Broken Age tells the story of Vella Tartine and Shay Volta, two teenagers in strangely similar situations but radically different worlds. The player can freely switch between their stories, helping them take control of their own lives and dealing with the unexpected adventures that follow.

The girl has been chosen by her village to be sacrificed to a terrible monster--but she decides to fight back. Meanwhile, a boy on a spaceship is living a solitary life under the care of a motherly computer, but he wants to break free to lead adventures and do good in the world. Adventures ensue.

The development of Broken Age began began two years ago in a historic, record-breaking Kickstarter campaign—and Act 1 of the game is nearly here, in all its beautiful, 2D, hand-painted glory, with an original orchestral soundtrack and an all-star vocal cast starring Elijah Wood, Jack Black, Wil Wheaton, Jennifer Hale, Pendleton Ward, Masasa Moyo, and many more.

The development of Broken Age began began two years ago in a historic, record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, but the scope of the game became so large that the intial $3,336,371 funding was not enough to cover the entire game. As such Double Fine decided to release the game in two parts, hoping the revenue from Ep.1 would be enough to cover the development cost of the second, and final, part.

Originally scheduled for 2014, Double Fine's Greg Rice revealed that the conclusion to Broken Age is scheduled for 2015.

The team has been steadily growing in size over the past month and progress is being made really rapidly now. The key milestone being that just last week we hit Alpha on both Shay and Vella’s halves of Act 2, leaving just the big finale section until we can say the entirety of Act 2 is at Alpha!

This has unlocked the ability to playtest Act 2 from the start all the way up to the finale, allowing people to switch characters throughout. We kicked that off in full last week and it has been super informative. So far we’re seeing exactly what we were hoping! Playtimes of just Act 2 have ranged from 8-12 hours, the puzzles seem to be providing a good level of challenge, nothing is really standing out as needing to be heavily re-worked, and most importantly people are laughing a lot and seem really pleased with where the story goes. YAY!

In parallel to all this Alpha development, the animators at both Double Fine and SuperGenius, as well as the audio team, have been charging forward on Beta work for the scenes that have professional VO already recorded. This has put Shay’s half of Act 2 well on it’s way towards Beta! Next week Tim is headed down to LA for the final major recording session with Vella, and at that point we’ll have pro VO for all of the remaining cutscenes ready so that animators can start taking them to final!

The goal now is to get all the finale work done so we can hit Alpha on all of Act 2 by the end of the year. That means, as you may have guessed based on recent updates and documentary episodes, the Act 2 ship that will deliver the complete adventure is now looking like it will be early next year. The game is looking really good and the team is working super fast, but we just gotta give the game the time it needs to really deliver on everything we’re hoping it will be.

Now that we have all the writing and design finalized and VO recorded, the remainder of development is much easier to estimate, so the production team is currently working to nail down a new schedule for finaling the game that we can use as a goal for the team and also share with you all.

Oh and did you hear?! Broken Age was nominated for Best Indie Game at this year’s Video Game Awards! We’ll be heading out to Vegas next week to attend the show and honor all the amazing games that came out this year. Keep an eye peeled and maybe you’ll see us in the crowd!

The Act 2 conclusion of Broken Age will be available as a free update for all owners of the game.