having a slide in some areas we did. In the shipping version, any Actor that Raz should Slope Slide on has the COMP_SlidableSlope component added to it. We check the current ground Actor for the component and enter Slope Slide mode if we find it.

Here are the Slope Slide mode-specific settings. These appear in the settings asset alongside all the base class settings shown above.

Example: Ledge Hang

Ledge Hang was one of several spline-based move modes (others were Rail Slide, Vertical Pole, Ladder, Horizontal Pole, and Tightrope). The common feature of these modes is that Raz’s movement is constrained along a (potentially) curvy line called a spline. While hanging from a ledge Raz is able to move side to side, hop up to the ground above, or jump backwards away from the wall.

Player input moves Raz left and right along the ledge spline. We wrote a function called PhysSpline that all spline-based modes used to handle the logic of keeping the character at the correct offset and orientation while moving along a spline.

To handle sharp corners we had a function called SplinePrimitiveLookAhead that we used to detect the spline point and tangent in the direction we move. If it detected that we were approaching an angle change over 45 degrees we temporarily stopped running the PhysSpline update. Instead we picked a target location around the corner and interpolated the character to the new location while playing a transition animation. The interpolated corner movement is based on a cubic hermite spline. We tuned the shape of this motion by specifying a location, orientation, and velocity for both the start and end.

We had two sets of animations for the ledge hang mode and selected between them based on if there was a wall below. Raz either braces his feet against the wall or dangles accordingly.

For the most part we determined which animation was appropriate by doing a line trace forward to check for a wall. Though in some cases we’d detect a wall due to invisible collision placed nearby. For these cases, designers could set an override on the ledge.

Example: BigBall

The BigBall move mode was developed for the Strike City level where Raz rides around on a large bowling ball. It was also used in a couple of the later levels. Our first attempt at the BigBall mode was to use the Levitation Ball movement we’d already developed. We made it bigger and tuned it to feel heavier. But it couldn’t handle some of the level geometry we were hoping to have (e.g. half pipes) and never felt quite right.

After experimenting a bit we settled on using the physics simulation for moving the ball. This meant that the BigBall move mode doesn’t actually use normal character movement logic at all. Instead we apply forces to the ball actor and snap Raz’s location to the top of the ball.

Control forces were tuned using a bunch of curves. Curves are very useful when a single value doesn’t feel right in different circumstances. A good example is the Accel Scale by Speed in Accel Direction Curve. We give stronger acceleration when your input is fighting against your current velocity. This lets you slow down to a stop more quickly than you could accelerate back to the original speed. We also ramp out the acceleration at high speeds to create a soft speed cap.

Because we used the physics sim instead of character movement, we lacked some of the normal things that the character movement system knows about. For example, “are we on the ground?” was a bit of a tricky question to answer. And an important question too! We needed to tune acceleration and other movement behavior differently when you were airborne, not to mention that an action like Jump should only work when on the ground. Character movement slides reliably along the ground collision and keeps track of information about the current floor. Physics movement tends to be a bit messy and unpredictable, and there’s no built-in concept of “current floor” for a physics object. We ended up tracking hit events from the collision system and checking what part of the ball was hit. Hits low enough down on the ball were considered valid ground and would transition from the BigBallFalling mode into the BigBall mode. Similarly if we hadn’t detected the floor in the last frame we switched back to BigBallFalling.

One unplanned benefit of our switch to using physics was that when we decided to have Raz ride a giant egg later in the game we were able to (mostly) just swap out the collision shape of the ball actor. All of the desired awkward wobbly movement came naturally without the need to write a lot of custom logic. The main piece of logic that needed improvement was the logic for positioning Raz on top of the ball. Originally it worked off of a tunable radius in the settings. But the egg radius depends on orientation. We ended up doing a raycast against the egg mesh to find its surface directly above the center and aligned Raz’s character mesh to that surface location

Which Way is Up?

The Slope Slide section above mentions that we used the “local gravity” to calculate acceleration. One distinctive feature of Psychonauts 2 is that gravity isn’t always the same direction. This allowed for mind bending level design, but also complicated a lot of our gameplay code.

Common assumptions that the Z axis is vertical are incorrect, so all of our movement code had to be careful. We also had to remove those assumptions from Unreal’s code in many cases. For example, code that checked the Z component of velocity to determine if the character was moving up or down had to be rewritten to check the dot product of Velocity and GravityDirection.

Getting the horizontal portion of Velocity needed to project the velocity onto the plane defined by the gravity direction.

Every single move mode had to carefully consider what the current gravity direction is. And in many cases had to take into account that gravity might be completely different at the end point of its motion.

Debug Info

There was a lot of information that was helpful to be able to examine for understanding the current movement state. We created a new category for the Gameplay Debugger system that showed the most important movement state properties.

We had a Raz page in our debug menu with a bunch of toggles and functionality. This let us turn on various debug draw features, log information about the current state, and disable certain features.

Post-Psychonauts 2

We used the Move Mode system so much that after shipping we spent time building a DFMoveMode system to share across future projects. We borrowed the core approach and some of the code from Psychonauts 2, but left out a lot of game-specific logic that other games are less likely to need.

