@slag: I think Act 1 sold...modestly. Like, it wasn't awful, but it wasn't like "Woohoo, it's like a second Kickstarter! We got another 3 million!" And I believe in one of the documentary episodes, Justin Bailey straight up admits that the bulk of the sales of the game will be when it launched with Act 1. So even though there is going to be a little Steam popup saying "Act 2 now available for Broken Age", the business reality is that when Act 2 launched it probably didn't generate huge sales, so the Act 2 launch wasn't likely to recoup the costs of Act 2 itself, meaning they had to get by on whatever revenue Act 1 generated and also whatever cash reserves Double Fine has.
If I may wildly speculate based on the incomplete information in the documentary: early on, Tim went on and on about how he'd been thinking about doing a game that showcased Nathan "Bagel" Stapely's art. Which turned out to be difficult to turn into an art "pipeline" since there isn't a cohesive style to it necessarily, so they had to have Nathan concept out a lot of stuff. While I think Tim always envisioned the game having the switcheroo where you revisit the world but as the other character, I have to imagine there were either going to be new areas in each world, or a longer third act in the Plague Dam. Neither happened, and there is no new Bagel art like the iconic train going into a sleeping mountain (which is weird even for a holodeck) or a town made entirely of little ceramic pots that hold sugar and baking materials, or a sandcastle village, etc. It's just some bland scenes inside Alex's ship, and then a kinda heavy metal Plague Dam. I can't imagine they intended to "blow their load" in Act 1 and not really have any new memorable locales based on Bagel concepts in Act 2.
I believe Lee Petty was originally art lead or something on the project, but Tim says in one of the later episodes that he had to leave to work on an unannounced Double Fine project. I don't remember him really being in very many post-Act-1 documentary episodes. Levi Ryken was another main artist that was moved to another project. As much as the project still had people on VFX and animations and that sorta stuff, those two were the heavy hitters (at least as far as I could tell from the documentary) in adding a lot of the art art to the game. The credits do list some art people that never feature prominently in the documentary that were likely responsible for the new backgrounds and what little we see of the Plague Dam and Thrush city and whatever, but thinking back, their art team seems like a ship without a captain after Act 1 finished. So it kinda makes sense that so little prominent new art is in Act 2.
So Act 1 took 2 years, because first they had to concept it, then they had to find a way to actually turn that into a pipeline instead of Bagel just being a bottleneck because he was having to do every background himself, then they got a bunch of tools in place to actually start generating content, then they actually implemented content. All that being said, how did Act 2 take a year, when basically all of the tools are in place, 90% of the background art is already done aside from some modified ship scenes, and 90% of the character models already exist and are fully rigged and everything? They literally just needed some dialogue from Tim, and the puzzle designs, and then let Anna Kipnis and Oliver Franzke just bang out the implementation of those puzzles in the actual game. Other than that, there are a few cutscenes showing the Plague Dam and Thrush city or whatever, but nothing major and nothing requiring player interaction. I'm not trying to piece together some grand conspiracy, but I just think for how little new stuff is in Act 2, for it to take basically a full year, it seems like a lot of people must've shifted to other projects, and having reduced employees on the team kinda protracted the dev cycle. For business reasons, I think it made sense to move people off the Broken Age team when development of Act 2 was kind of a money pit, but I wonder if they hadn't done that, maybe it would've at least shipped in the same year (maybe December) as Act 1.
Building up people's expectations for those few extra months (and the split into two acts in general) probably hurt the game overall, because that cliffhanger was really good, but the payoff just wasn't there in the plot, and even the themes (Vella rebelling against the life path her parents want for her, Shay rebelling against his mother's overprotective nature and wanting to be independent) kind of never come up at all in Act 2 and the characters don't progress in any way other than "Yay! We saved the day!" Act 1 took kind of a long time to make, but it shows, because I think it's pretty well crafted, has all kinds of crazy original art in there, and the characters were interesting. I really wonder if the documentary downplayed how much they had to rush Tim to finish the script for Act 2. It's like he had a bunch of clever zingers for the spoon and knife and Curtis written down in his notebook, ready to go, but maybe not enough time to consider good ways for Shay and Vella to have character moments so the game just doesn't have them in the same way that Act 1 did.
I guess this sums up video game development in general, but I have to imagine that all sorts of compromises led to Act 2 coming out the way it did, and frankly I think the puzzle design is the least of its problems.
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