PPP2 Inspiration: Telltale Games

As I have already done a post, from FMX, about the history of Telltale Games I want to just quickly look at some of the reasons why I think this is such an inspirational company. Telltale Games is an independent games company formed in 2004 based in California. The business mainly revolves around episodic gaming and this is the main reason they set up the company, they wanted to bring pure storytelling to games and there were a lot of drawbacks that they had to overcome, (stated here in my other post from FMX 2014 about Telltale Games http://megsdfgablog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/fmx-2014-episodic-gaming.html)

What I really like about them as a company is that they experimented with episodic gaming to make it become what it is. They went through so much effort to be able to do this by experimenting with different ways of showing it to the audience and back then they didn't know what kind of feedback that they would get back from it, they didn't know whether it would drain all their money or whether it would be a success but they still gave it a go which is why I am inspired by them so much. They gave it a go and it took them around 6 different 'formulas' to get the recipe for episodic gaming right and about 10 games to get the pinocle one, The Walking Dead.

For me The Walking Dead is one of my favourite games and definitely the best one that they produced, and I think it's mainly down to the art style. I really like it and it looks very much like a comic, which is obviously a reference to The Walking Dead comics, but it works really well and it is very character driven which I like about the game. You can see that the art style is influenced by some of their older games well, like going right back to their Texas Hold 'Em game you can see that they applied a very similar style here as well, which seems to have evolved to get to The Walking Dead. They also produced a game series called Sam and Max which had a nice art style as well. This was a lot more round and cartoony but it is a style that I would really like to focus on, creating something that is bright, cartoony and this means that you don't have to get proportions right straight away as they usually contain characters that are not anatomically correct.