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A Telltale Afternoon archived preview - page 2

San Rafael is an affluent suburb north of the Golden Gate Bridge, where the sun shines even when San Francisco is draped in fog. But in the past few years, the dot-com blitz's downward spiral has sent a lot of the technology companies in the area packing—either downsized or gone belly up—leaving the traffic a little thinner and many of the offices along the freeway empty. Not so for Telltale Games, who just moved to a bigger office down the street from their original location. They'd been in this office less than a week when Adventure Gamers' server admin Doug Tabacco and I took a drive up to see the new space. We located their name in the building directory—they'd slapped a sticker with their logo over the name of the previous tenant—and made our way up to the second floor.

Heather Logas, one of Telltale's designers, met us at the door and introduced us to the handful of employees who were working through lunch. She then gave an impromptu tour, which basically involved standing in the middle of the office's main room and looking around at the desks set up in face-to-face pairs. When asked how many programmers are with the company, Heather scanned the workstations, counting off on her fingers. "One, two, three… hey—" she called to someone across the room "—how many programmers do we have?" This is when CEO Dan Connors came in from lunch. Latte in hand, he led us around partially unpacked moving boxes to a conference room, steering clear of an area where a dividing line and the words DO NOT CROSS had been stuck to the carpet in blue painter's tape. He started to explain but then just shook his head: "It's a long story."

This is a day in the life at Telltale Games, the start-up founded by three LucasArts veterans just over a year ago that has now grown to nearly twenty people. Telltale, better known as "the guys who got fed up after Sam & Max 2's cancellation and struck out on their own," is deep into the development of their debut Bone game. The 3D, point & click treatment of Jeff Smith's popular comic will be the first of a series of short-but-sweet games available for download from Telltale's website.

When Telltale approached Smith about the possibility of making a game based on his comics, he hesitated. Wary of ending up with a Bone shooter, he asked for a sample of what they had in mind. The team started mapping out the series as a game, initially thinking they could cover all nine volumes in just three installments. As they planned, though, it became clear that the first book, Out from Boneville, had enough going on for it to be a game by itself. And that's what they've been working on ever since. The end result is on schedule for a September release, with the next installment to follow about five months later.

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The schedule's tight, but this is intentional. Telltale's big on the concept of "TV for your PC"—short, self-contained games that come out often enough to keep fans satisfied and the company in business. If a game like Grim Fandango is like a feature film, chief technology officer Kevin Bruner explains, Bone is a television show. Rather than putting years of hard work and funding into a game that may or may not pay off in the end, Telltale believes that by releasing a steady stream of games, based on a variety of licenses (comics, TV shows, and even novels), they'll have a better chance of producing quality interactive stories for the players, while staying creative and productive themselves. It's an idea Connors and Bruner came up with back at LucasArts. They wanted to do Sam & Max this way, but LucasArts vetoed the idea in favor of one longer, traditional game—and we all know how that turned out. Connors and Bruner left LucasArts and, along with fellow LEC alum Troy Molander, started Telltale to follow through on their idea. The team doesn't rule out the possibility of developing original properties and finding a reasonable balance between shorter and full-scale productions down the road, but for now, Bone is certainly keeping them busy.

With Bruner, Logas, and recent Telltale hire Dave Grossman (one of the creative forces behind such LucasArts games as Day of the Tentacle) watching over our shoulders, Doug and I played through an early portion of Out from Boneville. It was clear as soon as Fone Bone walked across the screen with a deep-kneed gait lifted straight from the comics that this game has been developed with an incredible attention to detail. The game is in full 3D with fixed cameras, and uses a context-sensitive, mouse-driven interface that should be intuitive even to those who have never played an adventure game. Everything in Bone's world has been designed to make you feel like you're inside the comic, from the Look, Walk, and Talk icons that look just like Fone's eyes, legs, and hands, to the text that displays in the same bold uppercase font used in the books.

