We'll see how it fairs the longer I play with this control system, but for now, it just feels unnatural given the genre.
I have started again Culture Shock just for start it again, and, after playing W&G and ToMI and watch the trailer like 100.3 times, 2 things:
1- Boy, they were stiff (I was all "Come on Max, show some emotion! I KNOW YOU CAN!")
2- My left hand wants to play too. And now, without want it I put my left hand in the WASD and I don't simple remember is just point and click. And now just point and click is... weird...
I tend to play a whole bunch of FPS's, so I don't think the whole WASD and mouse set-up will be foreign to me. In fact, I'd like to see how it plays out in a game like this.
In the many previews of the game that I have seen, It appears that the ending to the penal zone has been given away, but their are tutorial windows and such during the video. Have you given away the ending in any of your previews? I would really hope not because it seems a little... Anti - climactic...
2- My left hand wants to play too. And now, without want it I put my left hand in the WASD and I don't simple remember is just point and click. And now just point and click is... weird...
Join the club! You are not the only, although I got back used to P&C now with Season 2.
Anyway, we already have a huge public topic about this.
Do you guys have a strategy for coming up with puzzles? Do you design the levels before you come up with the puzzles?
We don't really have "levels" since they're story-based game, and that affects how puzzle design is done, too. Usually the strategy is to treat it roughly like a screenplay: come up with the story, then divide the story into the main beats or key moments when something changes. Then at each of those beats, try to think of a way that the player has to do something to advance the story to the next point.
If you start thinking of them as "puzzles," then it can feel like you're just giving the player something to do, and once he finishes, the story can continue.
In Episode 201, when Jimmy Two-Teeth tries to kill himself by jumping off the second floor of Sam and Max's apartment, I was almost sure that I was supposed to get Grandma's Happy Pills from Santa's Workshop somehow and give it to him. I was wrong. Were Grandma's Happy Pills meant to throw us off? If so, were they originally going to be intended for the puzzle at some point?
Nope, as far as I'm aware they were just a gag to fill out the number of gift items you can send to people. That's one of the problems with comedy games, I guess, making it clear what's a joke and what's not.
Adventure games have a grand tradition of cameos. Sierra cross-referenced itself constantly. Sam and Max appears throughout the Lucasarts Monkey Island series while DotT's Bernard appears in Sam and Max. Guybrush Threepwood has an appearance of sorts in Return to Zork. And Fone Bone and Boris Krinkle have both found their way into the Sam and Max episodes (one in a blooper). With the large cast of characters Telltale now has in its retinue, will Season 3 continue this tradition of cross-game cameos from a source other than previous Sam and Max games?
There's no grand plan for it or anything; you just start coming up with ideas to fill out a scene and occasionally a reference to something else seems funny. It varies from writer to writer, too; I tend to think references to stuff outside the "bubble" are funnier than in-jokes, but other people (like Mike) can make those work.
Truth be told, you guys are probably better at spotting the in-jokes and cross-references better than anybody in the company.
Any intention to add cross-over content this season as well, like the decals in Season 2?
Not really, no. Remember that Season 2 started out as a PC-only game; we didn't start moving to consoles until Wallace & Gromit and Strong Bad. So the decals were kind of an attempt to do the same thing that achievements/trophies do on the consoles, something for the completionists to get excited about doing. It was the same for the Awesomeness Level on the Strong Bad games.
The new season will have the trophies on PS3, and most likely some version of the "Did you try..." stuff.
Has Steve Purcell ever said "No" to something big? Anything as broad as a whole story idea, or major aspects of a prospective plot? How often does he either say an idea is bad or offer some means of changing it to make it more in line with the characters/universe?
Dave would have to talk about season 1 and season 2, since the bulk of those were already in place by the time I started working on them.
From what I've seen from the end of season 2 and the new season, though, Steve is a blast to work with because he only suggests stuff that makes the games better. From my experience, he doesn't say "no" or "this is bad" but comes up with a way to keep the intent the same, but make it fit more in the tone of Sam & Max. He just gets what makes Sam & Max work -- which you'd think would be obvious, since he created them, but is rarer than you might think when you're handing something you made over to someone else to do their own interpretation.
