And from that hub you're going to go into another series of mental worlds and exploring the secrets of the history of the psychonauts organisation. "Sasha and Milla are going to return, and Lili, and you're going to be seeing them in their natural environment not in their summer camp clothes, but in their super secret spy headquarters. So he's going to be hanging out at the actual psychonaut's headquarters where they do international espionage and he's going to be meeting the actual people who run the psychonauts," Schafer explains. "The first game was about summer camp and Raz trying to be a psychonaut, the second game is Raz is now a psychonaut and he's going to Psychonaut Headquarters to see how they do it downtown. Concept art for Psychonauts HQ.Īs for what Psychonauts 2's story is actually about, Schafer notes that it follows Raz as he becomes a fully-fledged psychonaut and grows disillusioned with the institution he grew up idolising. Several former Psychonauts vets will return including writer Erik Wolpaw, concept artist Peter Chan, composer Peter McConnell, voice director Khris Brown, and voice actors: Richard Steven Horvitz (Raz) and Nikki Rapp (Lili). "The first game took five years because we were just big dummies, and now we're not big dummies anymore." "We know a lot more than we knew with the first ," Schafer says. There's also the fact that Psychonauts was Double Fine's first game and the studio has since refined its craft. "So that's a big chunk of our budget that we don't need to worry about." "We're going to be using Unreal this time, so we're not writing an engine from scratch," Schafer explains. One of them is to develop Psychonauts 2 in Unreal Engine 4. Schafer isn't worried about this, however, as he's found a couple of workarounds to keep costs low. That explains how Double Fine is able to match the budget of the first Psychonauts, but that was 10 years ago and inflation hasn't been kind. "Each of those three parts on their own would not be enough to fund this game, but together it makes it possible." "All three of those things combined will bring us to a scope similar to the first game," Schafer says before estimating it will receive roughly a cumulative $13m budget. And finally, Double Fine itself has been a profitable company as of late, so it's got a decent amount of dough lying around that it can throw into the Psychonauts 2 coffers. Schafer also notes that another anonymous investor (but not Notch) is pledging a good sum of money into this sequel. ![]() So if the game is a hit, they'll get royalties from it," Schafer tells me over Skype. "With Fig people are actually going to be able to participate in the success of it. (There are also smaller rewards tiers for T-shirts and the like, same as other crowdfunding platforms.) The game we've all been dreaming of. The first couple projects on Fig only allowed those with serious capital (making over $200k a year or with $1m to their name) to invest, but this time anyone can get in on the action so long as they invest at least $1k. Furthermore, Psychonauts 2 is campaigning on Double Fine's new crowdfunding platform Fig, a service that lets people invest in a project then actually see a return on that investment in the form of royalties. Broken Age made more than eight times its $400k goal with very little to present up front, so Schafer is confident the studio can match that $3.3m target with an already established franchise. Speaking with Eurogamer over Skype, Schafer explains that part of this is due to crowdfunding. ![]() Needless to say, Psychonauts 2 was put on the backburner.īut now Broken Age is out and Double Fine has outlined an opportunity to fund this sequel many grew convinced simply wasn't possible. What began as an experiment to fund a tiny flash game suddenly raised $3.3m, leading to a project that would consume Double Fine founder and Psychonauts creator Tim Schafer for the better part of three years. This ended up not happening, mostly because Notch made this offer the day before Double Fine was to launch its now famous Kickstarter campaign for Broken Age (then codenamed Double Fine Adventure). Psychonauts may have been a critical darling upon its release a decade ago (it even snagged Eurogamer's highly coveted Game of the Year Award), but it failed to sell very well and any hopes to see a sequel were almost immediately stamped out.īack in 2012 Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson offered to front $13m, the cost of the first game, to Double Fine in order to fund a sequel. On the surface, it's about actual dreams as your pre-pubescent psychic commander Raz hops inside the subconscious of others like a benevolent Freddy Kruger, but it also represents a dream for fans. Double Fine's debut 2005 adventure Psychonauts is a game about dreams.
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