This isn't really a question, but I just wanted to thank Chuck for that movie list. I watched The Beast Must Die with a couple of friends last night, and we had a great time. Pretty much the perfect drinking game. I even managed to guess the wrong person. I was sure
the professor
was the werewolf. Just a perfect movie in every way.
So, yeah, thanks Chuck. You gave us an immense backlog for our weekly movie night.
Wait, I do have a question. Can we expect some sort of concept art thread in here? I loved that back on the Private Pirates Forum.
yep! (video contains spoiler of getting all grubs)
And there is also a special sentence at the 5000th, the 9000th and the 9900th if I recall correctly.
it is something like:
5000: - We are halfway done!
9900: - We are almost home!
I do not recall the other one...
I wanted to make a youtube movie too with all three sentences, but I had few problems with `recordMyDesktop.'
I really loved the music in the first 2 games, Jared Emerson-Johnson is a genius on my books, is he back for season 3? And if so, can we expect the music to be similar to the previous seasons?
Each chapter brought a different mix to the jazz vibe, my favorite was the Don Ted E. Bear and the all the ones on the last chapters of the second season.
And there is also a special sentence at the 5000th, the 9000th and the 9900th if I recall correctly.
it is something like:
5000: - We are halfway done!
9900: - We are almost home!
I do not recall the other one...
I wanted to make a youtube movie too with all three sentences, but I had few problems with `recordMyDesktop.'
Reminds me of being able to prove just how long Guybrush could hold his breath in Monkey Island 1.
Has the new gamepad compability provided any challenges in terms of hotspot placement and puzzle design? I would guess the gamepad controll system doesn't have the same "reach" as the mouse when trying to interact with far off hotspots (like a high window or a bird on the roof).
Did this new controll system limit gamedesign in any way, or did it open new possibilities?
Robert (AKA TTG Yare) put a good bit of time into making the selection stuff have as little impact on the design as possible. The way it works for season 3 is that you can select pretty much anything you see on screen; if not just by walking up to it, then by using the right stick or bumper buttons to cycle through the current selection. So it hasn't had a huge impact on the season 3 design; the trick is going to be iterating on this in future games to have it feel even more natural and incorporated with direct control.
(For the record, season 3 is the first Telltale game that I actually prefer playing with the controller than the mouse and keyboard.)
Have you guys considered allowing for keyboard customization for the PC/Mac releases? I know personally I'm an ESDF movement key kind of guy instead of the more standard WASD. And I like to move my hot keys (like inventory key or the examine key) to spots near my movement keys, if I get the option.
It'd be a low priority, honestly. It's not a technical limitation of the engine, it's more of a philosophical thing, a desire to keep the complexity at an absolute minimum. (Think of it as being kind of Apple-like: instead of trying to come up with an option for people to configure every single detail, try harder to come up with a default configuration that feels right). If you came in at Season 1 of Sam & Max, you might've noticed that the team put a good bit of design work into streamlining the interface as much as possible: it should still feel like a SCUMM game, but with a simplified one-button mouse interface and a pared-down inventory. And we try to keep all the fiddling with the settings to a minimum as well. Since the games have gotten more complex, it's possible to put in more configuration, it'd just be a matter of putting enough priority on it to put it into the UI.
Probably, but not on purpose. Adventure games are so subjective anyway -- answers that are obvious to one person can stump another person for hours -- that it's almost impossible to get it down to an exact science. But we've attempted to keep things at roughly the same difficulty as Monkey Island and as season 2 episodes. And we will make some attempt to slowly ramp up the difficulty a little throughout the season, as we have with previous series.
Can we expect some sort of concept art thread in here? I loved that back on the Private Pirates Forum.
I'd hope so. Everybody in the studio is still cranking away on the games, so it's just a question of being able to block away enough time for people to hop in here and participate.
I really loved the music in the first 2 games, Jared Emerson-Johnson is a genius on my books, is he back for season 3? And if so, can we expect the music to be similar to the previous seasons?
