Kevin Bruner, Telltale's Chief Technology Officer

So, Out from Boneville came out, and a lot of people had a lot to say about it. How do you feel about the feedback?

We feel really good about the feedback. It's our first game, and there are growing pains involved in a first game. We were trying to do something a little outside the box for the hardcore adventure gamers, so there were a lot of things we were braced for, but the majority of them were things we can fix without really affecting our other goals of trying to keep the games really accessible. We knew the game was going to be easy, but the feedback that the game was too short… we knew the game was short, first of all. It was shorter than what we intended to make, and we weren't able to tell that until far too late in the process.

Why was that?

Honestly, we were like, "Okay, this feels right." As we were building it we were thinking, "It feels like you can spend so much time here, so much time here…" So for The Great Cow Race, we're very focused up front on pre-planning—the user's going to spend so many minutes here, so many minutes here, so many minutes here. When we focus group Cow Race, we're going to sit with a stopwatch and figure out, "Okay, they didn't spend as much time here as we intended them to, so we need to beef that part up." Or, "They're spending too much time here, is that good? Or do we need to move some of that somewhere else?"

It sounds like it's really changed the development process.

It's made us a lot more aware. It's really good, because I think it's something that's easily fixable. It would have been far more devastating if people were like, "I didn't like the characters," or "I don't like the way the point and click works," or "I don't like the way the dialogue works." Something real core and fundamental. Then we would have had a problem. On the flip side, I think what we don't want to do… we could have easily made Boneville longer, by making Fone have to walk longer distances, make him walk a little slower. Those are kind of punts, cop-outs. There are a lot of longer adventure games where you spend 20% of the time walking from here to there.

People don't like that. They know that's what the developer's doing.

Right. It's one of those things that you shouldn't notice. We get a lot closer to the characters in our games, all the time, than most other games do. That's something we want to do, we want to keep the characters big on screen. The fact that not a lot of people have been commenting on the fact that you don't spend all day walking around is a good thing, because it's not the kind of thing we want people to notice. But in light of the game being short, it would be nice if somebody said, "Well at least they don't make you walk around." So we're trying to figure out ways to make the next games longer, a guaranteed 4 to 5 hour experience for a real adventure gamer, which is probably going to turn into an 8 or 9 hour experience for the more casual gamer. We're going to make the next game a bit more challenging—there were some criticisms that this game was way too easy—but what we're hearing is it was too short, didn't entertain me enough for the amount of money I spent on it. The reaction to that is to make it more entertaining, and we're going to try to do that with more writing, more voice, a longer experience, more time in the world. One of the things in Boneville is that the characters spend a lot of time alone, and some of the best parts were where they were all together, interacting with each other. In the Cow Race, you spend very little time alone.



And that's just a function of the story?

It's a function of the story, but as we've been going through the preliminary design, we catch ourselves. There's a part of the game where Gran'ma and Thorn are there, and Fone has a task to do, and Gran'ma and Thorn have to wait until Fone does his task. We're now realizing that's barking up the wrong tree, because some of the best parts of the game are when they interact with each other. So we started to redesign that area of the game to say, okay, it was a nice puzzle, and adventure-wise it would work, but we're losing an opportunity to entertain people. That means the puzzles have to be harder and more challenging, if they're the only thing you can focus on. We don't particularly want to make the games super mind-bending games. We want them to be more like interactive cartoons. So it's really making us focus on every aspect of the game, and ask if we're delivering what we want to be delivering for each individual section.

Do you think it's going to change the development time at all?

No, this is just being a little bit more deliberate in our focus, and keeping checklists next to us, literally, saying, "In this part of the game, is the interactivity what we want? Does this part of the game deliver the characters in the way we want to? Does this part of the game deliver the narrative in the way we want to? Does this part of the game bring something from Jeff Smith's world and present it, as opposed to just doing something that could happen in any world?" We're being a lot more deliberate and a lot more focused on each and every aspect of the game. And we have the opportunity to do that because we're not spending as much time building technology, creating animations. We were halfway through the first game before we had Fone walking around. Right now, we can have Fone interacting, animating, from day one. So we've got all this great feedback that gets us hyper-aware of delivering exactly what we want in ways that hopefully will be right there for people, and they won't lament parts not being there. We're able to look at the game not from a production standpoint so much, but from a game design standpoint.

Are you past the concept stage with The Great Cow Race?

Yes, we're starting implementation. Right now we've got the Barrel Haven bar running, the kitchen in the bar running, and there's a new Gran'ma's house set that's almost finished. We've got the design of the game complete, except we're still finalizing the cow race. We don't want to do an arcade game for the cow race. It's interesting, there's a new version of the original Boneville where you can skip the chase sequences. The cow race is a pinnacle moment in the Jeff Smith series. It would be horrible to build something where anybody was like, "Well, at least I could skip it." It's the name of the game, the most important thing in the book. If we deliver something where people are like, "Well, you can skip it," we're failing there. The cow race itself is proving to be an enormous design challenge. We don't want you to play as Gran'ma, since we've kind of established you play as the Bone cousins, so currently you play as the Mystery Cow, but the Mystery Cow doesn't win the race. So the things that you do in the race have to be not about winning the race.

Without making you feel like a loser.

Yeah. We can't be like, "Go go go, win win win," just so at the end we can pull the plug on you and say, "Ha ha, you didn't get to win." So we're trying to design puzzles right now to happen inside the race, that allow the excitement of the race to build, with the conclusion of Gran'ma winning the race, and the user experiencing the story, feeling really good that Gran'ma won. As a player, if you're playing Phoney, then you don't want Gran'ma to win, but as a human being, watching the story, you do want Gran'ma to win. So weaving our way through all those issues has been really, really challenging, and it's been nice to have Dave Grossman, somebody who's really experienced, hacking away at this for us. We've spent a lot of time on the cow race so far, coming up with the design, and we're about 80% of the way there. We'll see if people will like it, but nobody will insist on skipping it.