Archives: Amnesia Fortnight


VENUS PATROL PRESENTS: THE FOUR GAMES PENDLETON WARD REALLY WANTS TO MAKE WITH DOUBLE FINE


pinkbudforbrandon

2.6.2014

Brandon Boyer

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What could be more exciting than Broken Age creators Double Fine announcing another round of its Amnesia Fortnight game jam? Here’s the easy answer: another round of Amnesia Fortnight where one team has already been chosen to create a new game led by Adventure Time creator Pendleton Ward.

Like last time, the Fortnight — a two-week long jam that’s previously given birth to Double Fine games like Costume Quest, Stacking and Spacebase DF-9 — will be funded by the public via the studio’s just launched Humble Bundle page, and funders will ultimately decide which of the nearly 30 pitches Double Fine will focus on, all of which will be again fully video documented by studio stalwarts 2 Player Productions.

But this year’s twist is that Ward is also pitching four of his own game ideas for the studio to produce, which will also be voted on by the public. Outside his story & design input on the console and mobile Adventure Time games (and Cheque Please, his still forthcoming collaboration with QWOP creator Bennett Foddy), the resulting prototype will be the first original concept he’ll have released in actual game form, and all four pitches are as honestly super hilarious & creatively unbridled as you’d expect.

And so, below he’s given Venus Patrol the extra special horse’s-mouth skinny on (and new doodles for) all four of the concepts — from a stab-happy cupid, to an entire town’s least favorite human-pyramid topper, to the fantastically ambitious zombie thriller he’s wanted to create since high school, which we might as well call right now as totally the one everyone is going to vote for, aren’t they.

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NOT EASILY FORGOTTEN: THE ART OF DOUBLE FINE’S LATEST AMNESIA FORTNIGHT


12.10.2012

Brandon Boyer

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With just over a day left to contribute to Double Fine’s latest season of their two week, five-game prototyping session, Amnesia Fortnight and receive all the games and video updates (plus several earlier prototypes), it seemed like high time for a wrapup of the concept art & illustrations that’ve been produced so far, because, almost instantly, each one has become a game I’m immensely excited for.

At the top is one shot from the Ico-inspired adventure The White Birch, below is the zero-episode of the daily updates the team has been providing over the course of the past week, and after the fold, a selection of the rest of the new games taken from Double Fine’s recently launched Tumblr.

If you like what you see (and you will!) don’t lose your last chance to support the cause and get all the eventual games for yourself.

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DOUBLE FINE RELEASE ‘MONSTER HUNTER MEETS HARRYHAUSEN’ ONLINE ACTION PROTOTYPE, BRAZEN


11.21.2012

Brandon Boyer

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In an effort to brace their ongoing campaign to help fund and hone the latest round of two-week ‘Amnesia Fortnight’ prototyping, Double Fine has just announced that anyone that donates to the cause at a higher-than-average price will receive Brazen, 4-player co-op online action game created for an earlier Fortnight round.

Designer Brad Muir — best known as the lead on Double Fine’s recent online action/defense game Iron Brigade (nee Trenched) — calls the game not just a tribute to Capcom’s Monster Hunter, but even more an homage to Ray Harryhausen — the classic stop-motion movie monster animator behind films like Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and the original Clash of the Titans.

The prototype — awesomely called a “Fynamation production” (in tribute to Harryhausen’s ‘Dynamation’ process), and given a second round of polish past the original Amnesia build — will allow players “choose from three character classes: the stout defensive Stalwart, the agile and versatile Waracle, or the drunkenly unhinged Beerzerker” to “do battle against the Gorgoth, a mythical two headed creature with an insatiable appetite for mankind.”

Head over to the Amnesia Fortnight page to claim your own Brazen copy, and vote on the rest of the contenders for this round of prototyping — the four leads of which I’ll include below the fold.

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OPENLY AWESOME: DOUBLE FINE GETS PUBLIC FUNDING, FEEDBACK FOR AMNESIA FORTNIGHT PROTOTYPES


11.19.2012

Brandon Boyer

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Shortly after basically entirely redefining what “a success on Kickstarter” looks like, Double Fine have just announced a brand new campaign to publicly fund the next round of Amnesia Fortnight games, the long-running process where all Double Fine devs shuffle around into new teams and take two weeks to prototype new ideas.

It’s the process that would spawn Costume Quest, Stacking and the Sesame Street licensed Kinect game Once Upon A Monster, and, for the first time, they’re letting the public in to guide the process. By visiting the just launched Amnesia Fortnight page, you can watch over twenty short and extremely broad pitch videos, which, by donating any amount, you can then vote on, to whittle the selection down to just four.

When those four have been chosen, 2 Player Productions, the same video house that have been doing an amazing job of documenting the Double Fine Adventure process, will be filming daily updates of the progress of all the games, and Double Fine will deliver the final prototypes to all backers at the end of the campaign.

Everyone who donates also gets two prototypes from earlier Fortnights: the original Costume Quest demo, as well as Happy Song, the game that would become Once Upon A Monster. Visit the Amnesia Fortnight site to learn more and to help kick off the process.