The Telltale Sam & Max games would be sunk without Jared's music, IMO, and he's definitely doing music for The Devil's Playhouse. And from what I've heard of from the first two episodes, he's outdone himself.
What was the hardest episode to make in past/current Sam and Max seasons, in terms of time and effort you had to put into it?
A ton of work has gone into the new season, especially the first episode, and I think it shows in the end result. Apart from that, the last episode of season 2 ended up turning into a "double episode," more or less, and took a hell (pun intended) of a lot of work from everybody.
I don't know the actual numbers, but it feels to me like 301 has more music than any other Sam & Max episode. And Jared's outdone himself, both with the compositions themselves and all the different variants on them that we kept asking him to do. As a result, we broke Jared. I hope you're happy.
That's the same way my dog went.
Do you guys have a strategy for coming up with puzzles? Do you design the levels before you come up with the puzzles?
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?
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?
They've also used some character models from the Bone games in Sam and Max and ToMI (good use of reuse, I'd think) and Homestar made a guest appearance in a Sam and Max Season 2 easter egg.
They've also used some character models from the Bone games in Sam and Max and ToMI (good use of reuse, I'd think) and Homestar made a guest appearance in a Sam and Max Season 2 easter egg.
Homestar? Where?
I've got one more question. I've noticed that Sam and Max have a few references to Monkey Island, like the rubber chicken with the pulley in the middle, red dye number 2, and I think when Threepwood says he can breathe underwater for 10 minutes, because Sam once said he could only breathe underwater for 8. Are there any other references to Monkey Island or, say, Strongbad that I haven't listed here?
Is there going to be a return of Chuck the Plant? It was awesome that he was in TOMI and he was really hard to spot in Wallace and Gromit (the amount of detail in those games was amazing btw, from the music, graphics and characters, it seriously felt like the movies. Even now it blows me away) but will he appear in Sam and Max Season 3?
Plenty (it's 9 minutes though, replaying it now so I recently heard it )
* That's the second biggest...
* Actually... can't remember more 0_0
Another question (pretty sure it wasn't asked before)
Any intention to add cross-over content this season as well, like the decals in Season 2?
There was mention of online content (a la treasure hunt), and the answer was yes. Just wondering if we get both...
I can think of two more Monkey Island references in Sam&Max:
- In Reality 2.0 Sam tells Bosco: Look behind you, a three headed internet!"
- I can't remember which episode, but Sam tries to sell Bosco a fine leather jacket.
Guybrush Threepwood has an appearance of sorts in Return to Zork.
Woah. Weird. Can you tell me more about this? I played Return to Zork as a young thing, probably a year or two before discovering LucasArts games, so I wouldn't have noticed the cameo, but now it has me intrigued. And I can't seem to find any info on Google about it.
I can think of two more Monkey Island references in Sam&Max:
- In Reality 2.0 Sam tells Bosco: Look behind you, a three headed internet!"
- I can't remember which episode, but Sam tries to sell Bosco a fine leather jacket.
I'm pretty sure the leather jacket joke goes back to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy uses the line as a failed ploy to get past castle guards. Makes more sense with Indy saying it too.
I'm pretty sure the leather jacket joke goes back to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy uses the line as a failed ploy to get past castle guards. Makes more sense with Indy saying it too.
Yes but its also something Guybrush says to Meathook in Secret of Monkey Island, likely to parody/reference Indiana Jones. Ahh the amazing cycles of references.
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?
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this or not, but would you mind telling me which 3d modeling program is used when designing the character models?
I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask this or not, but would you mind telling me which 3d modeling program is used when designing the character models?
Thank you
Maya... I think. At least when I asked in the previous super secret fan society forums (TOMI)
Woah. Weird. Can you tell me more about this? I played Return to Zork as a young thing, probably a year or two before discovering LucasArts games, so I wouldn't have noticed the cameo, but now it has me intrigued. And I can't seem to find any info on Google about it.