There are a couple of examples from the new season, but I can't go into a ton of detail without spoiling something. In episode two, we'd originally pitched it as jumping right into the story, but he suggested putting a kind of "wrapper" around the story to keep the players more grounded. And it made the episode fit into the whole season a lot better. And with the last episode, he was conscious about keeping the dynamic between Sam & Max consistent, because that's what's at the heart of all the Sam & Max stories. And that's about as specific as I can get.
cant wait for s&m season 3 is tomi coming for season 2 was monkey island a big influence on season 3
I really don't know what the status of Monkey Island is, since I didn't work on that game apart from a little of the first episode.
And Tales of Monkey Island was an influence on the new Sam & Max games in terms of proving out the interface and direct control, and taking all the great stuff the environment artists, effects artists, modelers, animators, and chore artists perfected on that series and bringing it to Sam & Max.
Why the design decision to make Sam and Max's building orange?
As far as I know, it has always been red in other incarnations.
Why orange for the Telltale games?
Hmm, sounds like a question for Bogan. I'm not an art guy, but I do know that when designing the environments for season 1 they went for a strong, unified color palette in each location, and the street is mostly orange-ish. Maybe that's why?
So anyways, it's sort of a pointless question, but I was in the middle of playing What's Up Beelzebub when I wondered,
after Sam signed that contract with Satan, what was the first worst thing he thought of before thinking of having Peepers as his partner instead of Max?
I was about to answer, but the legal department informed me that the answer would have these message boards shut down. Something about the Patriot Act, decency laws, and a couple articles of the Geneva Convention.
Adventure games are not FPS or RTS games, there's no lines of fire or sight or terrain or tactics. The micromanagement of how they walk from the office to the DeSoto when I want to go for a ride is only tedious and pointless. I tell the game where I want to go, and the game figures it out. That's a feature, not a bug. It's your game and you pick how you want it, but I find it sad that the reasoning given is exactly opposite of how I experienced it.
I have to agree. Having played thru the first two chapters of ToMI, I'm finding the controls rather difficult to get used to. It also feels rather unnatural to be in the WASD+Mouse "stance" for a point and click adventure title. For something like Spore, I'm used to that interface because it makes the game that much easier to play.
We'll see how it fairs the longer I play with this control system, but for now, it just feels unnatural given the genre.
To each his own, of course, and nothing you read on a message board is going to change something you don't like in a game. My own take on it, though:
1) I'll be happier when we start thinking of game genres not as FPS/RTS/adventure/etc, but as comedy/drama/horror/action/etc. The reason is because if you think of a game primarily in terms of its mechanics, then you end up just doing iterations on the same game over and over again. I mentioned Portal already, but it's the perfect example: it uses a first person shooter engine, but playing it feels like playing a comedy adventure game. I think that's how you get better games.
2) The reason for doing direct control isn't to set up terrain or tactics or line of sight, but for immersion. When I go into a room in a SCUMM game and sweep my mouse over the screen to find all the objects I can click on, I think "puzzle." It's passive; I'm watching characters do stuff. When I go into a new world in a 3D Mario game, I feel more connected to and involved in what's going on, even though their puzzles are usually a lot more explicit than in an adventure game, with bright arrows pointing to them and everything. You could say the same thing with Portal: you're not watching some character trying to get out of a locked room, you're locked in the room yourself.
3) Like puzzle design, it's still more art than science: there's no one clearly defined "right" way to do it in every instance, so you keep having to try things and see how they work. And there are plenty of people who hit the first obstacle in an adventure game, or the first puzzle that could've been designed better, and decide that all adventure games suck. "I have to hypnotize a monkey with a banana? This is why adventure games died! Good riddance!" If I run into a puzzle in a game that's frustrating, I don't think that ruins the whole philosophy behind puzzle-based games. And if I run into a particular set-up or camera angle or area that's hard to control, I don't think it invalidates the philosophy behind direct control. It's worth experimenting with it and getting it right.
In the many previews of the game that I have seen, It appears that the ending to the penal zone has been given away, but their are tutorial windows and such during the video. Have you given away the ending in any of your previews? I would really hope not because it seems a little... Anti - climactic...
The previews you've probably been seeing are all from the start of the game. Max gets the future vision power in this episode, so he can see what's going to happen later on. You'll have to play the game to see how all that plays out, but rest assured that we know what we're doing. (We hope).
Something i've always wondered is do the designers or writers make the puzzles for TTG?
