Little Bits and Pieces
TelltaleGames
Former Telltale Staff
In this town, they're always working on the bridges. If you want job security around the Bay Area, bridge construction is definitely the way to go, and the project to be on at the moment is the Bay Bridge Eastern Span. For those unfortunate enough to be living anywhere else on the planet, I'll mention that the Bay Bridge is a massive artery connecting Oakland and San Francisco, and that plans have been afoot to replace its eastern span ever since it fell slightly apart during that earthquake back in 1989.
From the existing span, which you can still drive on, you can watch the new one going up, one big cement stick at a time like a giant erector set. It's the kind of thing where if you pass it every day you probably wouldn't notice the progress at all, because each step requires such a tremendous amount of effort and coordination, but over time things seem gradually to be happening. Work is expected to continue for about another five or six years, provided nothing else goes wrong.
A lot of game projects are like this. The scanty initial planning process on Blades of Stenchtar IV is followed by years of gradual progress from milestone to milestone as you watch the structure get pieced together one giant cement stick at a time. Not so the Bone series - with Bone we do the design, and then there's a period of time where people are off in corners creating art and writing scripts, and it doesn't seem like anything much is happening for a while. But then one day, all the little pieces abruptly fall into place, and suddenly there's a game where there wasn't one just a week ago, as though elves came in and built it while you were sleeping. InstaGame, just add water.
OK, maybe I exaggerate just a touch. But hey, that's my job.
Little bits and pieces often combine magically to make a bigger picture, so with that in mind, here are some of the bits and pieces that have been happening around the office lately:
From the existing span, which you can still drive on, you can watch the new one going up, one big cement stick at a time like a giant erector set. It's the kind of thing where if you pass it every day you probably wouldn't notice the progress at all, because each step requires such a tremendous amount of effort and coordination, but over time things seem gradually to be happening. Work is expected to continue for about another five or six years, provided nothing else goes wrong.
A lot of game projects are like this. The scanty initial planning process on Blades of Stenchtar IV is followed by years of gradual progress from milestone to milestone as you watch the structure get pieced together one giant cement stick at a time. Not so the Bone series - with Bone we do the design, and then there's a period of time where people are off in corners creating art and writing scripts, and it doesn't seem like anything much is happening for a while. But then one day, all the little pieces abruptly fall into place, and suddenly there's a game where there wasn't one just a week ago, as though elves came in and built it while you were sleeping. InstaGame, just add water.
OK, maybe I exaggerate just a touch. But hey, that's my job.
Little bits and pieces often combine magically to make a bigger picture, so with that in mind, here are some of the bits and pieces that have been happening around the office lately:
- Somebody broke the coffee pot. It is unclear whether this was an accidental or deliberate act, offensive or defensive, undertaken by person or persons or hideous crawling beast spawned in the primordial soup of leftover coffee. But it's definitely broken, alleviating any coffee issues we may have had.
- Another expired power supply has appeared on the Tower of Power next to my desk. Not my own, this time - word has it that it came out of Randy Tudor's machine. Randy works his machine pretty hard, so I am less concerned with the fact that yet another power supply has gone belly up on us than I am with the fact that my desk has apparently become accepted as a sort of elephant graveyard/depository for same. How long can it be before I am unable to claw my way out from beneath the pile?
- The chess game between Heather and Greg continues at a glacial pace. Queens were recently exchanged, Greg (playing the black) is up by a pawn, and he appears to have superior territorial influence. My dad had a special move he used to use in gaming situations where he felt his position was untenable, which he called "the earthquake" -- but I will not mention this to either player in the interest of preserving a civil atmosphere.
- Stalwart intern Marco Brezzo actually got paid this week. Congratulations are in order until the accounting staff manage to figure out how this could have happened and those responsible are fired.
- Brendan Q. Ferguson has been sighted several times leaving purple graffiti on the white boards. He has scrawled a mysterious sequence of numbers - not the same one as in that popular TV series, but it's still got me wondering what arcane significance they may have.
- The Wall is still here, and has not visibly moved for some time.
- Our tiny holiday tree (located beneath the buffet table, that's how small it is) miraculously withstands the rigors of time and has not lost so much as a needle. It's as though it were in some kind of science fictiony stasis field.
- Speaking of time manipulation, someone was actually looking for an actual FLOPPY DISK last week. Remember the days before CD burners were standard equipment and we all used floppy disks for stuff? Remember cassette tapes and buggy whips? Even more amazing: we HAD some floppy disks. There's definitely a time machine hidden in the office somewhere, and I'm going to find it.
Yes, and then I'm going back in time to patent my idea for TiVo....
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