Oh, I liked them for their run, but it feels like their "arc" is over. They've really served their purpose by the end of the last episode of Season 2. Maybe it's better that most people didn't like them along with Sam and Max, so that they could have a satisfying story arc that ENDS.
Agreed. I'd only be interested in having them back if there was a damn good reason for it. Otherwise, it's as you said -- their story is over. I may bear no ill will towards them, but I didn't shed a tear upon
their demise
either. It was a fitting exit.
Okay, a question for Jake: What has been the biggest challenge (and conversely, the biggest reward) you've encountered now that you wear more hats at Telltale than ever before?
I didn't like the new way of making Sam talk. I preferred the old way, with the list, but i suppose I'll get used to it.
Ah, yes. Same here. I already gave my whole speech why I prefer list over a pointers.
Good example of this is Fahrenheit, where when I was playing English I never talked like I would have wanted, while I did when playing German, because I had no idea what convo option I picked because I can barely read German .
So the question is... why did you guys vote for using this conversation system instead. What are the pro's that made you pick it over the con's?
I don't really get it. I never associated inventory combination with Monkey Island any more than with any other of the old lucasart games. Seems to me it's just part of adventure gaming as a whole, not of any specific game or franchise.
Not that i really care if there IS or not some item combination in season three, especially since the whole psychic powers thing seems more than enough to mess with and improve gameplay, and i sure agree with the "if it's not needed, why use it ?" approach, but i just don't really understand why it felt more "necessary" to you in MI than here.
I think the difference is that Sam & Max don't have the same long history with item combination puzzles as other adventure franchises do. There had only been one Sam & Max game before Telltale came along, whereas every single Monkey Island prior to ToMI had item combining. And now after two seasons (and soon enough, three) without item combination, it doesn't necessarily seem like an essential element of what makes Sam & Max games what they are anymore.
I don't really get it. I never associated inventory combination with Monkey Island any more than with any other of the old lucasart games. Seems to me it's just part of adventure gaming as a whole, not of any specific game or franchise.
That's exactly how I feel. Items combinations seems as much part of adventure games as using items in the first place. I never felt it was specific to Monkey Island any more than "you have to solve puzzles" is specific to Monkey Island.
This being said I didn't like the way combining items worked in Tales so I'm not going to miss that.
Ah, yes. Same here. I already gave my whole speech why I prefer list over a pointers.
Good example of this is Fahrenheit, where when I was playing English I never talked like I would have wanted, while I did when playing German, because I had no idea what convo option I picked because I can barely read German .
So the question is... why did you guys vote for using this conversation system instead. What are the pro's that made you pick it over the con's?
I believe the reasoning behind it was that they wanted the jokes to be more of a surprise, rather than just reading the joke in advance and waiting for Sam to say it.
I think the difference is that Sam & Max don't have the same long history with item combination puzzles as other adventure franchises do. There had only been one Sam & Max game before Telltale came along, whereas every single Monkey Island prior to ToMI had item combining. And now after two seasons (and soon enough, three) without item combination, it doesn't necessarily seem like an essential element of what makes Sam & Max games what they are anymore.
I think this is a good explanation. But, I must admit, while watching the Giant Bomb Video
I was totally, in my mind, trying to use the Gun with the Beacon =P
I believe the reasoning behind it was that they wanted the jokes to be more of a surprise, rather than just reading the joke in advance and waiting for Sam to say it.
This is a good explanation, though Sam never precisely says what's in the text you click.
Can we hope for more constant subtitling? For instance, in Season I the songs were not subtitled. In Season 2, Episode I the subtitles for some dialogue were absent at the end after the fadeout, and also at the setup wizard with the COPS.
It'd be more user-friendly for non-English-native players.
Jake Specific Question:
1. Hi Jake. I think I remember you from the TMI pre-order forum. You do web stuff right? Is there going to be any fun web integration in DPH like the treasure hunting game from TMI?
I actually haven't done web stuff in a while, so I can only pretend to answer this. There will surely be some web/game integration but it will be different than treasure hunting. I'm not sure how it works or when it will be announced, though
I really, really liked the opening credits for S&M season 2. They really set the tone, and got you geared up for the episode. I hope the cold-open-to-opening-credits style has been retained for season 3? I didn't miss it in ToMI, because that's a different type of story, but a Sam & Max episode just showing credits at the bottom of the screen without great fanfare just doesn't seem right.
If you liked that stuff about the opening credits' style, and the structure of the opening in season two, think you will be pleased with the way we handled it in the Devil's Playhouse. Nick Herman and I came in for a weekend and basically killed ourselves to churn out what is, I think, a pretty sweet title sequence. Speaking of...
Okay, a question for Jake: What has been the biggest challenge (and conversely, the biggest reward) you've encountered now that you wear more hats at Telltale than ever before?