At TTG, the designers and the writers are the same people. Often, but not always, the lead designer of an episode is also the lead writer of the episode. But the designers are in charge of coming up with the story & puzzles, and the writer is in charge of coming up with the script. At TTG, even if the designer and writer isn't the same person, everybody on the design team is working together on the story & puzzle design.
1) I'll be happier when we start thinking of game genres not as FPS/RTS/adventure/etc, but as comedy/drama/horror/action/etc. The reason is because if you think of a game primarily in terms of its mechanics, then you end up just doing iterations on the same game over and over again. I mentioned Portal already, but it's the perfect example: it uses a first person shooter engine, but playing it feels like playing a comedy adventure game. I think that's how you get better games.
OOooo, I like this train of thought! Seriously, I do! But how long do you think it will be until we, as gamers, start thinking this way?
...wow, suddenly all my games feel rather boring. Spore would be classified as Sci-Fi cartoon action comedy, and The Sims would be a drama/reality show, but everything else I play doesn't fit a television/entertainment genre with this concept you're presenting. I mean, what is AudioSurf? MTV back when they actually played music videos?
1. Will the recurring themes (like a background character that Sam and/or Max doesn't like end up being the main mastermind at the end, episode 1 not being part of the plan, etc.) return in Season 3?
2. Will the worthless but fun decals return?
3. I noticed that one of the villains in the trailer looks strangely like Grandpa Stinky. Is that a coincidence?
4. What other cool new features will we see in the new season?
I mean, what is AudioSurf? MTV back when they actually played music videos?
Chuck's genre categories work great for narrative games (which makes sense, since he works primarily on the some of the best narrative games being made today!), but consequently fall short of non-narrative things more specific to games as a medium. When a game IS more about mechanics/concept than story (like AudioSurf), a mechanics-based label is probably more appropriate.
That said, maybe Audiosurf would just be a 'music game,' along the same lines as a 'music video.'
As in Zelda is action/adventure and fantasy. FF is RPG and fantasy. S&M is adventure and comedy.
The genre is important but it's not everything. I've trying playing FPS, it doesn't matter if the story is great, I'm bored after 5 minutes. And the only way I've ever been able to enjoy platformers was to play them in multiplayer modes.
I think it does matter. There is the story on one hand and the way you experience it on the other hand. Just like you can have a story that's a mystery, a comedy, horror, etc, and you can have it in the form of a novel, a graphic novel or a movie, and not everybody will enjoy all of these. My brother (the engineer) for instance only read comics, never novels/short stories.
Genre is pretty important, I can't think of a game I've ever liked that I didn't like as a story, but the way you experience it is important too, so I don't think it should just fade away. I'd hate to buy a game advertising as fantasy comedy only to find out it's a FPS or a platformer and I can't play it.
Telltale doesn't support Linux, but some players on the forums have had some success using Wine and the like. I don't have any idea how much it'd cost to do an "official" Wine port, but there aren't any plans anytime soon.
And I'd imagine that the reason ID can do a Linux port of Doom 3 is because they're a very programmer-driven company and because Carmack likes to tinker; Telltale is more content-focused. Plus, DOOM is obviously such a huge series that ID can afford to spend all their resources porting their games to every possible platform. Adventure games are just a different market -- for the most part, the people who are interested enough in technology to be running and maintaining Linux (even "user-friendly" versions like Ubuntu) have lost interest in more casual games like graphic adventures. Remember that getting a game up and running on a platform is only a small part of the job: you have to have enough QA guys to test all the different versions, customer support for anybody running the different versions, etc.
I don't expect TTG to port any games to Linux anytime soon, since I realize that too few people use Linux for it to be worth the cost. That being said, I think you're wrong in saying that Linux users "have lost interest in more casual games like graphic adventures". In my experience, Linux users account for some of the most hardcore adventurers I've come across. Personally I think Ubuntu passed Windows in user friendliness a couple of years ago, but since I enjoy playing my adventure games every now and then, I still keep Windows in a dual boot setup on my computers.
I see... so its like that episode of seinfeld that goes in reverse! Clever...
I guess it's not that extreme, but I love the idea!
I'm pretty sure, that would be extremely difficult to design, though. You'd be given the outcome first, then getting the puzzle and finally you would be looking for the items you need for that puzzle... I don't really see how that could work in terms of gameplay without getting too confusing.
