Q&A With the Design Team
Hello, honorary Freelance Police! Thanks for pre-ordering the game.
I'm Chuck Jordan, designer and writer of "The Penal Zone", the first episode of "The Devil's Playhouse." I'm also the guy responsible for making sure all the season's stories fit together in some semblance of order.
This thread is for your questions about the new season, as well as "Beyond Time and Space" and "Save the World," and general Sam & Max design-type stuff. I'll be starting out, and as we go on I'll try to rope in the other designers: Mike Stemmle, Andy Hartzell, Joe Pinney, and Dave Grossman.
I'll be answering your questions whenever I've got the time & know-how, with a super-bonus semi-live Q&A today (Monday Mar 15) from 2-3 PM.
So ask away!
I'm Chuck Jordan, designer and writer of "The Penal Zone", the first episode of "The Devil's Playhouse." I'm also the guy responsible for making sure all the season's stories fit together in some semblance of order.
This thread is for your questions about the new season, as well as "Beyond Time and Space" and "Save the World," and general Sam & Max design-type stuff. I'll be starting out, and as we go on I'll try to rope in the other designers: Mike Stemmle, Andy Hartzell, Joe Pinney, and Dave Grossman.
I'll be answering your questions whenever I've got the time & know-how, with a super-bonus semi-live Q&A today (Monday Mar 15) from 2-3 PM.
So ask away!
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Comments
What is everyone's favorite puzzle/segment from the past seasons? Maybe there could also be a tease about their favorite puzzle from The Penal Zone?
Thank you kindly,
Mr. Huggernaut
In previous seasons of Sam and Max, the Street has featured as a sort of hub linking together the game's many varied locations. With the new series seemingly venturing away from our world and out into space, is the Street going to be left behind? And, if not, in what ways has it changed/expanded since the last season?
Thanks,
-SamnMad.
A couple of questions:
1) I know Telltale considers the comic as the main inspiration of their games, and the new game seems to take the comic roots to a whole new level. Is there any comic (or, of course, cartoon episode or (cancelled) game) in particular that serves as a main inspiration for any of the episodes? Anything that you feel wasn't really present (or even possible) in Telltale's previous episodes?
2) Max's new powers bring a whole new dynamic to the game, making the gameplay feel all fresh. It reminds me a bit of Loom. Was that an inspiration behind the choice to do it this way (or if it wasn't, what was?)? Will we see more weird new gameplay choices in future Telltale titles (which I'm very much in favor of!)?
3) Season 2 very directly adressed some of the biggest issues people had with the first season. What are the biggest differences this time? What is it that this game does better than Season 2 (or Season 1)?
4) Where does Max keep his gun?
cheers
1. When planning season 3, did you use TomI kind of like a stepping stone to see what you could do with season 3?
2. How much more demanding on PC's will this be compared to Monkey Island?
Anyway, my only question for the moment:
1) Is the entire stroyline for the season already set in stone, or is the entire arc still up for some modification at this point?
In 301 I think some of the teleportation puzzles are really neat.
The new season is going to be centered around New York, not outer space! Sam & Max's street is still a major location in the game, but we're using it a little differently than in previous seasons. We wanted to use more of New York City, instead of seeing little glimpses of places from all over the world. And we wanted to make sure that the street was just one of the locations you'd visit, and the action was more spread out all over the city.
The biggest changes to the street happen in the first episode, when General Skun-ka'pe arrives.
I think "Beast from the Cereal Aisle" and "Bad Day on the Moon" are the two main influences on the story this season, but I've read the comics so many times that they all kind of run together for me. The visual influence is to make the city seem dirtier and more realistic than past seasons; the comics always seemed more like Sam & Max were cartoon characters in the real world, instead of existing in a big cartoon where everything is simple and brightly-colored. Plus, Steve always crams in tons of detail into the comics -- rats, pigeons, roaches, and whatever else -- so we wanted more stuff always going on in the background.
I've actually never played "Loom," so it wasn't a conscious influence. (My first LEC game was "The Secret of Monkey Island.") It was more a result of looking at what worked best in previous episodes -- "Chariots of the Dogs" and "Moai Better Blues" in particular -- as well as what's going on in independent games and other puzzle games. In the indies, they usually take one core concept and do a bunch of variations on it: turning negative space into positive space, making clones of yourself, or, of course, using a portal gun to move from one place to another. I really liked that "Moai Better Blues" (which was designed before anybody here knew about Portal!) took the one concept of the Bermuda Triangles and built a bunch of puzzles around that. So the idea is that instead of having a bunch of inventory items, and you have to figure out what each one's specific purpose is; you have a smaller set of psychic powers and we tell you exactly how they work. Then, you have to figure out how to use those to fit the situation.
