Ever since AF2014, I've been looking forward to its return. To be honest, it had been so long that I was worried they weren't going to be public anymore; Despite the years being "2012" and "2014", the releases were actually less than a year and a half apart, with the 2012 jam occurring in November and the 2014 jam happening in February. From this, it was easy to assume Amnesia Fortnight was an annual tradition of the studio, so when 3 years passed with nary a word, I had more or less figured that it wasn't happening anymore. But lo and behold, earlier this month Amnesia Fortnight was announced once again. I actually didn't partake in voting this year; I was short on cash and also Persona 5 had just come out. But now that the event is well and truly underway, and episodes of the documentary are being released (much more slowly than previous years, unfortunately; more on that later) I'm back in it and I gotta say, it's looking to be a good two weeks.
One of the purposes of Amnesia Fortnight is to give members of the studio a chance to see how well they do in a leadership position, and it's always fascinating to see how each project leader handles their position. And this year, there's a good variety of experience among the winners: For starters, there's Zak McClendon, a recent hire of Double Fine Productions brought on to be the project lead on Psychonauts 2. McClendon has worked on a variety of projects, and is a Bioshock 2 alumnus, working as the lead designer on the title. McClendon is clearly used to a leadership position, and his experience shines through in the documentary. He's very clearly aware of what he wants his game, I Have No Idea What I'm Doing, to be: A virtual reality minigame collection with a focus on collaboration between the person wearing the VR headset and outside observers. That may sound like an odd thing to note as a positive, but even in the last Amnesia Fortnight, one of the projects spent several days nailing down what the primary gameplay was going to be. McClendon has also already considered the difficulties the team may face: He specifically notes that a multiplayer game will be difficult to playtest on account of needing more people, and developing for virtual reality presents all sorts of new challenges to developers. The aesthetic of the game is chosen to allow a quick asset creation process, and McClendon is clearly optimistic and confident, but realistic about how far the game can get by the time the 2 weeks are over.
Derek Brand is the sole returning Amnesia Fortnight project lead with his game, Kiln. In AF2014, Brand pitched Mnemonic, an adventure game where you pieced together memories using various odd sights and sounds to draw attention to and remind you of details in other scenes. It was Brand's first time leading a team, and it took him quite a bit of time to get used to the role. Mnemonic had, or at least was portrayed as having, a rough start, but ended up being my favorite game of the bunch. So I was excited to see Brand get another opportunity to lead a game with Kiln, a competitive multiplayer game where you form your body on a clay throwing wheel and charge into battle. Compared to 2014, Brand comes off as much more confident in his role. In 2014, Brand had to be encouraged and guided to take control of the project and steer it towards his vision when the designers got the wrong idea of what was intended in the game. This year, he's taking charge wonderfully, leading team meetings with confidence. He knows what the game is, and has done a much better job communicating that to the rest of the team. The difficulties from the previous Amnesia Fortnight seem to have all but vanished, and I'm very excited to play Kiln even just from three days worth of documentary and assorted preview images on Twitter. Maybe it's too early to be asking this, but honestly I'm just curious: when Derek Brand gets to lead a full game, will it be a full version of Mnemonic, or a full version of Kiln? Either way, I'm looking forward to it!
Devin Kelly-Sneed is something of an enigma to me. His game, Darwin's Dinner, is a fairly simple concept that is likely difficult in practice to create: You play as a hunter going after various wildlife, but at the end of each stage of the game, evolution occurs, and traits that you leave in the populace will become more prevalent in later generations. So, if you only kill slow animals, the following generations might be too quick to be able to catch and you'll starve, etc. The team leader himself, however, doesn't feel quite so easy to get a grasp of. He certainly comes off as calm, and isn't cracking under the pressure of being in charge of a project, at least not in the starting few days. The documentary hasn't been showing much of his team meetings, so it's hard to get a handle on his leadership style. It's even been difficult finding out much of his game development history; I assume he's another relatively new hire, given the fact that he's not credited on any released Double Fine project and his most recent credit is as Lead Gameplay Engineer on the game CounterSpy. As far as the doc series has gotten so far, we've yet to see much of Darwin's Dinner, and not much seems to have been posted online either, so we'll just have to wait and see how it ends up.
Finally, we have the surprise leader and something of a wild card: Asif Siddiky, Director of Photography and co-founder of 2 Player Productions, the documentary team which has done all of the doc work for Double Fine since the Double Fine Adventure kickstarter way back in 2012. You will note one important thing from that: Asif Siddiky is not a game developer. He has never worked in video games in his entire life, besides filming the people who make them. He has no experience with anything he is expected to do as part of Amnesia Fortnight. And in every interview, he is very nervous. In his very first interview, he says,
Why is anyone letting me do this? Uh...I don't know. I don't know what to do! Uh...He's in high spirits, make no mistake, but Siddiky's nervousness never really seems to subside. He's working in a medium almost completely unknown to him, trying to lead a team of game developers who know far more than him. He notes the difficulties in working in a new medium, in working with a team that has so many skills spread between them. But like all the other leaders, Siddiky knows what game he wants to make, and between all the leaders in all the Amnesia Fortnights I've seen, a clear vision of what the game should be is the most important thing, and Siddiky has it. He may always seem like he's fretting one thing or another, but his game, The Gods Must Be Hungry, seems like it's going to end up great in spite of this. It's unfortunate that his involvement in one of the prototypes is delaying the release of the documentary, as 2PP has confirmed on the Double Fine forums, but from what I've seen, The God's Must Be Hungry may be well worth the wait.
The project leads end up as the focus in Amnesia Fortnight, but seeing the difficulties each team faces is an important part of the process as well. In 2014 alone, Mnemonic had difficulty finding its core gameplay, Dear Leader had a large portion of the planned prototype cut, and Little Pink Best Buds faced numerous difficulties stemming from its ambition of being able to talk to 16 distinct personalities via keyboard-entered speech. Again, it's still early in the development of this years games, but we already see some difficulties: The Kiln team has trouble deciding how the pot sculpting should work, Darwin's Dinner has some trouble making its evolution work as intended, IHNIWID takes time to become playable along with getting a view for both the player wearing the headset and those who aren't, and figuring out the scope and an appropriate level of ambition is a bit difficult for the GMBH team and their non-developer leader. Double Fine, between Amnesia Fortnight and the Double Fine Adventure documentary, is no stranger to showing the ups and downs of development. I appreciate that they're willing to show projects on all levels, as they form, warts and all.
Amnesia Fortnight is an amazing time, and I look forward to the rest of the documentary and playing the games that come out of it. The leadership is varied, the projects sound fun, and the look into development the documentaries give is fantastic. Every time it happens, Amnesia Fortnight is a ton of fun to tune into. I just hope it comes back quicker this time.
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