So, somehow, someway, get Tim employed by Valve?

I didn't know it was supposed to be that small. That's odd to me. I assumed it was going to be an AGS style game like Blackwell or Gemini Rue in scope, and even with 3 million I think they could have stuck with that and added other additions like length, full orchestra sound, etc.

Or rather "point, but don't click"

This I don't really understand. I see lots of people accusing Double Fine of being greedy or lazy (or both). But I don't see any evidence for that. From watching the documentary I get the impression that they are actually very sincere and hard-working people. They mismanaged the budget for this game quite badly, but that's an entirely different issue. Why do you think that their problems are due to laziness?

Double Fine has existed for over a decade now; Tim Schafer has been working in the industry for over two decades. And yet somehow, it appears that nobody involved in the project knew how much it costs to make a game. I mean, I understand that they weren't expecting as much money as they got, but surely at some point after they knew how much money they had to work with but before they started development, they looked at what they wanted to do and asked themselves how much a game of that scope would cost?

I have nothing against either Double Fine or the people who backed this game, so I hope the Steam thing they're planning to do works out for them. But this is some startling incompetence from industry veterans.

Some of my favoutire games are from Double Fine, like Psychonauts.
But....they are managing the PC ports very bad, for me.
Every single title they release has several problems, at least for me.
One of the common problem is the black screen: I had it on ALL their titles, excluding The Cave that, well, has a TONS of other problems, like save corruption etc (they fixed it later with a patch).
And The Cave, a game I bought for FULL PRICE (and that is inusual for me) was only a mediocre, two hours long title.
Even Brutal Legend gave me problems (it won't start at all, it runs poorly and, finally, there are missing letters in the italian translation).

This is not the topic argument, I know, but thise whole situation seeems strange for me.
I mean, they said that have TONS of funds to realize this project, and now with all the money they can just realize the first half of the game?
Also the January-July thing is strange, I mean, you just said you don't have time to creat the game, and then you cut out around six months of programming?

When the title will be out I will buy it if it will be good, but no way I give them money with early access, Kickstarter or similar things.

Its not like that sort of documentary should be treated as propaganda video, not a sincere view on their work. To drop over 3 millions plus humble bundle money and other revenue and be still that far from any completion... that really requires some very expensive hookers...

Like someone said earlier, its more likely these are one of the devs who need to have a publisher overseeing the budget/cost constraints/delivery of the product.Not sure if they are lazy. More mismanaged and poorly organized. The quote about not seeing the tree's from the forest comes to mind ( or something along those lines)?
Just judging some of the backer comments already , some people think they got their money's worth from watching the documentary videos.....geeeez.....

well he did say he'll either succeed or die in a fire so this is kinda expected for me :D
I backed DFA at the lowest level but won't back any other of their projects until they deliver this.

Is there going to be a documentary on public burning? I'd back that kind of project.

Of course the documentary doesn't give you a perfectly objective picture of what's happening. But unless these guys are world-class actors, I'm pretty sure that they genuinely care and want to deliver the best game possible. They may be naive and incompetent in some ways, but I honestly cannot see anything malicious going on.

Yeah. Running a company like Double Fine does take a lot of money every month. They wanted to make a small AGS-type adventure game with 3 people in 6 months. Instead, they are at least 10 in the team, they're gonna need actors and more music, they expanded the scope of the project. They really want to deliver a fantastic game and that's their problem: they don't want to reduce the scope too much, they have developers on the team that worked a lot on the engine (instead of using only existing features)...

I baked the project and I don't mind the news. We knew they were budget/scope issues and they are honest about them. At least, they're being creative in order to find a solution to this without affecting the game.

They used the Amnesia and bundles money for the project but nobody said all the money was being injected in it, they have several teams in the company and it would be fair to split the money amongst the teams.

They are not very capable in handling a budget, that's true, noone could argue with that but greedy, come on people.

Odd, when I saw their newest kickstarter a few weeks ago, I thought to myself: Are they just running out of money for the other one, and plan to use the money from this kickstarter to help them finish it? All the while rationalizing to themselves that when they start selling the first game, all that money they make will go to the next one?
Serious, that was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the "Massive Chalice" kickstarter. I thought I was just being overly suspicious, but now, I wonder IF some of that money might just go to the first game after all. I truly hope not.
Sorry to the backers, at least though it seems like there WILL be a game, and hopefully it will still be a good one, if not super huge. A word of advice to Double Fine would be to let a pessimist plan their budgeting and project scope/size, it may save them some sleepless nights. Well, I wish them luck.

Oh jebus, he'd get lost in an ARG project and it'd dissappear into the void that Ep.3 and HL3 are hiding in.
Now get him hired at Blizzard and he'd have an Activision monkey tormenting him until it came out.

There are just too many financially inept fools running development companies, and Schafer is just another one.

Personally, I think Kickstarter will eventually collapse under projects like this that, because of the idiots running them who can't deliver on what they promised.

I'm still waiting for the first Kickstarter I helped fund deliver what it promised. It's now almost 10 months behind schedule, has produced a multi-player battle thingy I never wanted and wouldn't have funded, yet the single-player game doesn't seem to be much closer to completion.

Fools. Fools. Fools. And so many indie developers wonder why they get their asses kicked by mega international developers that CAN follow a budget.