Still, if done right, this might be the best and most innovative concept for an adventure game in years!
Genre is pretty important, I can't think of a game I've ever liked that I didn't like as a story.
Me, either, but that's because I generally prefer narrative games. However, I have friends that have whiled away hours and hours on Tetris, loving every minute of it, and certainly not because it had a captivating story.
Actually one of the things I really enjoy(ed) about early Nintendo games was how vague the story was, meaning you got to create a lot of the narrative and world yourself while playing (which is probably why attempts to make stories out of those games are so wildly varied, like the Mario Brothers).
Really, until computers came about (and maybe RPGs in the 70s), the vast majority of games were story-less. Go, Chess, Poker, and Cricket certainly couldn't be considered 'comedy' 'drama' etc.
Which isn't to say that genre labels aren't useful for narrative games, because they are. But not all games are narrative games.
Which isn't to say that genre labels aren't useful for narrative games, because they are. But not all games are narrative games.
No, they're not, and they don't need to be. I think Drop 7 is the perfect iPhone game, for instance, and I've probably spent more time playing it than any other game in the last six months. There's always going to be a place for purely abstract games, just like, for instance, there's always going to be value in purely visual art or instrumental music that's not "about" anything.
But when you're talking about "genres" then I think it's important to make the distinction, and it goes deeper than just narrative. For instance, Team Fortress 2 and the Civilization series are both fantastic games that don't have a (developer-defined) narrative. But just calling one "multiplayer shooter" and the other "turn-based strategy" doesn't describe what makes them most awesome. You'd be doing TF2 a disservice if you didn't mention that it was really funny, and you don't capture the appeal of Civ if you don't mention you're building a civilization throughout history.
And again, I think the reason it's important is because otherwise, you tend to get locked in a certain mindset. If all RTS games all had to work exactly like Warcraft, then there never would've been a game as cool as Battlezone. If all adventure games had to be point-and-click inventory-based 2d puzzle games with item combination and dialogue trees, then there never would've been Myst, or for that matter, Grim Fandango.
I guess it'd be like if someone asked you what the movie Up was about, and you answered "it's animated" or "it's in 3D."
I don't expect TTG to port any games to Linux anytime soon, since I realize that too few people use Linux for it to be worth the cost. That being said, I think you're wrong in saying that Linux users "have lost interest in more casual games like graphic adventures". In my experience, Linux users account for some of the most hardcore adventurers I've come across. Personally I think Ubuntu passed Windows in user friendliness a couple of years ago, but since I enjoy playing my adventure games every now and then, I still keep Windows in a dual boot setup on my computers.
No doubt that there are plenty of hardcore adventure game fans using Linux, but Telltale is getting out of the mode of making "hardcore" adventure games. The studio's putting the focus on story and presentation, instead of elaborate multi-step puzzles that will leave you stumped for days or send you running to the forums. And whether it's deserved or not, Linux doesn't have a reputation for being a great platform for more casual games.
Linux does seem to be making more inroads in mobile computing, so it's entirely possible that things will change, and there'll be more of a market for the kind of games that Telltale makes.
Have the controls for moving the protagonist improved for Season 3 compared to ToMI? I'm also one who has often used the grappling-hook-click-on-action-items method while playing it, because WASD didn't really work for me all that well, especially with paths that were very long and/or not constrained to horizontal, vertical and diagonal movement (and there were a good few of those). I'd imagine that works great with an analog joystick, but it sucked on WASD Keys.
Along those lines: You mentioned an XBox compatible controller can be used on a PC, how about a Mac?
Throughout this Q&A, there has been several times when you can't answer with examples since it would spoil the games, is it possible for these examples to be given in some kind of spoiler thread when the whole season is released?
I'm really pretty curious as to how you go about turning a story, or animation piece from a plot into a game with puzzles and inventory. I mean, where exactly does the puzzle creation process enter when you create a game? are you thinking about how the game will play when you write the story? or do you make the scenes you need for the story first and then add items in later.
