Last week ETC Silicon Valley had the pleasure of visiting Telltale, Inc. They’re located a few miles north of San Francisco, with offices looking into the bay. Founded in 2004 Telltale now employs 74 people and is renowned for its role in revolutionizing the episodic gaming genre. They are the first company to successfully develop and publish episodic games on a consistent basis. Following this initial success, Telltale published a number of seasons based on renowned IPs, including CSI, Wallace & Gromit, and Monkey Island.

Unfortunately for our readers, when we arrived at Telltale games we were requested to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) so I’ll be unable to discuss any details about the discussions that occurred. Our first speaker was Mr. Andy Vella, an engineer. He spent a great deal of time talking about the schedules and pipelines that allow Telltale to release games on a monthly basis. Telltale games are built on proprietary software and he also explained the advantages of using the software with episodic content.

Next we had the surprise and pleasure of meeting with CEO and Founder Mr. Dan Connors. Before establishing Telltale Games, Mr. Connors worked at LucasArts, having started in the QA division and working his way to producer, director and executive for games such as Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, X-Wing: Alliance, and Sam & Max Hit the Road. He talked about economic, storytelling and digital distribution challenges Telltale has faced. Telltale has worked hard to earn the trust of consumers with its ability to output content on a monthly basis.

Finally we had the opportunity to talk to game designer Mr. Sean Vanaman. He explained how Telltale writes its story and the methods by which their interactions are developed. Along with designing the interactions, Mr. Vanaman also works on dialogue scripts, and he explained how characters in the stories are developed and defined. As a writer there are many constraints laid down by the content’s proprietary intellectual owners, and Mr. Vanaman discussed how they dealt with these issues.

Our visit to Telltale games was fascinating. They shared with us their passion for storytelling and interactive media. Their episodic games and methods for digital distribution are innovative and very exciting.

Last Thursday, we had Bob Nicoll come to give us a lecture about art. Bob Nicoll is currently a faculty member at USC’s Cinematic Arts and was formerly the Senior Director of EA University, an educational program for employees at Electronic Arts.

Bob’s own story was pretty unique. He started off as a sculptor and painter in college, moved in to CG after seeing the movie Tron, and then went in to games after playing Gran Turismo. At heart though, he is an artist. His interest in art history and his perspective as an artist made for a very unique and educational lecture about the thought process and craft behind art.

His lecture was entitled “Developing a Critical Eye: The Art of design”, which is one of the lectures he gives to his students. He talked about how something visual is good and why we see it as so. It was a breakdown of the various elements of art and composition and how they come together to form “good” art.

Art, even game art, goes down through history and its very fundamentals can be found in ancient times through Greek sculptures and ancient paintings. We spent a lot of time analyzing the Renaissance paintings of artists such as DaVinci and Caravaggio and analyzed why they were masters of their craft and how they used the tools of visual design to cause certain emotions in their audiences. Contrast is the primary tool. Bob broke down visual elements into 6 categories: space, line, shape, tone, color, movement, and rhythm. He also talked about the canvas itself and how its very shape and use can determine the design of the image as well. 3D is just an illusion painted on a flat 2D screen.

These were things I learned during my undergrad as a Fine Arts major. I could go on about how amazed and intrigued I was during his lecture, but recording his two-hour lesson into a blog entry would turn into an essay. His overall message was that art in games isn’t just about putting something pretty on the screen. It’s most important function is to elicit an emotion from its audience and focus the eyes where the artist wants them to go. The idea is to get them to look where you want them to look and feel how you want them to feel.

Today we had the pleasure of hearing from ETC Alum and seven year EA alum, Jon Parise who gave a great presentation about his time at the ETC and EA.

Jon was an ETC student during the third year of the program and he worked on various projects dealing with large projection screens, motion capture, and Panda. He was actually the first person to work with Jesse Schell on bringing Panda to the ETC. He worked at Maxis, as a programmer, developing the Sims Online on a co-op for his final semester where he created the installation and registration system for the game. When he came back to the ETC before graduation, he gave a presentation to the rest of the class detailing some of the things he learned during his co-op.

He relayed a couple interesting tips or pointers that he gave during this presentation to us and I feel that even though they may be “old” at this point in time, they are still worthwhile points to keep in mind when developing almost any form of interactive entertainment.

• Don’t act immediately on design requests for at least 24 hours due to the fact that design decisions can often change within this time-frame and waiting can help save you from redoing a lot of your work
• Rely on producers to make decisions as this is what they are trained to do
• Always have something to show (even if it is work from a previous project/goal) regardless of where you are in your development process

He then talked about how he eventually went to work on the Sims Online full-time after graduating from the ETC and has continued to work at EA ever since. He moved from the Sims online onto Ultima Online, which EA had recently acquired. He then worked on a RPG for the 360 and PS3 called Lord of the Rings: White Council which was eventually canceled. We had the opportunity to watch some footage from the unfinished game at the end of the presentation and the game itself seemed like it could have been an awesome experience. It was an open-world RPG that felt very reminiscent of Oblivion and it seems like it would have given that popular title some serious competition if it was finished. After the Lord of the Rings game was canceled he ended up working on the Sims 3 and has recently started work on a currently unannounced project.

As many people know, it is not uncommon for games to be canceled at various points during the development cycle. Jon has been unlucky enough to be apart of two separate projects that ended up getting canceled and during Q&A, when asked about how he dealt with this loss he mentioned a core team of individuals he had been able to work with throughout all of the games as a great source of support. Throughout the rest of our Q&A he talked about how he was initially surprised how much influence marketing had on the eventual design of videogames. He also thinks that the future of gaming is going online (IE: sidestep piracy, microtransactions, etc.) and into asia (IE growing market) for the future. I must say that I am inclined to agree with him.

All in all, it was a great presentation from a very talented ETC alum. Jon has also contributed to a couple of books including PHP4 and Massively Multiplayer Game Development Two.

Thanks so much for your time Jon and we look forward to talking to you in the future.

Cheers,
Ben

In week 5 of the Fall 2009 Semester, we found ourselves in a different experience from our normal work days. We learned that we were going to ride around the Bay Area in a Zeppelin. As soon as we arrived at the airfield, the instructors gave us the basic safety requirements before allowing us on board. After that were introduced to our ride: a Zeppelin named Eureka.

As soon as we got inside Eureka we were surprised to see only 12 seats in a room surrounded by windows. After a few more instructions we were ready to start our trip.  1000 feet up in the air, we were all surprised by the view of San Francisco, which was a completely new perspective.

During the trip some parts of the city were partially covered by an eerie fog, but we were still able to see an amazing view from the hillside areas of the city all the way to the skyscrapers downtown and the towns of Sausalito and Tiburon.  After a while, we saw a massive shape covered in the fog, which ended being the Golden Gate Bridge. Even though it could not be completely be seen, it created an incredible view.

Finally, after landing we were taken to our debriefing room and, after celebrating the voyage with Champaign, we were all given certificates commemorating our voyage on the Zeppelin Eureka.

It was a fantastic experience that showed us not only a new perspective of the city, but took us on a trip that we will remember and recommend others to take in the future.