Wrap Up

Because of Raz’s many unique types of movement, it was valuable to build a system to compartmentalize each mode. This system proved quite successful and made it easy to add new modes as needed. In all we built about 30 move modes for Raz to handle the many acrobatic movement styles the design called for. Thanks for reading, we hope this behind the scenes look at our approach to character movement was enjoyable and informative!

The Wall 12 Jun 2024 1:00 PM (10 months ago)

What's this? A random blog? That's right. Harper here with a bit of silliness. I've always been a bit nervous about cutting loose on the site since I want folks to find recent news quickly but after talkin' it through with my boss we've decided there's room for flights of fancy and random musings. Tim used to hit up the site with all kinds of blogs in the old days and while I can't ever compare to The Man Himself, I wanna find time to show you more and more of the bits and bobs that lurk here at Double Fine. There's a lot of history here since we're a long running studio. That means tons of expertise and memories from devs and programmers and artists. It also means that sometimes you look behind the couch and find Peter Chan's original pencil drawing of the Grim Fandango cover art. There's always something happening, even though I know we've been a bit quiet about our upcoming games the last year or two.

I came to Double Fine as a happy accident. I saw the job listing on Twitter on a random scroll session and thought that seemed like a fun next direction for m'life. It was a chance to be around creative people and learn new skills somewhere I really respected and liked. That said: I didn't quite know what to expect. Now I'm here I get to bask (like a lizard) and take in a lot of cool stuff. Not just people but also the studio space itself! I think we're pretty good about sharing stuff behind the curtain here at the studio, between things like our documentaries and our new dev blogs.

But unless I'm mistaken, none of y'all have been inside the studio. So today I want to share something I really love about the office: the cool stuff on our walls!

My office, as well as Tim's, is tucked away on one side of the studio. It can get quiet over here and because we're not nested amongst the team, who often plaster concept art and other visuals on the walls nearby their stations, so we don't have the most up to date decorations. But what we do have is pretty good: an art wall packed with original pieces from our previous games. At any given time, I can peek outside my office and look at some amazing work by folks like Scott Campbell or Peter Chan or one of a dozen great artists. I don't know how how people guide their fingers in a way such that it creates honest to god pictures but these are pretty great. Better, they provide a sense of how older games developed. There's concept art for semi-unused Psychonauts items such as a psychic water balloons (which I think they evolved into the confusion grenades) and even some of the original art of Eddie Rigg's various pitched designs. He's not even "Eddie" in those. He's just "Roadie" even if the look is established.

Double Fine's been around for almost 25 years! Some folks here at the studio have been here from day one. It's impressive to work somewhere with that kind of continuity. Having an art wall full of classic designs, keeping in mind that these are the original sketches, really helps sell the studio's history.

Of course, the art is really just an extension of the cool people here and so there's an entirely different wall closer to our kitchen that's all about the friendly faces at Double Fine. There's some drawings there but it's mostly covered in polaroid camera shot bearing the silly mugs of pretty much everyone working here since around 2014. Our IT wizard Justin grabbed a camera and started taking shots with reckless abandon. These days, he's using a Lomo'Instant camera to snap candid shots. The result is tons of little crystalized moments. Many of the shots are from people's first day at the studio and Justin takes them without any warning. According to him, it's "fun to ambush people when they're nervous."

Once your picture is taken, you get to pin it on the wall. It's a silly right of passage but one that reminds folks that hey man, everyone is new at one point or another. Video games are this weird miracle of science and nonsense that are mostly stapled together by desperate creatives' absurd talent. They're magickal! They're weird! And while it's tempting to think that the people working on games must all be intense savants who dream in Matrix code, the truth of the matter is that we're just mostly just normal people. That means looking silly in your surprise first day polaroid!

Maybe the surprise is a bit ruined for your first day (yes, you! you're gonna work here some day!) but even if you know that yer gonna end up on the wall, I bet Justin'll still get the drop on you. He gets the drop on everyone. Except me. My picture is perfect and I look super cool in it. Yep! Totally!

Beyond the folks here at Double Fine, there's an amazing community of talented fans who've really attached themselves to series like Psychonauts and Brutal Legends. Throughout the Psychonauts 2 development process, we received tons of fan art and letters from project backers and other fans. All of it is collected on a wall right in our kitchen. I wasn't around for those initial days of the Fig campaign and the excitement of watching The Numbers Go Up. We couldn't have made Psychonauts 2 without everyone's generosity! Being able to see a daily reminder of your kindness and support is really great. When you're deep in development and grinding to put things together, the process can be stressful. Sometimes, it's hard to see the game for what it will become. This collection of art and thank you letters puts the work into perspective.

We still get some mail from time to time though not as much as the surge that came with P2's campaign. Maybe there will be another glut of letters in the future that we'll add to the wall. No matter what, we're always happy to hear from fans. You're the reason we do what we do! We only have the one wall of letters for the moment but who knows how many walls we might cover over the the next few years? One? Two? Seven? Time will tell!

This is just a portion of some of the things you can discover in the office and on our walls but I think it's a fine spread. You have the art, the folks who make it, and the amazing people who support our silliness. I'm gonna post here often with all kinds of stray thoughts but I also will dig around the studio for other curios and trinkets. Keep your eyes peeled in the future! From some vintage games to amazing personal knick-knacks, there's tons of stories on the shelves and, yes.. even on some more of the other walls here at Double Fine.