P.S. I remembered another puzzle favorite of mine from a telltale game, in Rise Of The Pirate God, there's a sequence where you need to achieve a locket you can't reach, so you cause water current to shake it. but that doesn't quite do the trick, so you must make it intercept an air bubble from a nearby clam. It seemed to be an expansion on the traditional use object with object formula, adding the environmental factor of the water current made it feel almost like a minigame. i don't know if you can miss with the clam, but i feel it would add depth if you could. the idea of time sensitive environmental puzzles seems cool, but i can understand how that's almost a platforming like departure too
'Nother pointless question. How amusing is it to watch various voice actors scream into the microphone? Like...Kasten going "WAHAHAHOOOOO" for this new season?
Have the controls for moving the protagonist improved for Season 3 compared to ToMI? [...]
Along those lines: You mentioned an XBox compatible controller can be used on a PC, how about a Mac?
The controls for the PC/Mac version are pretty much identical to Tales of Monkey Island's.
I don't know if a 360 controller will work with the Mac version, since it's not "officially" supported. I'm sure one of the QA guys will try it out as we get closer to the Mac release and report back.
Throughout this Q&A, there has been several times when you can't answer with examples since it would spoil the games, is it possible for these examples to be given in some kind of spoiler thread when the whole season is released?
Probably, if you start one and remember what you wanted answered. I think that most of it will be pretty obvious once you've played the episodes, though -- there's not a lot of "behind the scenes" stuff that won't be evident in the final game.
hey guys, great job on all of season 3 i have seen so far!
i know that psychic powers are going to be the ongoing theme but will the episodes differ in overall theme, like the penal zone is space based, will the other episodes be of different genres?
I'm really pretty curious as to how you go about turning a story, or animation piece from a plot into a game with puzzles and inventory. I mean, where exactly does the puzzle creation process enter when you create a game? are you thinking about how the game will play when you write the story? or do you make the scenes you need for the story first and then add items in later.
Both? Sometimes you think of a story moment, and then break it up into steps that the main character would do, and then think of how the player would do those things. Sometimes you think of something that'd be cool or fun to do in a videogame and then figure out a way to work that into the story. Sometimes you just come up with a visual gag and then try to figure out how to turn that into a story moment.
How amusing is it to watch various voice actors scream into the microphone? Like...Kasten going "WAHAHAHOOOOO" for this new season?
Boring answer, but the studio is laid out so that we can't actually see the actors while they're recording. We just hear the voice. It's actually kind of better that way, since you can concentrate on whether or not the voice carries what you were hoping to get out of the line, even without any visuals attached.
i know that psychic powers are going to be the ongoing theme but will the episodes differ in overall theme, like the penal zone is space based, will the other episodes be of different genres?
Yeah, each episode has its own genre, more or less: "The Penal Zone" feels mostly like a sci-fi B movie, and later episodes will hit on horror movies, old serials, other sci-fi, etc.
Was The Devil's Playhouse title chosen as an homage to the show that originally gave start to Rod Sterling's Twilight Zone, Desilu Playhouse? I hope it is.
Also, if Twilight Zone is your current theme I hope I see an "It's a Good Life" puzzle somewhere in there. A Max that must always be appeased is a cool concept.
Boring answer, but the studio is laid out so that we can't actually see the actors while they're recording. We just hear the voice. It's actually kind of better that way, since you can concentrate on whether or not the voice carries what you were hoping to get out of the line, even without any visuals attached.
Hmmm, and you don't record the mimications of the actor?
I know that when making animated movies, they generally look at that stuff in order to make the characters on screen mimic the characteristics of the voice actor at that time... or make it easier to convey the attached emotion by looking at the experssions and features of the actor.
When Max was elected president waaay back in 104. was it always the intention to keep him president for as long as you have, or was that a puzzle solution that grew its own legs?
have you ever consiserd making a doctor who game{from bbc a tv program] it is a good show no humor but fun also in the preview there was a robor who said" where are youre wepons" is it a hal like thing { from 2001 space oddesy}
Was The Devil's Playhouse title chosen as an homage to the show that originally gave start to Rod Sterling's Twilight Zone, Desilu Playhouse? I hope it is.
Then it is!
Well, close, anyway. We were trying to get the feel of the old anthology series like Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, but the closest one I knew of was a show called Playhouse 90. How exactly that title fits into the season, you'll have to play the games to see.
Hmmm, and you don't record the mimications of the actor?
I know that when making animated movies, they generally look at that stuff in order to make the characters on screen mimic the characteristics of the voice actor at that time... or make it easier to convey the attached emotion by looking at the experssions and features of the actor.