The voices, although not what every Bone fan had in mind, are in line with Jeff Smith's vision. This is no coincidence; Smith was involved in the casting process. Telltale started by suggesting "touchstones"—voices similar to how they imagined the characters would sound. In some cases, Smith's ideas were entirely different, and he made his own suggestions. There was one character everyone agreed on, though: the Red Dragon. "I was thinking Johnny Cash," Logas says, a touchstone Smith felt was right on. (Interestingly, this is the character many fans agreed sounds just right when the voices debuted in the recent Bone trailer.) Once the voices were nailed down, Telltale conducted recording sessions at a studio in nearby Fairfax. Jeff Smith has reportedly said that the voices are "pretty close" to what he imagined, an endorsement that has eased the minds of many Bone fans.

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Out from Boneville kicks off in the desert, where the three Bone cousins (Fone, Phoney, and Smiley) find themselves lost after being run out of town. As in the opening of the comic, the initial puzzle involves finding a map that will help the trio get out of the desert. The gameplay has been extended a bit, though. Instead of Smiley happening upon the map, Fone must find it hidden somewhere in the scene. He then makes the mistake of handing the map over to Smiley, who won't give it back. Fone has to convince Smiley to hand the map over to him and Phoney, who's being downright ornery about the whole situation. The dialogue-driven sequence that follows is far more complex—and at the same time, more natural—than an average dialogue tree. Controlling Fone, the player can alternate between sweet-talking Smiley (who wants a dollar in exchange for the map) and arguing with Phoney (who doesn't want to give up a dollar) in an attempt to convince one of his cousins to give in. The dialogue options appear at the bottom of the screen, along with icons depicting Phoney and Smiley. By clicking on these icons, the player toggles which character Fone is speaking to, and the dialogue choices change based on how the conversation's going. Just as in real life, the conversation doesn't follow a straightforward path. Ultimately there's only one way to solve the puzzle, but the solution isn't blatantly obvious, which leads to a nice a-ha! moment when you figure out where the dialogue is going.

This scene is followed by an arcade sequence in which the cousins are chased by a swarm of locusts. The arcade action itself is fairly easy, but Telltale is still considering adding in-game help, including an option to skip the sequence altogether if you fail a few times. At this point Fone is separated from his cousins, and much of the remainder of the game will be spent trying to find them. It's also the point where the "try before you buy" section of the game will likely end, and the player will be encouraged to pay to unlock the full version.

Telltale seems to have done a good job of blowing up small segments of the comic into fully playable challenges. One example is a sequence that takes place in the dark, with only a circle of light around Fone illuminated by his torch. This is hardly innovative (King's Quest 4 did it in the eighties!), but the team at Telltale has a knack for making even old conventions fun. While cautiously moving through the darkness, Fone discovers one of Smiley's cigar butts—another event taken directly from the comic—and goes looking for more in hopes of finding his cousin. Each subsequent discovery is accompanied by a little commentary, such as "These things smell nasty!"—a public service announcement for the kids, Bruner and Grossman joked.

We also saw a scene from later in the game that takes place around the dinner table at Gran'ma Ben's farm. The scene plays out like an extended version of the dialogue in the desert, where you can choose what you want to say to any of the people at the table, and the options change as the conversation progresses. "There's not really a puzzle in this part," Bruner said, clicking through the various questions Fone can pose to the others at the table. "The dialogue is the puzzle." The idea is similar to what was proposed with the recent independent project Façade: that dialogue itself can be the gameplay, as opposed to simply being tacked on. (It's not surprising that Telltale is exploring this possibility; Michael Mateas, one of Façade's creators, is on Telltale's advisory board.) Bruner says that in the future, he'd like to experiment more with the concept of dialogue-driven gameplay, and maybe even add the ability for players to input their own questions. ("I really had high hopes for Starship Titanic," he confided.) But he recognizes the limitations of implementing such a feature in a commercial project, as opposed to an academic one such as Façade. The trick will be to find fun uses for dialogue that make sense within the game.