Sure. It's in the "Ship in a Bottle" scene. If you explore the sunken ship, you'll find a skeleton dressed like Guybrush Threepwood, named G. T. and if you look at it it will say 'Guess his 15 minutes is up"
Yes but its also something Guybrush says to Meathook in Secret of Monkey Island, likely to parody/reference Indiana Jones. Ahh the amazing cycles of references.
I think, at least the half of the things we believe are mostly reference to Monkey Island, in Monkey Island were reference to something else. Like "That the second biggest whathever I ever seen" is a reference to Get Smart.
I've got another question I just remembered wondering for about a couple of years. <--- Strange sentence...
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?
Allo allo allo. I recently picked up Season 2 for the Wii since I was consumed with an unrelenting urge to preorder Season 3 and thought that I should at least play the previous season before it came out.
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 sort of want to think of a better question, but that's all I got now.
On a higher level, trying to do a "hybrid" method would violate part of what direct control is trying to do in the first place: set it up so that you move one way, and interact with things a different way. They're different things, conceptually: you shouldn't be having to treat the cursor like a grappling hook, pulling the character from one object to the next; you should just be able to walk around.
I can only speak for myself, but in ToMI I found the exact opposite was true. Because navigating with the keyboard or click-n-drag was annoying, I'd look for an object on the edge of where I was going to "grapple" where I'd normally just (click-)walk around. Any cinematic spots could quite easily have buttons like "Return to entrance of forest" to turn around if you want to go in an "impossible" direction and return to a "navigatable" shot, which is 90%+ of the scenes in ToMI despite the counterexamples.
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 can only speak for myself, but in ToMI I found the exact opposite was true. Because navigating with the keyboard or click-n-drag was annoying, I'd look for an object on the edge of where I was going to "grapple" where I'd normally just (click-)walk around. Any cinematic spots could quite easily have buttons like "Return to entrance of forest" to turn around if you want to go in an "impossible" direction and return to a "navigatable" shot, which is 90%+ of the scenes in ToMI despite the counterexamples.
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.
Comments
whaa? I just noticed that! Wasn't it mack salmon?
or is it the tomb of sam n max?
I gotta start readin everybodys stuff before I post. I just said the same thing
So, yeah, thanks Chuck. You gave us an immense backlog for our weekly movie night.
Wait, I do have a question. Can we expect some sort of concept art thread in here? I loved that back on the Private Pirates Forum.
Agreed/Seconded.
And there is also a special sentence at the 5000th, the 9000th and the 9900th if I recall correctly.
it is something like:
5000: - We are halfway done!
9900: - We are almost home!
I do not recall the other one...
I wanted to make a youtube movie too with all three sentences, but I had few problems with `recordMyDesktop.'
Each chapter brought a different mix to the jazz vibe, my favorite was the Don Ted E. Bear and the all the ones on the last chapters of the second season.
Reminds me of being able to prove just how long Guybrush could hold his breath in Monkey Island 1.
He's definitely back for 3, check the poster.
On the idividual episode pages on the site, what was planned to go in the Extras sections?
And, because thats not a design question i'll follow up with...
Will we find out whehe max put the noose collection this season?
Loving Telltales work guys, Keep it up!
(P.S. I've got all three versions of seasons One and Two, Damn your multiple formats
This is great news... I can't wait for the soundtrack.
What was the hardest episode to make in past/current Sam and Max seasons, in terms of time and effort you had to put into it?
(For the record, season 3 is the first Telltale game that I actually prefer playing with the controller than the mouse and keyboard.)
The character you're thinking of is "Mack Salmon." To find out who or what Sammun-Mak is, you'll have to play episode 2!
It'd be a low priority, honestly. It's not a technical limitation of the engine, it's more of a philosophical thing, a desire to keep the complexity at an absolute minimum. (Think of it as being kind of Apple-like: instead of trying to come up with an option for people to configure every single detail, try harder to come up with a default configuration that feels right). If you came in at Season 1 of Sam & Max, you might've noticed that the team put a good bit of design work into streamlining the interface as much as possible: it should still feel like a SCUMM game, but with a simplified one-button mouse interface and a pared-down inventory. And we try to keep all the fiddling with the settings to a minimum as well. Since the games have gotten more complex, it's possible to put in more configuration, it'd just be a matter of putting enough priority on it to put it into the UI.