The biggest challenge is getting everything done, since I now have my hands in a disgusting number the pies. On a few of the Monkey episodes (notably the finale) I was one of the first people on the game and then was the second to last person off it at the end. The coolest part is that I get to be involved in a gigantic amount of things here at TTG. I go to design meetings and help come up with puzzles and develop story ideas, and then I go back to my desk and make artwork and effects and cutscene type things on the games, and I still occasionally get to design a piece of packaging or something. It's probably too much work, but it's all very rewarding and is the exact type of stuff I've always wanted to do. So hey!
3 is Joe Pinney (Tales of MI: Lair of the Leviathan, W&G: The Last Resort) design, and Mike Stemmle (Tales of MI: Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood, Sam & Max Hit the Road) writing
4 is basically the reverse of that, from what I hear -- Mike designing, Joe writing
Actually, it's a little more (or less?) complicated than that: Joe is doing puzzle design for both 3 & 4, and Mike is writing the script for both. They're swapping off on the lead designer role, with Joe heading 3 and Mike in charge of 4.
What influenced you to change the overall FEEL of The Street? I love how grimy it looks!
To make it closer to the feel of the comics, as avistew said, and also we were going for a "70s New York" feel instead of the more brightly-lit cartoony feel of seasons 1 and 2. One of the goals was to make the environments a little more detailed, so it's like Sam & Max exist in the real world instead of some cartoon reality.
The control scheme - Is it similar to ToMI, straight-up point'n'click like previous seasons, or something else? For the record, I really liked the controls in ToMI.
So you're the one!
Yes, on PC and Mac,the controls are almost identical to Tales of Monkey Island. On the PS3 (and if you plug in an Xbox360-compatible gamepad on the PC), there's a new control system designed specifically for the controller.
Speaking of, will there be any more dialogue-puzzles featuring direct control of Max's big mouth? I've really enjoyed the two (I think? Culture Shock and Ice Station Santa? Missing anything?) occasions where we've been able to switch back and forth between them in dialogue.
I liked those a lot, too, but there's not as much room for them in the new season. Since you can switch control to Max anywhere in the game, it seemed weird to switch in dialogues as well. Don't worry that the idea is completely gone, though -- we'll be playing around with the systems throughout the season, and you will have a chance to make Max talk.
And finally, with all the new wacky stuff going on, will there still be a driving mini-game in every episode?
No, there are no driving minigames this season. They were fun to come up with for season two, but they always felt like minigames instead of being integrated fully into the rest of the game. We decided pretty early on not to do the driving, and as we focused on psychic powers and city map and all the other stuff that you end up doing in the game, it turned out that the new season doesn't really need a separate driving mode. The DeSoto is still a big part of Sam & Max, though, almost a character.
I didn't like the new way of making Sam talk. I preferred the old way, with the list, but i suppose I'll get used to it. Did you originally consider just keeping the old way for PC and changing it for PS3, or was it one way the whole way?
The dialogue went through a lot of revisions over the course of developing the first episode, but we'd always intended to have it work the same on PC/Mac as it did on PS3, and we always intended to use short topics instead of full dialogue lines.
Part of that was from the Chapman brothers, actually: when we started Strong Bad, they really wanted to use icon-based dialogues. The reason is that if you read the sentence and then hear the main character deliver the sentence, it slows down the dialogue and makes it feel like you're hearing everything twice (even if it's slightly changed from the text).
It's also fitting in with the license: like the inventory combination, text-based dialogues seem to me like a fundamental part of the Monkey Island series, one of the ways those games tell jokes. In Hit the Road, you just got icons of the topics you could ask about. It made it less predictable what Sam & Max were going to say, it made the dialogues flow differently, and it made it feel a little bit more like detective work: you were asking people about a set of topics, instead of just launching into random conversations.
One of the things we noticed about Strong Bad dialogues is that some of the icons could be hard to decipher on their own, so we went with short topic phrases. As the season goes on, there will be some occasions where you want to decide exactly what to say, and in those cases we'll have an interface that's more like the previous Sam & Max seasons and Monkey Island.
Another new thing, while I'm talking (a lot) about the dialogue system: the dialogue interface now shows you which topics still have new stuff left to hear, and which ones you've "exhausted" and will repeat.
Well, I thought it was a pretty perfect combination of the benefits of direct control - freedom in camera angles, and to do stuff like having the entire ground in one location be a hotspot - and still keeping the controls pretty much mouse-centric. I'm used to having one hand free when playing adventure games.
...
Get your mind out of the gutter! I've just developed a habit of assuming a rather relaxed, leaned back posture when playing those games, maybe eating or drinking something while I'm playing. That's easier when you're not hunched over the keyboard.
Also,
the dialogue interface now shows you which topics still have new stuff left to hear, and which ones you've "exhausted" and will repeat.
THIS. YES. Thank you.
ETA:
Re: The driving minigames, probably a good thing. While they were fun enough, I felt like I was well done with them at the end of the season, and you didn't really miss it in Chariots of the Dogs. I do still think the Paperboy-style game in Raving Dead was brilliant, though.