Motion capture is getting more common in games, and there are plenty of studios who use it like you describe. It's still too time- space- and labor-intensive for episodic adventure games from a smaller studio, though. All our stuff is animated "by hand."
Also I'm pretty sure you made up the word "mimications."
When Max was elected president waaay back in 104. was it always the intention to keep him president for as long as you have, or was that a puzzle solution that grew its own legs?
I don't think it was intended to last past 104, actually. But it kept turning out to be useful to the story for one reason or another if Max was still in office.
have you ever consiserd making a doctor who game{from bbc a tv program] it is a good show no humor but fun also in the preview there was a robor who said" where are youre wepons" is it a hal like thing { from 2001 space oddesy}
There are several people in the studio who are fans of Doctor Who, so I doubt anybody would be opposed to doing a Doctor Who game if the opportunity came up. And the references from the game and the trailer are all over the place, and HAL 9000 will keep popping up in one form or another.
Comments
I have started again Culture Shock just for start it again, and, after playing W&G and ToMI and watch the trailer like 100.3 times, 2 things:
1- Boy, they were stiff (I was all "Come on Max, show some emotion! I KNOW YOU CAN!")
2- My left hand wants to play too. And now, without want it I put my left hand in the WASD and I don't simple remember is just point and click. And now just point and click is... weird...
In the many previews of the game that I have seen, It appears that the ending to the penal zone has been given away, but their are tutorial windows and such during the video. Have you given away the ending in any of your previews? I would really hope not because it seems a little... Anti - climactic...
Anyway, we already have a huge public topic about this.
It's just my guess but I would assume his first thought was
If you start thinking of them as "puzzles," then it can feel like you're just giving the player something to do, and once he finishes, the story can continue.
Nope, as far as I'm aware they were just a gag to fill out the number of gift items you can send to people. That's one of the problems with comedy games, I guess, making it clear what's a joke and what's not.
Truth be told, you guys are probably better at spotting the in-jokes and cross-references better than anybody in the company.
The new season will have the trophies on PS3, and most likely some version of the "Did you try..." stuff.
From what I've seen from the end of season 2 and the new season, though, Steve is a blast to work with because he only suggests stuff that makes the games better. From my experience, he doesn't say "no" or "this is bad" but comes up with a way to keep the intent the same, but make it fit more in the tone of Sam & Max. He just gets what makes Sam & Max work -- which you'd think would be obvious, since he created them, but is rarer than you might think when you're handing something you made over to someone else to do their own interpretation.
There are a couple of examples from the new season, but I can't go into a ton of detail without spoiling something. In episode two, we'd originally pitched it as jumping right into the story, but he suggested putting a kind of "wrapper" around the story to keep the players more grounded. And it made the episode fit into the whole season a lot better. And with the last episode, he was conscious about keeping the dynamic between Sam & Max consistent, because that's what's at the heart of all the Sam & Max stories. And that's about as specific as I can get.
And Tales of Monkey Island was an influence on the new Sam & Max games in terms of proving out the interface and direct control, and taking all the great stuff the environment artists, effects artists, modelers, animators, and chore artists perfected on that series and bringing it to Sam & Max.
Hmm, sounds like a question for Bogan. I'm not an art guy, but I do know that when designing the environments for season 1 they went for a strong, unified color palette in each location, and the street is mostly orange-ish. Maybe that's why?
I was about to answer, but the legal department informed me that the answer would have these message boards shut down. Something about the Patriot Act, decency laws, and a couple articles of the Geneva Convention.
1) I'll be happier when we start thinking of game genres not as FPS/RTS/adventure/etc, but as comedy/drama/horror/action/etc. The reason is because if you think of a game primarily in terms of its mechanics, then you end up just doing iterations on the same game over and over again. I mentioned Portal already, but it's the perfect example: it uses a first person shooter engine, but playing it feels like playing a comedy adventure game. I think that's how you get better games.
2) The reason for doing direct control isn't to set up terrain or tactics or line of sight, but for immersion. When I go into a room in a SCUMM game and sweep my mouse over the screen to find all the objects I can click on, I think "puzzle." It's passive; I'm watching characters do stuff. When I go into a new world in a 3D Mario game, I feel more connected to and involved in what's going on, even though their puzzles are usually a lot more explicit than in an adventure game, with bright arrows pointing to them and everything. You could say the same thing with Portal: you're not watching some character trying to get out of a locked room, you're locked in the room yourself.
