Dave Grossman On Tales Of Monkey Island Page 2

19 Nov 2009 at 14:52:09 by Tim McDonald

I've been wondering a bit about how the episodic format actually works from a developer standpoint. How much do you tend to have done and worked out before you actually release the first episode? What point are you usually at when the first episode comes out?

*laughs* I'm not sure if we would be surprisingly far along, or surprisingly not far along by that point! We usually work out the broad strokes of the season, and how the story is generally going to go, before we start work on anything. Then we'll build out the main characters and some of the principle environments, and they we'll start working on episodes in an interleaved format. We're always designing one, and writing another, and working on production of a third, and so when the first one comes out, we're probably in the middle of design on, like, the fourth one. Others are in recording and in various stages of production, so depending on which one you're talking about we might be far along, or we might not be. *laughs*

In that case, have you had any – and I can't think of a way to phrase this eloquently, so we'll call them “Oh shit” moments – where you've released the first episode, and you realise something doesn't actually work and needs to be changed hugely?

Not hugely. There are small inconsistencies and we catch lots of those before they go out, partly because by the time we release the first episode, the next couple have been done, and a lot of times it's not something that doesn't work, but it's something that we want to foreshadow for an upcoming episode, so someone's working on episode three and he says “Wow, this would be really cool if X happened in episode one,” and because we haven't released episode one yet, we can make X happen.

No huge moments of blind panic in the middle of a series, then?

Not about that kind of thing. We're panicking about something all the time over here, but it's more about “Oh my God, the deadline is coming up, how are we going to finish this thing?” *laughs*

How much does the criticism, both from fans and journalists, actually impact the development in the middle of the series?

More than you might expect, given how far ahead we tend to be working. We read the forums and we listen to the fans and we do whatever we can to respond to what they say, and sometimes it's big things, like we change direction on elements, and sometimes it's more peripheral things, like... there was a character, Reginald van Winslow, who was introduced in Monkey as a minor character and fan response to him was good, so he's kind of gotten more screen time than he would have otherwise. “Hey, let's make a little part for Winslow in this one!” when he wasn't going to be there before.

What've you learned from the previous Telltale games? What've you brought over to Tales from Sam & Max, Strong Bad, and the rest?

Wow. It's a constant learning process – I don't know if I can split anything out. We're learning to wrestle with things, from production side things (about how we're actually going to get episodes out on a schedule at all) to how to tell a story in that format. What kind of things is it good to leave hanging between episodes, and what kind of things is it better to wrap up? How does the gameplay relate to all of that? How does that evolve?

Speaking of Winslow – who is, indeed, brilliant - how has it been creating new characters to try and “compete” with the old ones that everyone wants to see back?

It doesn't actually feel any different to me than what we always do. Every episode of Monkey Island has a bunch of new characters in it, and certainly there are some favourites, and we picked a couple of those and brought them back. Murray is back, and Stan is in, and judging by fan reaction, those were two of the right ones to revisit. Of course, we need Guybrush and Elaine and LeChuck, and possibly the Voodoo Lady. They were so central it was a no-brainer to include them. Once you've got those six people involved, it feels good to create new characters.

Any particular favourites in the office?

Winslow is popular in the office as well. In fact, if you can find a recent picture of Mark Darrin, who's one of the lead designers on this, online, he's actually wearing the Winslow chops. He grew them out for Halloween but he's kept them on, and they actually look pretty good on him, I've gotta say.

[SPOILERS FOR THE END OF EPISODE FOUR BEGIN HERE.]

I'll dig that up and put it in the article by that quote! Let's talk about episode five for a bit, though. We've got LeChuck back at full power, everything's coming to a head – what's new in episode five?

What's new? My goodness. Well, what can I say without spilling the beans? As you know, Guybrush is deceased, which is rather an interesting twist, and it seems like everything has really gone to seed as much as possible. LeChuck has really gained a leverage over things that he hasn't had before, and that's going to colour the whole experience, so it's LeChuck's ball game now, all of a sudden, and... what's going to happen, and who's going to deal with that, I kinda want to leave hanging for people.

At the risk of spoiling things for myself, is there any chance we might take control of another character for a little while in episode five?

Another character, other than Guybrush? Why would you want to do that? *laughs*

Well, he is dead.

Even when he's dead, Guybrush is more fun to control than the other characters.

*laughs* Fair enough. Killing off Guybrush, I have to say... that must have taken some balls. How on earth did you actually come up with that and what sort of reaction were you anticipating from the end of that, at episode four? Much as this is presumably temporary.

Yeah, well I don't think anyone was really going to expect that we would just kill off Guybrush and that he'd be gone forever. Obviously, there are plans to deal with that, and I think LucasArts might not have been very happy with us had we done that, but it did seem like the title of the episode -  I knew we were going to release the titles early, and just that sort of beguiling “The Trial and Execution of Guybrush Threepwood” - I thought that was going to make people think, long ahead of time, “Oh my gosh, what's going to happen here?” It just seemed like that was where the story wanted to go.

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