Designing the Great Cow Race, Part 3
TelltaleGames
Former Telltale Staff
I was informed that I was not allowed to write about sandwiches or tasty cookies this week. You'd think that the public would want to know what foodstuffs fuel my overdeveloped brain. Nonetheless, I will honor the wishes of a certain content coordinator and instead focus this designer diary on the process of design.
The office is a frenzy of activity today. We were informed that we needed to have a build of the game ready by 3pm for review and here it is 4:06. The room is filled with workers quietly hunched over keyboards and mice, working away diligently to get that last bug fixed before the whistle is blown. Gritting teeth and splintering fingernails in an eerie dead silence, afraid that too much volume will remind Dan and Kevin that we're actually working out here and that our deadline was an hour and six minutes ago. No matter how minor the last niggling details, we are loathe to let even a single one get through.
It's times like these that I think back on the project and marvel at how far we have come in so little time. Adapting a story like Bone to an interactive experience is a fun but not inconsequential challenge. Conveying the same sense of emotion and narrative in a game requires very different techniques than creating a comic. The focus changes from telling an engrossing story to involving the player in an immersive world.
We started with the comics themselves. We already knew that we were going to backtrack to the end of the Out From Boneville book and show Phoney's arrival in Barrelhaven and the aftermath of the rat creature attack on the farm. From there we carefully chose the most important story points and themes from The Great Cow Race and constructed an outline to work from. Then it was a matter of detailed discussions on how to best represent these points and themes in an interactive way. We strive to avoid constructing a game where the gameplay and story are treated as disenfranchised cousins; i.e. a jumble of unconnected puzzles and cutscenes. Rather, our goal is to integrate story and game as much as our technology and deadlines will allow. This can be an exercise in brain-jarring, intellect-numbing out of the box creativity, as in all honesty the simplest solution is to unceremoniously jam all necessary exposition into cutscene after cutscene.
Since our love for our players is boundless and never-ending, we prefer to explore more rewarding methods of story conveyance. Therefore, any activity we design must not only be enjoyable to experience but must also support the story and the characters. Even when our unparalleled genius devises a true gem of cunning puzzlery, if it isn't something the character would do or doesn't feel appropriate to the game world then it doesn't find its way into the game. (Weep not, for all these ideas are stored in Telltale's mystic game design vault for use in future products).
When you reach the end of a production, as we are now, and you are frantically trying to complete what you've started, as we are now, it is easy to forget all the intricate reasons why some of the elements were cleverly layered into the game in the first place. Some puzzle or joke doesn't play out quite the way we expected and we find it terribly tempting to cut it out of nervousness that the end player either won't get or won't appreciate what we are trying to accomplish. It is necessary at these times to pause and think back: Why did we choose to do this thing in this manner? What great gaping void would we be creating by removing this seemingly inconsequential bit? In a game this tight, everything that remains at this phase is there as part of a highly developed and complex plan. We have already executed the phase where we trimmed dialog like pruning a bonsai with a chainsaw, and watched twenty of Smiley Bone's lines intended to describe cheese sandwiches fall like so many tiny green leaves. Everything that's still a part of the game is a tenacious survivor of this and similar treatments, and was spared for very good reasons - even if we can no longer remember what they are at this stage.
Do not think for a moment that we are not as impressed as you are with what we've been able to accomplish in the time we have. In six months we've gone from a slim paper outline to a fully developed game with convincing characters and an immersive world. Every bold step the story and the characters have guided our way through the perilous snake-infested jungle of game design. The result is a game that we all can be truly proud of, characters that we've come to know as friends, and a world we don't mind visiting every day when we come into work. Most days, that even beats out tasty sandwiches and rich luscious cookies.
This continuing developer diary brought to you by Telltale designer and writer Heather Logas.
Learn more about Bone: The Great Cow Race - click here.
The office is a frenzy of activity today. We were informed that we needed to have a build of the game ready by 3pm for review and here it is 4:06. The room is filled with workers quietly hunched over keyboards and mice, working away diligently to get that last bug fixed before the whistle is blown. Gritting teeth and splintering fingernails in an eerie dead silence, afraid that too much volume will remind Dan and Kevin that we're actually working out here and that our deadline was an hour and six minutes ago. No matter how minor the last niggling details, we are loathe to let even a single one get through.
It's times like these that I think back on the project and marvel at how far we have come in so little time. Adapting a story like Bone to an interactive experience is a fun but not inconsequential challenge. Conveying the same sense of emotion and narrative in a game requires very different techniques than creating a comic. The focus changes from telling an engrossing story to involving the player in an immersive world.
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Since our love for our players is boundless and never-ending, we prefer to explore more rewarding methods of story conveyance. Therefore, any activity we design must not only be enjoyable to experience but must also support the story and the characters. Even when our unparalleled genius devises a true gem of cunning puzzlery, if it isn't something the character would do or doesn't feel appropriate to the game world then it doesn't find its way into the game. (Weep not, for all these ideas are stored in Telltale's mystic game design vault for use in future products).
When you reach the end of a production, as we are now, and you are frantically trying to complete what you've started, as we are now, it is easy to forget all the intricate reasons why some of the elements were cleverly layered into the game in the first place. Some puzzle or joke doesn't play out quite the way we expected and we find it terribly tempting to cut it out of nervousness that the end player either won't get or won't appreciate what we are trying to accomplish. It is necessary at these times to pause and think back: Why did we choose to do this thing in this manner? What great gaping void would we be creating by removing this seemingly inconsequential bit? In a game this tight, everything that remains at this phase is there as part of a highly developed and complex plan. We have already executed the phase where we trimmed dialog like pruning a bonsai with a chainsaw, and watched twenty of Smiley Bone's lines intended to describe cheese sandwiches fall like so many tiny green leaves. Everything that's still a part of the game is a tenacious survivor of this and similar treatments, and was spared for very good reasons - even if we can no longer remember what they are at this stage.
Do not think for a moment that we are not as impressed as you are with what we've been able to accomplish in the time we have. In six months we've gone from a slim paper outline to a fully developed game with convincing characters and an immersive world. Every bold step the story and the characters have guided our way through the perilous snake-infested jungle of game design. The result is a game that we all can be truly proud of, characters that we've come to know as friends, and a world we don't mind visiting every day when we come into work. Most days, that even beats out tasty sandwiches and rich luscious cookies.
This continuing developer diary brought to you by Telltale designer and writer Heather Logas.
Learn more about Bone: The Great Cow Race - click here.
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