I actually haven't done web stuff in a while, so I can only pretend to answer this. There will surely be some web/game integration but it will be different than treasure hunting. I'm not sure how it works or when it will be announced, though
Oooh. You're profile says you're still the web guru. So what is it that you do now?
Another new thing, while I'm talking (a lot) about the dialogue system: the dialogue interface now shows you which topics still have new stuff left to hear, and which ones you've "exhausted" and will repeat.
I was totally going to ask you about that before I read this last bit. I couldn't be happier with the answer.
You mentioned stuff like Plan 9 from Outer Space and the Twilight Zone as being an influence on this series. Any other movies or any particular Twilight Zone episodes that I could watch to get in the mood for some freelance policing?
In addition to Plan 9 and The Twilight Zone, here's a list of stuff that influenced the season overall and episode one in particular:
"Night Gallery", "The Outer Limits", The Beast Must Die!, Zardoz, Logan's Run, "Space: 1999", "Star Trek" (the original series), The Flash comics, Scanners, The Fury, Carrie, Flash Gordon (the movie), Murder on the Orient Express, Superman, The Shining, The Manitou, "Battlestar Galactica" (the original series), Pom Poko, "Challenge of the Superfriends", "UFO" (the TV series), The Third Man, Gangs of New York, The Mummy, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Warriors, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Plus more I'm sure I'm forgetting. It's up to you guys to figure out what came from where.
my question is, after what happened to the Soda Poppers in Season 2, do you know if they will come back? And if not, what Soda Popper-like characters would pop up over the course of this series?
Yes, I do know if they will come back.
And I can't think of what you mean by "Soda Popper-like," whether you mean villains or child stars or really really annoying characters. I can promise that we'll have two of those three things.
What is Telltale's account on episodic dramatic stories? Is this something Telltale like to/will try in the future? And would there be enough manpower to make such a game without abandoning your other franchises?
I think Telltale's always been open to doing a dramatic series; the trick is finding the right one. It's very likely that you'll see a non-comedy (intentionally) series at some point in the future. (The studio already makes CSI games, which depending on your attitude towards grisly murder, aren't all that funny). It wouldn't mean "abandoning" a franchise, on its own -- there are only so many games the studio can make at once, so it's not as if we can have series based on all the active licenses happening at the same time, anyway.
I noticed you said earlier, that this season will story heavy, what made you change your mind from going to case by case and then wrapping it up from the last few episodes, to having every episode more connected?
Dan, Kevin, and Dave made me change my mind. But it was mostly based on the response we got from the end of season 2 -- people commented a lot that they loved how those two episodes flowed right into each other -- and from the overall structure of Tales of Monkey Island.
Around how many items would we be able to fill our inventory with during a single episode? Cuz in S&M season 1 it was like 4-5, and in ToMI it was more like 14-15.
It's going to vary from episode to episode, but it will be between those two -- definitely less than Monkey Island. Again, the general idea is that there's a little less focus on inventory and more focus on psychic powers. Instead of having a bunch of single-purpose items where "you have to read the designer's mind" to figure out what the use of it is, you've got psychic powers and we tell you exactly how they're supposed to work. It's the player's job to figure out how to use the powers to solve a problem.
Will there be any BIGFOOTS?! S&M must have bigfoots!
MAYBE!? Sam & Max had kind of a falling out with the Bigfoots after Hit the Road, and Max in particular refused to ever work with them again. We'll have to see if we can change their minds.
2) The animation student/hobbyist in me is curious: As far as you can answer, how much of what's involved in creating an animated short or feature film translates into how you create games? Especially now that you're able to use a more cinematic approach?
Animated shorts have a lot more planning. Someone generally storyboards the whole thing out before hand, then everything gets blocked in 3d, and then the animator animates that shot to final. Time doesn't always allow for that process games. For cutscenes, the animators usually work with whichever chore guy is setting up the scene to figure out cameras and character positions and then create a rough layout, which gets approved, and then we move on to final animation.
I really, really liked the opening credits for S&M season 2. They really set the tone, and got you geared up for the episode. I hope the cold-open-to-opening-credits style has been retained for season 3? I didn't miss it in ToMI, because that's a different type of story, but a Sam & Max episode just showing credits at the bottom of the screen without great fanfare just doesn't seem right.
You should be happy with the credits for season 3. Jake always does a good job with those sequences, to the point that it's kind of boring now, but he and Nick outdid themselves with the one for the new season.
So you've stated that story and design come first. Then puzzles. When you finally get to puzzles to you keep in mind technical limitations or do you design the puzzles and then see how much you're going to have to expand the engine?
It's a little of both. With any game engine -- whether it's designed for adventure games or RTS games or first-person shooters -- there are some things it does really well and other things you have to account for. Telltale's games handle cinematic sequences better than most FPS engines, and their engines handle physics-based and movement-oriented puzzles better than ours.
