250 employees is some 1990’s squaresoft shit. That for light adventure games?
I feel they were a very talented studio that kept making the same game over and over.
Sure but the scope AC and a TT game are way different. You could make TWD with 50 people.
Sure but the scope AC and a TT game are way different. You could make TWD with 50 people.
I feel they were a very talented studio that kept making the same game over and over.
Not saying I necessarily disagree but I think that puts them right in line with 99% of game devs.
I'd say their games were destined to not age or grow like other games did. Linear, episodic, story based games didn't really catch on.
I'm not a Telltale dev though so I don't know. It seemed like they were making it work for them, and it *does* guarantee some kind of consistent/scheduled income.
Going from TWD to this? How?
I kind of wish they had stuck to their other games that were basically traditional adventure games as well.
While I think a lot of them were not as good as the originals, they were solid enough for a genre that hasn’t received a ton of entries.
I liked the Monkey Island series they did, even though it wasn't as good as the original games. That's about it.
https://twitter.com/Binkysaur/status/1
(https://i.imgur.com/jJ56Xds.png)TWD Season Two is their real sales peak probably.
But the success of The Walking Dead spurred the company to expand rapidly: in order to suit both its growing ambitions and keep investors happy, it became a company that many long-standing employees no longer recognized. “We went from a small and scrappy team to kind of a giant studio full of 300-plus people,” says former Telltale programmer and designer Andrew Langley, who worked at the studio from 2008 to 2015. “You walk around the office, and you don’t really recognize anybody anymore.”
Sources say the culture of the studio never properly adapted from its indie mentality to one more appropriate for its larger size. Tribal knowledge persisted over clearly documented processes, and a lack of communication among employees bred confusion. “Very rarely people were writing things down on a wiki or a confluence page or any sort of documentation,” says a former employee. “People were shifting so often that you would hear a version of a story that was actually weeks old, and the person telling you has no idea because that’s the last thing they heard.”
To keep up with the workload, the company started rotating developers in and out of different games during the development process, sometimes in ways that employees say made little sense. As the developer’s schedule grew more aggressive, management sought to remedy tighter turnarounds by adding more people to the department — a “solution” that did little to help the problem. As one former Telltale developer put it: nine women can’t make a baby in one month. “Focus on quality really started to shift to ‘let’s just get as many episodes out as we can,’” the source says.
Time management was a major issue. Release dates would often slip after games underwent multiple, extensive reviews that came with a great deal of feedback, but failed to budget enough time to make the changes. “The pace at which the studio operated was both an amazing feat and its biggest problem,” says a former employee. “Executives would often ask teams to rewrite, redesign, recast, and reanimate up until the very last minute without properly adjusting the schedule. The demands on production only became more intense with each successful release, and at some point, you just don’t have anything left to give.”
But where most developers go into “crunch mode” in the final months of a game leading up to its launch, they described it as constant. Because of the episodic nature of Telltale’s games, the studio’s development cycle was a constantly turning wheel. As soon as one episode wrapped, it was on to the next one, over and over with no end in sight. “Everything [was] always on fire,” one source with direct knowledge of the company says. “You never [got] a break.” This sentiment was echoed over and over to The Verge by four different people across several parts of Telltale.
One source told USGamer that, "At one point, there was a quote (printed on paper) on one of the creative director's doors that read something to the tune of, 'It's not about how much time you need to make a good game, it's about how good of a game you can make with the time you have.'" Several other sources confirmed they had also seen this sign.
Working on these franchises wasn't easy on employees either. One anonymous source said that having to work on games tied to existing IPs was sometimes seen "as a hindrance" due to the nature of working with an established IP. In addition, according to several sources, Telltale handed down "heavy rewrites" that could account for as much as "80 percent" of a game. And these rewrites would sometimes come very last minute.
"[Sometimes] team leadership would push through [with rewrites] anyway for one of many reasons—time, prestige, actual belief in subpar ideas," one source said. "And it would always come back on them in the end. We'd always eventually fix the product. But late fixes were deeply disruptive. [...] [These problems] could have been avoided by better decisions earlier in the process."
Inconsistent feedback was also cited as a problem. Another source said, "So much effort was spent reacting to reactions, and the notes would be wildly different every time. So a lot of time it resulted in schizophrenic [game] episodes cobbled together via contrary notes."
Bruner took over as CEO of Telltale in 2015 from Connors, who former employees described as a far less imposing figure. Numerous employees describe Bruner as cultivating a culture of fear, and a running joke at the company compared Bruner’s attention to the Eye of Sauron, the fiery gaze of the villain in The Lord of the Rings. “Inevitably, the Eye of Sauron looks at you, and that beam of light just blows everything up and makes it a hellscape where you don’t believe in a thing you’re building anymore,” says a former employee. “A lot of times at Telltale, you don’t feel like you’re wanted there.”
Executive review meetings with higher-ups like Bruner became infamous within the company as brutal, hours-long arguments where Bruner would belittle and question the choices of those involved with the studio’s projects, according to half a dozen sources. “When [Bruner] saw something he decided he didn’t like — which very often was exactly what he had asked for — [that] was really undeserved, and often really difficult for teams to deal with,” the source says.
Tulley Rafferty, a former Telltale programmer who worked at the company from 2008 until the November layoffs, agrees that the critiques were often devastating. “There was no warning. You go into the executive review, and they take a giant turd on you. That was your feedback: ‘We hate this thing that you made.’”
“I remember hearing one of my bosses say, ‘I love that we can just shout at each other and curse at each other in a meeting. It’s totally great,’” says one former employee.
After The Walking Dead, to describe one Telltale game was to describe all of them: an episodic adventure game that unfolded across sequentially released episodes, where players make difficult choices with emotional consequences. This became the creative mold at Telltale, where former employees say every new game was — to some degree — trying to recapture the spark of The Walking Dead. “Every game was held up to that standard, regardless of how realistic that was,” one source says.
How an award-winning studio abruptly shuttered, as told by the people who were there