Episodic Gaming by Dennis Lenart (Telltale Games)
The next talk that we went to I was so excited about as it was Dennis Lenart From Telltale games and he had tried for a long time to get into this company as he wanted to be involved in creating a game that was solely about storytelling.
In the beginning none of them really knew what they were doing with episodic gaming but they knew that they wanted to look more into it and get involved in the process and create a game that looks into it. But first they had to do their research. They started by looking at the types of episodes that that could produce, the main being serialised episodes. This is were they are planned out months in advance and published at different intervals like monthly or weekly. This can be interpreted in two ways, as a long running series were you can pick it up from whenever or a shorter running series where there are so many episodes in a series so that you would have to watch them all.
Although that this seemed simple enough, there were some risks to take into consideration:
- Its a complete new business model meaning that they were unsure whether they would get the audience for a whole series
- Would they have the money to finish the story if it got bad reviews from the beginning?
- Would hardcore gamers want to play a short game that's broken up into sections?
But there were also a lot of benefits to then out way the risks:
- Its a smaller investment
- Shorter games are easier to try before you invest a lot of money into them
- Smaller games means less resources, less development and less building
- You can easily reuse characters and assets meaning that you do not have to model as much
- You can get continued player interest from an ever-expanding world.
- The constant release reminds players that the game exists meaning they don't have to spend more money on advertising and marketing
So in the beginning they thought about how they were going to go about introducing their company and the first game that they came up with was Telltale Texas Holden which was a comedy poker game designed primarily to teat their new game engine. But the first episodic game that they brought out was with Sam and Max. They created one series of episodic games that didn't follow serialised episodes meaning that they created a aeries of one-off stories so that players didn't have to buy all of them, they could just buy into one to test it out. They wanted it to be a comedy, introducing this new concept of episodic gaming so that the players could get used to this new process.
Overall the game was a great success and they moved onto their next, Strong Bad Cools Game For Attractive People and more people eventually became interested in this new way of gaming. They then reached the problem that only a few people where playing every episode and many were just buying a few and then stopping. So for their next game Wallace and Gromits: Grand Adventure they tried out a different formula of creating the game. They tried out another new formula on Tales of Monkey Island and as it appeared to get positive results they followed it up with a second and third series of Sam and Max.
As the forth version of the formula was being created they were working on the fact that people didn't want a game that had puzzles as some of them were too difficult, so they simplified them and made them simpler to complete to try and make people happier and also introduced the idea of quick time events and tried this formula out in their new game Jurassic Park: The Game. As it didn't prove a success they again kept modifying their formula until they reached the sixth version and brought out The Walking Dead Game, which obviously proved a huge success to the company.
In The Walking Dead Game they wanted to give players the influence over the character and feel the pressure that the characters would if they were actually in that situation. As each episode went on the tension builds up until there's a moment where you will have to choose which character to save. This creates an emotional impact as the characters will then have different opinions on yours meaning that everything you do, you have to think about.
Overall the talk was brilliant, it was so interesting to find out information about the company and how they had to go through six different formula in order to get the winning one, and a number of different bad games as well. But overall it shows that hard work does definitely pay off as even though they went through many bad games to get the right formula for The Walking Dead they were able to bring episodic gaming to life, something which many people didn't think they were able to do.
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