So the rough sequence is: come up with a story moment, think of a way to turn that story moment into an obstacle that the player has to solve, and then figure out how the player would solve it. Sometimes that turns into a "minigame" or a "set piece" or a special game mode, like for instance the opening puzzle of Wallace & Gromit episode 2. When that happens, we talk to the content programmers and chore artists about how we'd go about implementing that sequence. Then we decide if it's a ton of work without adding that much coolness to the game or even more importantly, overwhelming the story. If it is, we'll either simplify it or find some other way to get the story moment across.
Did you mean "episodes" instead of "seasons?" There are some cool moments that are off the critical path of the game; we usually cover them with the "Did you try?" walkthroughs we release after the game. On the PS3, each episode will have a set of trophies for doing different things. (Before anyone asks, the trophies aren't in the PC/Mac versions). And the chore guys crammed a lot weird stuff into Max mode; I still haven't seen all of it.
I don't really get it. I never associated inventory combination with Monkey Island any more than with any other of the old lucasart games. Seems to me it's just part of adventure gaming as a whole, not of any specific game or franchise.
Everybody's going to have his own interpretation of the games and what's most memorable, of course, but to me the inventory combination always seemed uniquely Monkey Island. I remember the other games as having a different main focus: in Hit the Road, it was minigames and using Max; in Day of the Tentacle, it was the chrono-johns; etc. I'd thought it was inherent to adventure games before I played (and then worked on) the first two seasons of Sam & Max, which made it clear that they worked fine without it, and it was in fact kind of silly trying to find a way to shoehorn it into a game that didn't need it. But a Monkey Island game that doesn't have you making a compass out of a cork, or filling a mug up with grog, just seems weird to me.
Will there be special secret cameos by any voice actors?
Not secret, but over the years we've built up an amazing cast of voice actors, and we're using most of them for multiple parts. There was going to be a secret cameo in the first episode of the new season, but I'll just go ahead and spoil it for you: it turns out that I am a very lousy voice actor. Luckily Jared was able to come in and re-record the voice at the last minute.
Can we hope for more constant subtitling? For instance, in Season I the songs were not subtitled. In Season 2, Episode I the subtitles for some dialogue were absent at the end after the fadeout, and also at the setup wizard with the COPS.
The song sequences are extremely difficult to subtitle, since the timing in a song is so much different from in normal dialogue. In season 2, they were only included because the song was integral to the plot
and had so much Spanish in it
.
Our QA team is always keeping an eye out for subtitle issues; if you run into something please report it on the support forum and we'll see if we can fix it.
Nojh Livic in total. Its an anagram of John Civil, who was the author of a book, the title of which I've forgotten, that was on the book shelf next the computer I was using when I first signed onto a Star Wars BBS RPG. They asked for a character name and my friend, who's parents owned the computer, told me that Star Wars names were made by taking real names and re-arranging the letters. I wasn't much of a Star Wars fan at the time, just the idea of controlling giant battleships in space was really cool. The name kinda stuck for the last decade or so...
*Wikis Solomon Grundy* Huh. I knew he was a DC villain. Totally didn't know he was a zombie. Cool.
Did you mean "episodes" instead of "seasons?" There are some cool moments that are off the critical path of the game; we usually cover them with the "Did you try?" walkthroughs we release after the game. On the PS3, each episode will have a set of trophies for doing different things. (Before anyone asks, the trophies aren't in the PC/Mac versions). And the chore guys crammed a lot weird stuff into Max mode; I still haven't seen all of it.
Ahh. I totally didn't know about the "Did you try?" stuff. Serves me right for not keeping up with the forums. Is there anybody who is collecting the Did you try stuff somewhere nicely archived? I mean now I'm going to go Google diving into the forums for 'em all of course but if someone has already done the work...
Ahh. I totally didn't know about the "Did you try?" stuff. Serves me right for not keeping up with the forums. Is there anybody who is collecting the Did you try stuff somewhere nicely archived? I mean now I'm going to go Google diving into the forums for 'em all of course but if someone has already done the work...
Those are in the Games's Page. If you click in a episode, you will see the option for the "Did you try?"
For any and all of the Telltale guys: What was your first exposure to Sam & Max? The comic? Hit the Road? Being called into the conference room and informed that you'd be making a game about a dog-and-lagomorph investigative team?
Regarding the graphical advancements, the first thing I noticed was that the textures and shading have really been kicked up a notch. It's amazing how much that sort of thing adds to the depth and... realness of the characters and world. Just look at Sam's suit! It's all... cloth-like.
Why Sam and Max for the PS3? Was it a platform you wanted to work on, and Sam and Max was the next on the list? Or did you think that what you wanted to do with Sam and Max required the bump up in terms of hardware tech? Why not Monkey Island?
I'm not sure if any of that is your guys' decision at all, but it's something I'd like to know.
There was going to be a secret cameo in the first episode of the new season, but I'll just go ahead and spoil it for you: it turns out that I am a very lousy voice actor. Luckily Jared was able to come in and re-record the voice at the last minute.