As for whether that kind of thing shows up in the future, it depends on the designers of future games, and of course the feedback we get from season 3.
I'm hoping that the world ends up feeling bigger and more detailed. We're also more conscious about changing up the formula -- we want to build up a big world over time, with characters and places that you get to know in greater detail, but also keep it from feeling that you're doing the same thing over and over again.
In his holster, of course.
I like it that you're trying to bring more detail into the world, this is one of the only things that was a major difference for me between the comics and the telltale games.
Hmmm... Not really a question I guess... ehmmm... Oh, i know:
Will there be a guy who's squashed between buildings in this game?
And maybe:
How much is Steve Purcell still contributing to the writing? Is he still coming up with story ideas and jokes? And what's his take on the Max' psychic powers thing?
The reason I ask this is because of the whole "Red Portal in Stinky's" puzzle...
In the GiantBomb quicklook you mention that there were several stories the team was considering, but everyone always seemed to like the Psychic Max-storyline the best. The gameplay seems to be centered around Max's powers. Did the new gameplay decisions follow the story decisions here, or did you want to do something different with the gameplay this time anyway?
And I know you probably can't answer this, but what are some of the different storylines you guys considered that didn't make it? Or perhaps something that was cut from one of the older seasons, like the infamous spin-the-bottle scene that was cut from 204?
We're starting to have a separate "director" role, who takes the design and script and then collaborates with the content programmers, animators, chore artists, etc. through the course of the episode's production. And that's in collaboration with the art director, animation director, lead chore artist, etc. It's a little like the designer is in charge of the "game" side of things, and the director is in charge of the visual/presentation/storytelling side of things. On "The Penal Zone," Nick Herman handled much of the direction, with lead choreographer Dennis Lenart and of course Jake, who does a little bit of everything.
We knew we wanted a giant cockroach in the game from day one, since Steve likes drawing them.
The doors of the DeSoto have always worked; Sam & Max just prefer not to use them. They're big fans of the Dukes of Hazzard.
The Narrator is just there because most of the TV shows and movies influencing the season have a narrator. There's Criswell from Plan 9 from Outer Space and Rod Serling from "Night Gallery" and "The Twilight Zone", plus the voice-over at the beginning of "The Outer Limits." Also, there's a great werewolf movie from the 70s called The Beast Must Die! with an opening narration. It was a great way to fit the tone, plus introduce people to Sam & Max if they'd never heard of them before, without just dropping them into a big weird story. Also, I didn't want people thinking they couldn't understand Sam & Max if they hadn't read the comics or played the previous two seasons.
To find out what "The Devil's Playhouse" means, you'll have to stay through the last episode.
It's more like Tales of Monkey Island, with each episode being a chapter in a larger story. People seemed to like that a lot in Monkey Island, and also the final couple of episode in season 2 of Sam & Max.
All of the series build on each other, but since Monkey Island was the most recent series, it had the most direct influence. From the story side, again, the episodes are a lot more closely linked than they were in previous seasons. And of course, it's building off all the great visual work the studio learned how to do in Wallace & Gromit as well as Monkey Island.
You'd have to check the system specs and possibly try out a demo to know for sure. We still have the "quality" setting, so you can turn off stuff like depth-of-field and real-time shadows if it's not performing well on your computer. Season 3's requirements are going to be higher than Tales of Monkey Island, though, since we've got bigger environments with more stuff going on.
Not yet, we've got to finish season 3 first!
I remember several articles at IGN, 1UP, etc., that mentioned season three coming in early 2009. The general consensus seems to be that it was delayed because of the opportunity of Monkey Island popping up for you guys. So is The Devil's Playhouse the result of a year (or more) of planning and programming?
2. We saw in several videos that there was six slots for psychic powers. Does that mean that there will be six powers in the entire series or does it mean that we will be able to hold a maximum six powers at a time and there will be morethan six?
Sorry, I should've said 2-3PM Pacific Daylight Time, AKA right now!
Maybe not stone, but maybe like reasonably hard clay. Obviously the entire arc can't change, since we're releasing the first episode in a few weeks! But the story has stayed relatively intact for a while now, so it's unlikely to change significantly.
Well now there has to be, it sounds like.
