Lots of stuff has been going on in the Kickstarter community lately. I'm sure many of you have noticed Double Fine's announcement about splitting up their game into two parts. They've gotten some serious heat for this. Backers of Shadowrun have heard similar things about the content in that game, with the DLC being released much later.

I would also like to talk about my personal opinion on this, and I'd love to be open and talk like a normal person instead of a PR person in damage control mode. Can we do this? Without freaking out? You can disagree with me of course, just be nice about it.

This is hard. Like, way WAY hard. When we pitched the game we were hoping for enough money to get extra animations, maybe increase the length of the game. We thought we'd get, like, 2000 backers, not 20,000. A fine problem to have, right? Haha! Except that it's actually a huge problem. The hardest problem I've ever dealt with in my life. Now I know.

We thought now we could do everything we ever wanted for the game, and got too ambitious. We thought we could make the game in six months, and I'm still not sure what we were thinking. That was stupid. I wish I could take that back, all we needed to do was put a different date there and nobody would be complaining. Whoops. We ARE still doing everything we want, and it's taking a long time. I don't feel bad about that. That was the POINT, right? To dream as big as we could?

We released a truly free demo hoping to make some extra cash for development, and got brutalized for it. But without that income and development time our single-player game wouldn't be as good. Some people will never understand this.

It's interesting to think of it from someone else's point of view. For many people, letting a dev shoot for the moon is NOT the point. For a lot of people the point is I BOUGHT A GAME, WHERE IS IT? They want the biggest, best game ever made, on time, for their $10 contribution. I can see that, too. I don't really agree... but I suppose it's a matter of perspective.

Leisure Suit Larry FAQ wrote:

How come it's costing you $500,000 to do a re-make of Leisure Suit Larry and it only cost Double Fine $400,000 for a brand new game?

This was another really popular question today. I (Paul) just got off the phone with Greg, the producer over at Double Fine and asked him how it was possible to make a full fledged adventure game for $400k when it's costing us $500k to re-make Leisure Suit Larry. He told me that they initially only planned on making a small iOS game with 3 people on the entire team: 1 artist, 1 programmer, and 1 producer. That, plus they already had a game engine they spent millions of dollars making for a previous game whereas we're using the Unity engine and we're starting with the PC English version, which is a huge, huge difference!! The only thing we can re-use is the original design. Everything else we need to create from scratch: characters, environments, animations, engineering, and even sound effects.

I love the game but I would pledge more if you guys made a brand new Leisure Suit Larry game instead of a re-make of LSL 1

We would LOVE to make a new version of Leisure Suit Larry!! We thought about making LSL 4 (the missing floppies) or 8, or even 69!! The problem is, when we licensed the title from Codemasters back in October (you guys probably saw our big press release), we only licensed the re-makes. So we're doing that to fulfill our obligation. What we REALLY want to do is to make Leisure Suit Larry 8. To do that, though, it costs a hell of a lot more money than $500,000. To put it in perspective, LSL 7 cost about $2mm back in 1996 which is about $3mm today. The reason why we're re-making the original 7 versions is so we can bring them up to date, up to speed, and make enough money to build Leisure Suit Larry 8 (maybe even 4 but Al is a bit reluctant on #4). We really want to hit #8 out of the ball park so being 100% honest here, that means we have to save up enough money from the sales of 1-7 to make #8 which we see costing roughly $5 - $8 million dollars.