Wow, I would like to know more about this. What kind of character was it? When I listen to your voice on the GiantBomb quicklook, I can imagine you doing a voice for a character like the crazy rat-scientist who takes care of Max's regeneration in Bad Day on the Moon.
Another question; you've written for quite a lot of games by now, and I know from your blog that you're very interested in how movies and tv-shows are written. Have you ever considered doing some writing for anything other than videogames? What if Steve Purcell gave you the chance to work on another animated Sam & Max series, or even a movie?
Oh, and please make Steve finish another Sam & Max comic. I know he's a busy man, but there are few things sweeter in life than a brand new Sam & Max comic.
Wow, I would like to know more about this. What kind of character was it? When I listen to your voice on the GiantBomb quicklook, I can imagine you doing a voice for a character like the crazy rat-scientist who takes care of Max's regeneration in Bad Day on the Moon.
Also, just a suggestion, but I'd love to hear Chuck's apparently bad voice take as an extra on the Season Three DVD. With optional Chuck commentary! :cool:
Also, just a suggestion, but I'd love to hear Chuck's apparently bad voice take as an extra on the Season Three DVD. With optional Chuck commentary! :cool:
On the DVD? That's exactly what this pre-order forum is for!
On the DVD? That's exactly what this pre-order forum is for!
Oh, is it?
I want pre-order only voice acting bloopers! Design documents! Office pranks! A liive webcam feed! And I want to know what Jake had for lunch or something! Also, get me ice cream! And a pony!
Sam and max showed machinima potential with Sam And Max Nearly Save Xmas, it was an gaming episode perfectly turned into a watchable machinima. In fact, I'm not too proud to admit that I regularly watch the cutscenes, and pretend like they're a television sitcom, any chance of seeing another machinima episode? or god forbid, a little text to fill in the blanks between cutscenes on the dvd? Some days i'm just too tired to actually play the game. Have you guys thought about taking the whole sitcom gaming thing to the next level, actually let us watch sam and max like a sitcom if we don't feel like playing?
Hey Chuck, did you take a good look at Psychonauts when designing Max's powers?
I'm saying this because Raz' psychic powers always felt very "adventuregames-like" to me. They gave the gameplay a unique and fresh twist I really liked, something far from the usual interaction.
I've been reading a lot recently about how TTG originally wanted to carry on production of the cancelled "Freelance Police". My question is, of all the Sam & Max games you've done, have you come close to the original plot of this mysterious game? Or will you ever consider maybe even having a crack at it now you're on good terms with LucasArts?
Cheers for all the great work, it is all very muchly appreciated!!
I'm not sure if I can ask this here, considering it's the design team Q&A. I'm awfully curious to know what a Telltale animator's expected output is within a daily and weekly basis? With the added enhancements that have been made to the facial rigs and possible poly-count on the head, does this get taken into account for expected output?
I'm unfamiliar of how the TTG cinematic engine works, but does everything still get animated in Maya (or similar 3d program) and inputted into the engine? What, if any, are the limitations to this system?
Also, do the Sam & Max cartoons influence the style of animation within the games? I know we're talking 2d vs. 3d but what are the choices in regards to personality through poses?
I've probably asked one too many questions, but I'm an avid animation student and would love to learn more about TTG's process.
I have another question, but maybe I shouldn't ask this to the design team:
When voicing the narrator, where did Andrew Chaikin find the inspiration for the voice?
Because I could swear it was an imitation of Orson Welles' voice over for the Tales of Mystery and Imagination; Edgar Allen Poe album by The Alan Parsons Project.
Have you got any idea if this was an inspration for him?
It's probably in reference to Max's psychic powers. The idea is that a lot of adventure games work by having you collect a ton of stuff in your inventory and then making you figure out what each item's specific purpose is. In the new season, we're putting more emphasis on Max's powers -- there are fewer of them, but you know exactly how they work, and you can use them in multiple different ways.
One example is Max's future vision power. He can use it on most characters and some objects to get a short scene showing their future. The idea is how does it change traditional adventure game puzzles if you get the solution first, and then have to work backwards from that?
At just about any point of the game, you can hit a button and switch control from Sam to Max (and vice versa). In Max mode, you enter Max's mind and can look around through his eyes. Max mode is where you use Max's psychic powers. Sam mode works pretty much like it always has -- you can walk around, look at things, add stuff to your inventory, start dialogues, etc.
This sounds excellent. One major problem with many of today's adventures is that puzzles basically serve as roadblocks between parts of the story, but have no storytelling purpose of their own. Here's your broken motorcycle - fix it so you can advance to the next cutscene. Creative incorporation of puzzles (and violence, as it were) into the flow of the story as well as different puzzle mechanics is where it's at. The previous seasons already had good, uncommon puzzles, and I'm really looking forward to this.
I can't tell you all the characters that'll show up, or it'd ruin the surprises later on. I will say that some of the characters from previous seasons will be back, and several won't. Some of the characters' stories were pretty much finished in season 2, so there's not much point bringing them back.