3) Like puzzle design, it's still more art than science: there's no one clearly defined "right" way to do it in every instance, so you keep having to try things and see how they work. And there are plenty of people who hit the first obstacle in an adventure game, or the first puzzle that could've been designed better, and decide that all adventure games suck. "I have to hypnotize a monkey with a banana? This is why adventure games died! Good riddance!" If I run into a puzzle in a game that's frustrating, I don't think that ruins the whole philosophy behind puzzle-based games. And if I run into a particular set-up or camera angle or area that's hard to control, I don't think it invalidates the philosophy behind direct control. It's worth experimenting with it and getting it right.
The previews you've probably been seeing are all from the start of the game. Max gets the future vision power in this episode, so he can see what's going to happen later on. You'll have to play the game to see how all that plays out, but rest assured that we know what we're doing. (We hope).
At TTG, the designers and the writers are the same people. Often, but not always, the lead designer of an episode is also the lead writer of the episode. But the designers are in charge of coming up with the story & puzzles, and the writer is in charge of coming up with the script. At TTG, even if the designer and writer isn't the same person, everybody on the design team is working together on the story & puzzle design.
...wow, suddenly all my games feel rather boring. Spore would be classified as Sci-Fi cartoon action comedy, and The Sims would be a drama/reality show, but everything else I play doesn't fit a television/entertainment genre with this concept you're presenting. I mean, what is AudioSurf? MTV back when they actually played music videos?
1. Will the recurring themes (like a background character that Sam and/or Max doesn't like end up being the main mastermind at the end, episode 1 not being part of the plan, etc.) return in Season 3?
2. Will the worthless but fun decals return?
3. I noticed that one of the villains in the trailer looks strangely like Grandpa Stinky. Is that a coincidence?
4. What other cool new features will we see in the new season?
And finally...
5. What old characters will NOT be returning?
Chuck's genre categories work great for narrative games (which makes sense, since he works primarily on the some of the best narrative games being made today!), but consequently fall short of non-narrative things more specific to games as a medium. When a game IS more about mechanics/concept than story (like AudioSurf), a mechanics-based label is probably more appropriate.
That said, maybe Audiosurf would just be a 'music game,' along the same lines as a 'music video.'
As in Zelda is action/adventure and fantasy. FF is RPG and fantasy. S&M is adventure and comedy.
The genre is important but it's not everything. I've trying playing FPS, it doesn't matter if the story is great, I'm bored after 5 minutes. And the only way I've ever been able to enjoy platformers was to play them in multiplayer modes.
I think it does matter. There is the story on one hand and the way you experience it on the other hand. Just like you can have a story that's a mystery, a comedy, horror, etc, and you can have it in the form of a novel, a graphic novel or a movie, and not everybody will enjoy all of these. My brother (the engineer) for instance only read comics, never novels/short stories.
Genre is pretty important, I can't think of a game I've ever liked that I didn't like as a story, but the way you experience it is important too, so I don't think it should just fade away. I'd hate to buy a game advertising as fantasy comedy only to find out it's a FPS or a platformer and I can't play it.
I don't expect TTG to port any games to Linux anytime soon, since I realize that too few people use Linux for it to be worth the cost. That being said, I think you're wrong in saying that Linux users "have lost interest in more casual games like graphic adventures". In my experience, Linux users account for some of the most hardcore adventurers I've come across. Personally I think Ubuntu passed Windows in user friendliness a couple of years ago, but since I enjoy playing my adventure games every now and then, I still keep Windows in a dual boot setup on my computers.
I guess it's not that extreme, but I love the idea!
I'm pretty sure, that would be extremely difficult to design, though. You'd be given the outcome first, then getting the puzzle and finally you would be looking for the items you need for that puzzle... I don't really see how that could work in terms of gameplay without getting too confusing.
Still, if done right, this might be the best and most innovative concept for an adventure game in years!
Me, either, but that's because I generally prefer narrative games. However, I have friends that have whiled away hours and hours on Tetris, loving every minute of it, and certainly not because it had a captivating story.
