Adventure Gamers: First of all, I'd like to offer you congratulations for taking home some major hardware in the first-ever awards presentation here at Adventure Gamers. I understand you've been similarly recognized elsewhere, but we all know The Aggies are where the real glory is. Well done!

Dave Grossman (design director): Thanks very much! We are honored and pleased — even game developers need validation. Especially game developers. And Adventure Gamers has been with us since the beginning, so you can say you knew us when.

Dan Connors (CEO): Thanks, we really respect Adventure Gamers so we're very proud to receive this recognition from the site and the readers — it's a pretty discerning audience. This has led me to finally forgive Evan for his review of The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball.

AG: Okay, enough resting on your laurels. Time to look ahead to your next highly-anticipated "grand adventures". So, why Wallace & Gromit?

Dan: Because it's a great franchise with a lot of integrity. It's obvious that Aardman has poured a lot of love into the franchise, so it gives us a strong base to work from.

Dave: Plus, we love Wallace & Gromit! They're great characters, at once hopelessly loony and yet filled with richness and deep human emotion. They have a kind of soul that many other mainstream media figures lack. Also, think about what usually happens in their films: They cleverly solve some sort of problem, only to get themselves into much bigger trouble, which they must then resolve through additional cleverness. Is that perfect for adventure games, or what?

AG: It is perfect, you’re right. But it's also a curious choice based on the importance of dialogue in your previous games. There are probably fewer words in all the W&G shorts combined than a single Telltale episode to date. How do you approach the transition to a property where words are at a premium?

Andy Hartzell (lead designer): That's a good question. You'll find that Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures relies less on snappy one-liners than Sam & Max or Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. And in keeping with the Aardman brand, there's more physical comedy. But a Wallace & Gromit adventure game will never be quite as kinetic as the claymation originals. Ultimately we found a compromise between Aardman's hyper-physicality and Telltale's signature hyper-verbosity. We've surrounded our two heroes with a supporting cast of sharply-drawn characters. They tend to bring out a more talkative side of Wallace. (And did we mention that Gromit is now voiced by Eddie Murphy...? Kidding, kidding.)

AG: That's not the only key transition you're making, as W&G represents Telltale's first foray into direct control. Why that move?

Dan: Well, it's also our first Xbox Live Arcade game, and we really wanted to design something that would work well on an Xbox controller.

Dave: Our approach is a hybrid of direct control and point-and-click, a sort of "direct and select" that involves a familiar direct control for moving the character, and a directional popping-from-spot-to-spot method for pointing his attention to things and people in the environment.

We've adopted this for a few reasons. One is that the game was designed from the beginning for Xbox Live Arcade, and we wanted to do something that felt intuitive and natural using Xbox controls. It also improves our cinematic options, in that we can do a lot more with the camera if we don't have to worry about giving the player enough floor space to click on to move the character around. With direct control, that problem disappears and we can frame shots so that they actually look good. And there is some thought that direct control connects the player more strongly to the character on screen, though that seems to depend somewhat on the individual.

AG: Do you see direct control as simply another means to the same end, or does it create some fundamental gameplay differences for W&G? If so, what kind?

Dave: The basic idea is largely similar to our other titles, i.e., most of the gameplay revolves around interacting with other characters and combining different ideas to come up with creative ways to resolve situations. The direct control does feel more active since you're not always waiting for Wallace to walk to where you clicked, and it has added a certain physical component to the experience, in that you tend to be much more aware of where your character is located relative to everyone else. Once in a while this will be important to a puzzle, but more notably it has helped us to make the other characters more lively and organic, in terms of when and how they react to your presence. Which is kind of cool.

AG: After releasing Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People on the Wii, what was it about the Xbox 360 and Live Arcade that seemed the best fit for this series? Was the decision to bypass Nintendo this time because the Wii couldn't handle the new series technically, or was there something about the SBCG4AP experience that made you want to look elsewhere this time?

Dan: We have been evolving step by step on the distribution side, and from a business perspective, it was very important for us to be on XBLA. It's the most mature of the console platforms, and it certainly allows us to be extremely detailed with our environments and characters, which is important to us and to Aardman. We had a great experience with WiiWare on Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and they will be in our future plans. But in order to be a successful digital publisher, we need to be on every platform. It's part of the company's charter to keep adding new platforms to our repertoire.

Dave: This was not about bypassing any particular platform for any particular game; it was all about figuring out the best way to get our games onto as many downloadable channels as possible. We were planning Wallace & Gromit at the same time we were planning SBCG4AP, and we wanted to build one of them for WiiWare and one for XBLA. Which one went which direction wound up mostly being about the humdrum issue of how art styles affect file size — the elaborate clay look for Wallace makes big files, while the smooth cartoony style of Strong Bad makes smaller ones, and the download limit for XBLA is larger. So it was just easier to do it that way than the other way around. We think both platforms are excellent, and the hanging-out-on-the-sofa-in-the-living-room environment that they provide is perfect for our brand of episodic content.