I, for one, am glad that we are free from the yoke of our soda-popping overlords.
Comments
Agreed. I'd only be interested in having them back if there was a damn good reason for it. Otherwise, it's as you said -- their story is over. I may bear no ill will towards them, but I didn't shed a tear upon
Okay, a question for Jake: What has been the biggest challenge (and conversely, the biggest reward) you've encountered now that you wear more hats at Telltale than ever before?
Good example of this is Fahrenheit, where when I was playing English I never talked like I would have wanted, while I did when playing German, because I had no idea what convo option I picked because I can barely read German
So the question is... why did you guys vote for using this conversation system instead. What are the pro's that made you pick it over the con's?
I think the difference is that Sam & Max don't have the same long history with item combination puzzles as other adventure franchises do. There had only been one Sam & Max game before Telltale came along, whereas every single Monkey Island prior to ToMI had item combining. And now after two seasons (and soon enough, three) without item combination, it doesn't necessarily seem like an essential element of what makes Sam & Max games what they are anymore.
That's exactly how I feel. Items combinations seems as much part of adventure games as using items in the first place. I never felt it was specific to Monkey Island any more than "you have to solve puzzles" is specific to Monkey Island.
This being said I didn't like the way combining items worked in Tales so I'm not going to miss that.
I believe the reasoning behind it was that they wanted the jokes to be more of a surprise, rather than just reading the joke in advance and waiting for Sam to say it.
I think this is a good explanation. But, I must admit, while watching the Giant Bomb Video
This is a good explanation, though Sam never precisely says what's in the text you click.
It'd be more user-friendly for non-English-native players.
You THINK you remember Jake?! Jake is unforgettable! And I bet he... wait, who?:D
If you liked that stuff about the opening credits' style, and the structure of the opening in season two, think you will be pleased with the way we handled it in the Devil's Playhouse. Nick Herman and I came in for a weekend and basically killed ourselves to churn out what is, I think, a pretty sweet title sequence. Speaking of...
The biggest challenge is getting everything done, since I now have my hands in a disgusting number the pies. On a few of the Monkey episodes (notably the finale) I was one of the first people on the game and then was the second to last person off it at the end. The coolest part is that I get to be involved in a gigantic amount of things here at TTG. I go to design meetings and help come up with puzzles and develop story ideas, and then I go back to my desk and make artwork and effects and cutscene type things on the games, and I still occasionally get to design a piece of packaging or something. It's probably too much work, but it's all very rewarding and is the exact type of stuff I've always wanted to do. So hey!
To make it closer to the feel of the comics, as avistew said, and also we were going for a "70s New York" feel instead of the more brightly-lit cartoony feel of seasons 1 and 2. One of the goals was to make the environments a little more detailed, so it's like Sam & Max exist in the real world instead of some cartoon reality.
So you're the one!
Yes, on PC and Mac,the controls are almost identical to Tales of Monkey Island. On the PS3 (and if you plug in an Xbox360-compatible gamepad on the PC), there's a new control system designed specifically for the controller.
I liked those a lot, too, but there's not as much room for them in the new season. Since you can switch control to Max anywhere in the game, it seemed weird to switch in dialogues as well. Don't worry that the idea is completely gone, though -- we'll be playing around with the systems throughout the season, and you will have a chance to make Max talk.
No, there are no driving minigames this season. They were fun to come up with for season two, but they always felt like minigames instead of being integrated fully into the rest of the game. We decided pretty early on not to do the driving, and as we focused on psychic powers and city map and all the other stuff that you end up doing in the game, it turned out that the new season doesn't really need a separate driving mode. The DeSoto is still a big part of Sam & Max, though, almost a character.
The dialogue went through a lot of revisions over the course of developing the first episode, but we'd always intended to have it work the same on PC/Mac as it did on PS3, and we always intended to use short topics instead of full dialogue lines.
Part of that was from the Chapman brothers, actually: when we started Strong Bad, they really wanted to use icon-based dialogues. The reason is that if you read the sentence and then hear the main character deliver the sentence, it slows down the dialogue and makes it feel like you're hearing everything twice (even if it's slightly changed from the text).
It's also fitting in with the license: like the inventory combination, text-based dialogues seem to me like a fundamental part of the Monkey Island series, one of the ways those games tell jokes. In Hit the Road, you just got icons of the topics you could ask about. It made it less predictable what Sam & Max were going to say, it made the dialogues flow differently, and it made it feel a little bit more like detective work: you were asking people about a set of topics, instead of just launching into random conversations.
One of the things we noticed about Strong Bad dialogues is that some of the icons could be hard to decipher on their own, so we went with short topic phrases. As the season goes on, there will be some occasions where you want to decide exactly what to say, and in those cases we'll have an interface that's more like the previous Sam & Max seasons and Monkey Island.