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Although Out from Boneville follows the comic pretty faithfully, fans will notice a few minor changes. For one thing, there will be no winter scenes, even though winter is fairly prominent in the comic. The reason behind this decision is purely logistical: it will help keep the download small. (The goal is for each game to be around 50 MB.) Bruner says that realistic snow scenes would have required more space, because the characters would wear warmer clothing and the landscape would look different: "You don't want it to look like everything was just painted white." The events that occur during winter in the book will take place in the game, just without the chill. On the flip side, some aspects of the book, such as the scenes at the possum treehouse, have been expanded to give the player more to explore. The order of some events in the game deviates from the chronology in the comic, but the scenes have been adapted so that to players unfamiliar with the book (and hopefully even to those who are familiar), Out from Boneville's plot will feel seamless and natural.

The pre-alpha build we saw still has some glitches. At one point, Smiley's musical instrument disappeared from his hands, leaving him plucking an air banjo in off-key oblivion. The characters in the dinner scene hadn't been choreographed yet and sat frozen stiff around the table. These are the types of issues Telltale is still working on, with the help of their proprietary development tools. Much of the team's front-end work, even before the Bone license had been secured, was in the creation of a set of easy-to-use tools specifically for creating story-driven games. One tool allows dialogue options to be linked to certain events in the game, with minimal programming. Another lets developers change character animations and camera angles on the fly while playing, without requiring the compilation of a new build to see the results. These intuitive tools, which were also used to program last winter's Telltale Texas Hold 'Em, are a main reason Telltale anticipates being able to turn out new games so quickly.

Speaking of Texas Hold 'Em, we mentioned to Bruner that when it came out, a lot of adventure fans feared Telltale had sold out to the "dark side" of casual gaming. It turns out that game wasn't released for the sole purpose of getting a little money into the company, as some fans previously thought. In addition to giving the team a chance to stretch their creative muscles, Texas Hold 'Em allowed Telltale to test their engine and distribution model, so that any issues and incompatibilities could be addressed long before Out from Boneville's release. "There was a big AMD bug," Bruner said. "We didn't have an AMD box in the office. We do now," he added, patting the tower beside his desk. Having taken that trial run, Telltale hopes to have ironed out the kinks, which should save time in getting Bone out the door.

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There has been much speculation over how many Bone games there will be altogether, but at this point even Telltale's staff isn't sure. They do intend to cover the whole story told in the comics, which spans nine volumes, but it won't necessarily be one book per game. The idea is to keep the workload manageable, with a release about every four months and around four to six hours of playtime per game. Although formal production on the second game hasn't started, team members are mulling over ideas and have already committed some to paper. For now, though, they're focusing on Bone's debut.

One of Telltale's biggest challenges will be in marketing the game. The company recognizes that adventure games are a niche market and Bone wouldn't do well on a shelf next to Grand Theft Auto. Their solution is Telltale Now, a proprietary online distribution system that will allow the internet-savvy to get their hands on Telltale's games instantly. This covers both the adventure game and comic book crowds, but it still leaves a huge potential market that may never be aware of the game's existence. Other distribution channels may be explored in the future, but for the time being, Telltale Now will be Bone's bread and butter. And not just Bone's. The plan is to make the system available to other independent developers as well.

We'd been chatting with Bruner, Logas, and Grossman for about an hour when Dan Connors poked his head in the door. "Productivity's dropping," was all he had to say. "Sorry," said Heather, and Dave said, "No, he's talking about me," as they both headed back to their desks. As they cleared out, we asked Kevin if the September release date is an attainable goal. He said he thinks it is. Will it be easy to finish the game by September? "No," he said with a laugh, "but that's the date. That's always been the date." Based on what we saw of the development process and the team's dedication, they'll pull it off, but it may take a few late nights and some rounds of venti lattes for the team. But that's all in a day's work at a high tech start-up. Come September, we'll be reaping the rewards of Telltale's efforts.

Can't wait that long? To help pass the time, check out the other goodies Telltale shared with Adventure Gamers after our visit.


Doug Tabacco contributed to this article.

 

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