The first time I heard that Double Fine was doing a public Amnesia Fortnight, I naturally assumed it would be a livestream of Tim Schafer playing horror game Amnesia for fourteen days straight. To be clear, I would totally pay to see that. In fact it was the company's rapid prototyping gamejam, in which four ideas are worked on for two weeks as a testbed for potential future games. Now, after a week of public voting by buyers of the Amnesia Fortnight bundle , those four projects have been chosen.
The successful prototypes are Hack 'n Slash, a Zelda-like dungeon crawler in which you use cheats, trainers and hacks to progress; Spacebase DF9, a simulated space station city builder; The White Birch, an "ambient platform exploration game" and Autonomous, an 80s-inspired first-person construction sandbox. Each project will be developed over the next two weeks, with the process being streamed over at the Double Fine Twitch.tv site (when they wake up, the lazy Americans.)
That's the What, but Tim Schafer's also interested in the Why. He's set up a post on the Double Fine forums asking voters to detail what it was that appealed to them about the ideas they backed. You'd think "80s-inspired first-person construction sandbox" would speak for itself.
Below are the four successful pitch videos. Did your favourite idea get chosen?
Random characters kept swearing in Obsidian's font-obsessed murder-mystery when its procedural error system ran amok: 'Naughtiness abounded'
Eagle-eyed streamer spots that Roberta Williams' portrait in King's Quest 4 is based on her author photo on the back of the game box: 'I never noticed it before.'