Another new thing, while I'm talking (a lot) about the dialogue system: the dialogue interface now shows you which topics still have new stuff left to hear, and which ones you've "exhausted" and will repeat.
Well, I thought it was a pretty perfect combination of the benefits of direct control - freedom in camera angles, and to do stuff like having the entire ground in one location be a hotspot - and still keeping the controls pretty much mouse-centric. I'm used to having one hand free when playing adventure games.
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Get your mind out of the gutter! I've just developed a habit of assuming a rather relaxed, leaned back posture when playing those games, maybe eating or drinking something while I'm playing. That's easier when you're not hunched over the keyboard.
Also, THIS. YES. Thank you.
ETA:
Re: The driving minigames, probably a good thing. While they were fun enough, I felt like I was well done with them at the end of the season, and you didn't really miss it in Chariots of the Dogs. I do still think the Paperboy-style game in Raving Dead was brilliant, though.
E(further)TA:
@Jake: Yay!
I was totally going to ask you about that before I read this last bit. I couldn't be happier with the answer.
"Night Gallery", "The Outer Limits", The Beast Must Die!, Zardoz, Logan's Run, "Space: 1999", "Star Trek" (the original series), The Flash comics, Scanners, The Fury, Carrie, Flash Gordon (the movie), Murder on the Orient Express, Superman, The Shining, The Manitou, "Battlestar Galactica" (the original series), Pom Poko, "Challenge of the Superfriends", "UFO" (the TV series), The Third Man, Gangs of New York, The Mummy, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Warriors, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Plus more I'm sure I'm forgetting. It's up to you guys to figure out what came from where.
Yes, I do know if they will come back.
And I can't think of what you mean by "Soda Popper-like," whether you mean villains or child stars or really really annoying characters. I can promise that we'll have two of those three things.
I think Telltale's always been open to doing a dramatic series; the trick is finding the right one. It's very likely that you'll see a non-comedy (intentionally) series at some point in the future. (The studio already makes CSI games, which depending on your attitude towards grisly murder, aren't all that funny). It wouldn't mean "abandoning" a franchise, on its own -- there are only so many games the studio can make at once, so it's not as if we can have series based on all the active licenses happening at the same time, anyway.
Dan, Kevin, and Dave made me change my mind. But it was mostly based on the response we got from the end of season 2 -- people commented a lot that they loved how those two episodes flowed right into each other -- and from the overall structure of Tales of Monkey Island.
It's going to vary from episode to episode, but it will be between those two -- definitely less than Monkey Island. Again, the general idea is that there's a little less focus on inventory and more focus on psychic powers. Instead of having a bunch of single-purpose items where "you have to read the designer's mind" to figure out what the use of it is, you've got psychic powers and we tell you exactly how they're supposed to work. It's the player's job to figure out how to use the powers to solve a problem.
No, the episodes are going to be roughly the same length as season 2's earlier episodes.
MAYBE!? Sam & Max had kind of a falling out with the Bigfoots after Hit the Road, and Max in particular refused to ever work with them again. We'll have to see if we can change their minds.
Yes. How long he stays President, you'll have to play the games to find out.
He will show up, in one form or another.
Animated shorts have a lot more planning. Someone generally storyboards the whole thing out before hand, then everything gets blocked in 3d, and then the animator animates that shot to final. Time doesn't always allow for that process games. For cutscenes, the animators usually work with whichever chore guy is setting up the scene to figure out cameras and character positions and then create a rough layout, which gets approved, and then we move on to final animation.
was it tricky getting Sam's pockets to work like you wanted them too? with him putting his hands in them and everything.
That's kind of played-out at this point, don't you think? We'll have to see if we can sneak something in somewhere.
It's a little of both. With any game engine -- whether it's designed for adventure games or RTS games or first-person shooters -- there are some things it does really well and other things you have to account for. Telltale's games handle cinematic sequences better than most FPS engines, and their engines handle physics-based and movement-oriented puzzles better than ours.
So the rough sequence is: come up with a story moment, think of a way to turn that story moment into an obstacle that the player has to solve, and then figure out how the player would solve it. Sometimes that turns into a "minigame" or a "set piece" or a special game mode, like for instance the opening puzzle of Wallace & Gromit episode 2. When that happens, we talk to the content programmers and chore artists about how we'd go about implementing that sequence. Then we decide if it's a ton of work without adding that much coolness to the game or even more importantly, overwhelming the story. If it is, we'll either simplify it or find some other way to get the story moment across.
Did you mean "episodes" instead of "seasons?" There are some cool moments that are off the critical path of the game; we usually cover them with the "Did you try?" walkthroughs we release after the game. On the PS3, each episode will have a set of trophies for doing different things. (Before anyone asks, the trophies aren't in the PC/Mac versions). And the chore guys crammed a lot weird stuff into Max mode; I still haven't seen all of it.
I like Solomon Grundy. Nojh?