Actually one of the things I really enjoy(ed) about early Nintendo games was how vague the story was, meaning you got to create a lot of the narrative and world yourself while playing (which is probably why attempts to make stories out of those games are so wildly varied, like the Mario Brothers).
Really, until computers came about (and maybe RPGs in the 70s), the vast majority of games were story-less. Go, Chess, Poker, and Cricket certainly couldn't be considered 'comedy' 'drama' etc.
Which isn't to say that genre labels aren't useful for narrative games, because they are. But not all games are narrative games.
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But when you're talking about "genres" then I think it's important to make the distinction, and it goes deeper than just narrative. For instance, Team Fortress 2 and the Civilization series are both fantastic games that don't have a (developer-defined) narrative. But just calling one "multiplayer shooter" and the other "turn-based strategy" doesn't describe what makes them most awesome. You'd be doing TF2 a disservice if you didn't mention that it was really funny, and you don't capture the appeal of Civ if you don't mention you're building a civilization throughout history.
And again, I think the reason it's important is because otherwise, you tend to get locked in a certain mindset. If all RTS games all had to work exactly like Warcraft, then there never would've been a game as cool as Battlezone. If all adventure games had to be point-and-click inventory-based 2d puzzle games with item combination and dialogue trees, then there never would've been Myst, or for that matter, Grim Fandango.
I guess it'd be like if someone asked you what the movie Up was about, and you answered "it's animated" or "it's in 3D."
Linux does seem to be making more inroads in mobile computing, so it's entirely possible that things will change, and there'll be more of a market for the kind of games that Telltale makes.
Along those lines: You mentioned an XBox compatible controller can be used on a PC, how about a Mac?
P.S. I remembered another puzzle favorite of mine from a telltale game, in Rise Of The Pirate God, there's a sequence where you need to achieve a locket you can't reach, so you cause water current to shake it. but that doesn't quite do the trick, so you must make it intercept an air bubble from a nearby clam. It seemed to be an expansion on the traditional use object with object formula, adding the environmental factor of the water current made it feel almost like a minigame. i don't know if you can miss with the clam, but i feel it would add depth if you could. the idea of time sensitive environmental puzzles seems cool, but i can understand how that's almost a platforming like departure too
I don't know if a 360 controller will work with the Mac version, since it's not "officially" supported. I'm sure one of the QA guys will try it out as we get closer to the Mac release and report back.
Probably, if you start one and remember what you wanted answered. I think that most of it will be pretty obvious once you've played the episodes, though -- there's not a lot of "behind the scenes" stuff that won't be evident in the final game.
i know that psychic powers are going to be the ongoing theme but will the episodes differ in overall theme, like the penal zone is space based, will the other episodes be of different genres?
Boring answer, but the studio is laid out so that we can't actually see the actors while they're recording. We just hear the voice. It's actually kind of better that way, since you can concentrate on whether or not the voice carries what you were hoping to get out of the line, even without any visuals attached.
Not since The Vending Machine. You can still get candy on the gray market from the front of the office, but it'll cost you.
Yeah, each episode has its own genre, more or less: "The Penal Zone" feels mostly like a sci-fi B movie, and later episodes will hit on horror movies, old serials, other sci-fi, etc.
Also, if Twilight Zone is your current theme I hope I see an "It's a Good Life" puzzle somewhere in there. A Max that must always be appeased is a cool concept.
I know that when making animated movies, they generally look at that stuff in order to make the characters on screen mimic the characteristics of the voice actor at that time... or make it easier to convey the attached emotion by looking at the experssions and features of the actor.
Well, close, anyway. We were trying to get the feel of the old anthology series like Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, but the closest one I knew of was a show called Playhouse 90. How exactly that title fits into the season, you'll have to play the games to see.
Motion capture is getting more common in games, and there are plenty of studios who use it like you describe. It's still too time- space- and labor-intensive for episodic adventure games from a smaller studio, though. All our stuff is animated "by hand."
Also I'm pretty sure you made up the word "mimications."
I don't think it was intended to last past 104, actually. But it kept turning out to be useful to the story for one reason or another if Max was still in office.
There are several people in the studio who are fans of Doctor Who, so I doubt anybody would be opposed to doing a Doctor Who game if the opportunity came up. And the references from the game and the trailer are all over the place, and HAL 9000 will keep popping up in one form or another.