Probably, but not on purpose. Adventure games are so subjective anyway -- answers that are obvious to one person can stump another person for hours -- that it's almost impossible to get it down to an exact science. But we've attempted to keep things at roughly the same difficulty as Monkey Island and as season 2 episodes. And we will make some attempt to slowly ramp up the difficulty a little throughout the season, as we have with previous series.
I'd hope so. Everybody in the studio is still cranking away on the games, so it's just a question of being able to block away enough time for people to hop in here and participate.
The Telltale Sam & Max games would be sunk without Jared's music, IMO, and he's definitely doing music for The Devil's Playhouse. And from what I've heard of from the first two episodes, he's outdone himself.
It's still a surprise!
A ton of work has gone into the new season, especially the first episode, and I think it shows in the end result. Apart from that, the last episode of season 2 ended up turning into a "double episode," more or less, and took a hell (pun intended) of a lot of work from everybody.
That's the same way my dog went.
Do you guys have a strategy for coming up with puzzles? Do you design the levels before you come up with the puzzles?
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?
Homestar? Where?
I've got one more question. I've noticed that Sam and Max have a few references to Monkey Island, like the rubber chicken with the pulley in the middle, red dye number 2, and I think when Threepwood says he can breathe underwater for 10 minutes, because Sam once said he could only breathe underwater for 8. Are there any other references to Monkey Island or, say, Strongbad that I haven't listed here?
* That's the second biggest...
* Actually... can't remember more 0_0
Another question (pretty sure it wasn't asked before)
Any intention to add cross-over content this season as well, like the decals in Season 2?
There was mention of online content (a la treasure hunt), and the answer was yes. Just wondering if we get both...
- In Reality 2.0 Sam tells Bosco: Look behind you, a three headed internet!"
- I can't remember which episode, but Sam tries to sell Bosco a fine leather jacket.
Woah. Weird. Can you tell me more about this? I played Return to Zork as a young thing, probably a year or two before discovering LucasArts games, so I wouldn't have noticed the cameo, but now it has me intrigued. And I can't seem to find any info on Google about it.
I'm pretty sure the leather jacket joke goes back to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy uses the line as a failed ploy to get past castle guards. Makes more sense with Indy saying it too.
Yes but its also something Guybrush says to Meathook in Secret of Monkey Island, likely to parody/reference Indiana Jones. Ahh the amazing cycles of references.
Thank you
Maya... I think. At least when I asked in the previous super secret fan society forums (TOMI)
Sure. It's in the "Ship in a Bottle" scene. If you explore the sunken ship, you'll find a skeleton dressed like Guybrush Threepwood, named G. T. and if you look at it it will say 'Guess his 15 minutes is up"
I think, at least the half of the things we believe are mostly reference to Monkey Island, in Monkey Island were reference to something else. Like "That the second biggest whathever I ever seen" is a reference to Get Smart.
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?
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
I sort of want to think of a better question, but that's all I got now.
Is there any reason for why they chose Zbrush over Mudbox(which was supposed to be better integrated with Maya 2010 or 2011 (or something like that))?
I can only speak for myself, but in ToMI I found the exact opposite was true. Because navigating with the keyboard or click-n-drag was annoying, I'd look for an object on the edge of where I was going to "grapple" where I'd normally just (click-)walk around. Any cinematic spots could quite easily have buttons like "Return to entrance of forest" to turn around if you want to go in an "impossible" direction and return to a "navigatable" shot, which is 90%+ of the scenes in ToMI despite the counterexamples.
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.
BOOP Have installed CONSIDERATION FOR OTHER FORUMGOERS. Dispatched SINCERE APOLOGY. Is there anything else that must be done?
(I am seriously sorry, though.)
We'll see how it fairs the longer I play with this control system, but for now, it just feels unnatural given the genre.