Everybody's going to have his own interpretation of the games and what's most memorable, of course, but to me the inventory combination always seemed uniquely Monkey Island. I remember the other games as having a different main focus: in Hit the Road, it was minigames and using Max; in Day of the Tentacle, it was the chrono-johns; etc. I'd thought it was inherent to adventure games before I played (and then worked on) the first two seasons of Sam & Max, which made it clear that they worked fine without it, and it was in fact kind of silly trying to find a way to shoehorn it into a game that didn't need it. But a Monkey Island game that doesn't have you making a compass out of a cork, or filling a mug up with grog, just seems weird to me.
Not secret, but over the years we've built up an amazing cast of voice actors, and we're using most of them for multiple parts. There was going to be a secret cameo in the first episode of the new season, but I'll just go ahead and spoil it for you: it turns out that I am a very lousy voice actor. Luckily Jared was able to come in and re-record the voice at the last minute.
The song sequences are extremely difficult to subtitle, since the timing in a song is so much different from in normal dialogue. In season 2, they were only included because the song was integral to the plot
Our QA team is always keeping an eye out for subtitle issues; if you run into something please report it on the support forum and we'll see if we can fix it.
Why the Ps3? Was it something new you wanted telltalegames to try out and get a fan base with sony?
Nojh Livic in total. Its an anagram of John Civil, who was the author of a book, the title of which I've forgotten, that was on the book shelf next the computer I was using when I first signed onto a Star Wars BBS RPG. They asked for a character name and my friend, who's parents owned the computer, told me that Star Wars names were made by taking real names and re-arranging the letters. I wasn't much of a Star Wars fan at the time, just the idea of controlling giant battleships in space was really cool. The name kinda stuck for the last decade or so...
*Wikis Solomon Grundy* Huh. I knew he was a DC villain. Totally didn't know he was a zombie. Cool.
Ahh. I totally didn't know about the "Did you try?" stuff. Serves me right for not keeping up with the forums. Is there anybody who is collecting the Did you try stuff somewhere nicely archived? I mean now I'm going to go Google diving into the forums for 'em all of course but if someone has already done the work...
Those are in the Games's Page. If you click in a episode, you will see the option for the "Did you try?"
Awesome! Thanks. My free time just shrunk even further!
Regarding the graphical advancements, the first thing I noticed was that the textures and shading have really been kicked up a notch. It's amazing how much that sort of thing adds to the depth and... realness of the characters and world. Just look at Sam's suit! It's all... cloth-like.
I'm not sure if any of that is your guys' decision at all, but it's something I'd like to know.
Wow, I would like to know more about this. What kind of character was it? When I listen to your voice on the GiantBomb quicklook, I can imagine you doing a voice for a character like the crazy rat-scientist who takes care of Max's regeneration in Bad Day on the Moon.
Another question; you've written for quite a lot of games by now, and I know from your blog that you're very interested in how movies and tv-shows are written. Have you ever considered doing some writing for anything other than videogames? What if Steve Purcell gave you the chance to work on another animated Sam & Max series, or even a movie?
Oh, and please make Steve finish another Sam & Max comic. I know he's a busy man, but there are few things sweeter in life than a brand new Sam & Max comic.
On the DVD? That's exactly what this pre-order forum is for!
I want pre-order only voice acting bloopers! Design documents! Office pranks! A liive webcam feed! And I want to know what Jake had for lunch or something! Also, get me ice cream! And a pony!
Cuz I know a lot of people didn't really like Sybil for example...
Oh! Oh! And will there be any Guybrush remarks?
I'm saying this because Raz' psychic powers always felt very "adventuregames-like" to me. They gave the gameplay a unique and fresh twist I really liked, something far from the usual interaction.
Cheers for all the great work, it is all very muchly appreciated!!
I'm unfamiliar of how the TTG cinematic engine works, but does everything still get animated in Maya (or similar 3d program) and inputted into the engine? What, if any, are the limitations to this system?
Also, do the Sam & Max cartoons influence the style of animation within the games? I know we're talking 2d vs. 3d but what are the choices in regards to personality through poses?
I've probably asked one too many questions, but I'm an avid animation student and would love to learn more about TTG's process.
Thanks!
When voicing the narrator, where did Andrew Chaikin find the inspiration for the voice?
Because I could swear it was an imitation of Orson Welles' voice over for the Tales of Mystery and Imagination; Edgar Allen Poe album by The Alan Parsons Project.
Have you got any idea if this was an inspration for him?
This is a clip from the Orson Welles voice over.
The likeness is uncanny don't you think?
This sounds excellent. One major problem with many of today's adventures is that puzzles basically serve as roadblocks between parts of the story, but have no storytelling purpose of their own. Here's your broken motorcycle - fix it so you can advance to the next cutscene. Creative incorporation of puzzles (and violence, as it were) into the flow of the story as well as different puzzle mechanics is where it's at. The previous seasons already had good, uncommon puzzles, and I'm really looking forward to this.
I, for one, am glad that we are free from the yoke of our soda-popping overlords.