Steve's got a full-time job at Pixar, so he doesn't have a lot of time to be working on an episodic game series in addition to that. We had a series of brainstorming meetings with Steve, Mike Stemmle, Dave Grossman, and me at the beginning of the project, and I went to make a season pitch that incorporated as many of Steve's ideas as we could fit in. He approved the season story and the individual episode concepts and recommended changes. He approves & gives feedback on all the character and environment designs, and we run puzzle ideas and some gags by him to make sure that they fit in with the characters.
the huggernaut!!!
No, we tend to cut puzzles only if they're not working for the storytelling, or if they're more complicated to produce than fun. (There was a puzzle in 202 where you had to take the babies' food orders that just wasn't that much fun). If the testers run into readability/difficulty problems with a puzzle, we try to fix it instead of cut it.
And Will or somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall any of the QA team or playtesters having an unreasonably hard time with that puzzle in Stinky's. That's the thing about adventure games: there's no real "science" to puzzle design, and what's incredibly hard or obscure for one person can be stone simple to another.
Both, actually. I'd been wanting to experiment with more systematic puzzles for a while, especially after hearing Brendan explain the Bermuda Triangles in 202. And when we first started brainstorming season 3, Mike Stemmle mentioned "Max's latent psychic powers." The two ideas fit together well, so it seemed like a natural.
Not a lot gets cut, actually. I can't mention anything for season 3 without spoiling it. In season 2, there was the spin-the-bottle puzzle (which was really just a horrific idea, in retrospect), and that food orders puzzle I just mentioned. I can't really think of anything else that's been cut without eventually showing up somewhere else.
Brainstorming started towards the end of Strong Bad. Monkey Island did, obviously, become a huge priority for the studio as soon as it became available, but there are always multiple things going on in the studio. Production on the new season of Sam & Max started around last September.
So is it true that Bosco is not needed for this Season or is it a lie so that no one knows what's coming?
I noticed Max's voice in this Season, did Andrew return to play Max?
From the beginning of the teaser, I've wondered to myself "Why psychic powers?" how did this brilliant idea get formed and why wasn't it used sooner?
-splash1
You'll have a maximum of six at one time. We're not saying what all the powers are yet, so it'll be a surprise as the season goes on. The first episode focuses on future vision and teleportation.
The hardest part is waiting to find out what your next question is going to be.
No, no Fizzball this season. The idea comes up all the time (I think I remember Mike mentioning it coming up when they were doing Hit the Road, even), but if you're going to do it, you want to really do it justice. To do it really well, you'd want fancy physics and effects, the kind which don't really make sense in an adventure game engine.
It's true. Unless it's a lie, in which case I'm still lying right now.
Andrew Chaikin is doing several voices for this season, but not Max.
I partly answered this earlier -- Mike mentioned Max's psychic powers, and it fit really well with the kinds of puzzles we wanted to experiment with this season. As for why it wasn't used sooner, I'd guess that's because Mike hadn't started working here yet.
Cool, can't wait!
I've just replayed Culture Shock, and after that I checked the intro video to Season 3. You can here it's definitely not Andrew Chaikin, it's good ol' William Kasten. (I actually like his Max better.)
EDIT: Chuck beat me to it. He's a fast one.
Were you going for any other strange animals before Skun Ka'pe
Is there any chance of an appearance by Mack Salmon?
Questions:
1) Apparently I am not keeping up with TTG too much. What's this horrible puzzle in 204 you guys were talking about?
2) What locations of NYC will we get to see? Famous ones too?
3) Does the writer already include some puzzles, or get all of them added in afterwards? Or does the writer actually write story around puzzles already designed in the spinning session mentioned before?
I've read on some previews that you're slightly changing the way we go about solving puzzles in this season over last, any chance of a little enlightenment on what that could mean? I've also seen that we have more control over max in this version does that mean we'll possibly be seeing a switch character control button in the regular environment vs just in dialog?
And of course, thank you guys for all the fantastic games you've brought us, you've truly been the gaming highlight of the last decade for me. And TTG finally coming to mac will probably take the cake for the next ten years.
2. Will we get to combine items like in tales.
3.Will we get to use max's powers on sams items.
4. because of the computer trying ot move maxes inventory istems, will he have an inventory/be a playable character.
And since this season is based on spookier stuff, and is in New York City, will we see any Ghostbusters references?
What changed?
Now seriously, what do you first in designing? The Puzzles or the story or everything at the same time?