Story development

[numble]

How do you go about planning out the story, dialog, and humor in your games? How long does it usually take to plan everything out for a game/episode? Do you have any unwritten rules, such as "no breaking of the fourth wall"?

[HeatherLee]

This is a really big topic, as stories are very important and it can take a long time to get everything all figured out. Sometimes details linger into production because you haven't found just the right way something should go. But generally you start big and vague and get more and more specific as you fill out all the parts. I like to start with an outline of the major points and then extrapolate on it and build it out. What dialog is needed is decided from there. Writing dialog is a big task, but is also very rewarding.

Dave doesn't like breaking the fourth wall. :P

[Diduz]

Dave doesn't like breaking the fourth wall. :P

I can understand him, it can really spoil the experience.
Yet... the way it was done in the first two Monkey Island games was perfect. The characters felt there was something "adventuregamey" about the things that were happening to them, but they couldn't realize that fully. But the player did!
The same thing goes with the tongue-in-cheek comment Sam does about the "ridiculously useful"

SPOILER

layout of Bosco's helmet

[numble]

Dave doesn't like breaking the fourth wall. :P

Okay, I admit that I put that comment there to confirm/deny my suspicions regarding Dave's feelings about the fourth wall...

[dgrossman]

We tend to attack the story and the puzzle design as a single process, and working mostly from broad strokes down to finer strokes - for an episodic series, this also means thinking about how the series as a whole will flow and how the individual episodes will fit into it before proceeding to design each one. It seems to take about a month to do the full, detailed design for an episode of something the size of Sam & Max, and another four to six weeks to write the script.

I'm amused that you mention breaking of the fourth wall, as that is something that all adventure game writer/designers seem to find very funny, but that I personally think has been overused by now, not to mention it's disruptive to the maintenance of the story world (in film terms, they'd say it blows your suspension of disbelief). So at Telltale I'm the resident curmudgeonly fourth-wall policeman, putting my foot down firmly with some regularity. It fits right in with other unwritten rules like "keep the characters in character," "keep the puzzles in character," "keep the world in character," and so on.

[HeatherLee]

So at Telltale I'm the resident curmudgeonly fourth-wall policeman, putting my foot down firmly with some regularity. It fits right in with other unwritten rules like "keep the characters in character," "keep the puzzles in character," "keep the world in character," and so on.

I, on the other hand, just don't like rules.

That is to say, I can think of times when exceptions would make sense and work well. So an unwritten rule is reasonable as long as you know its ok to break it under the right circumstances. But then, I guess that's true for most rules one encounters in their lives.

[dgrossman]

Actually, it's true that the fourth wall rule is a bit less important with some licenses than with others. Sam & Max is a good example.

[Erwin]

I, on the other hand, just don't like rules.

Well, I think some rules are a useful way to force you to be more creative.

--Erwin