Here is the секунда batch of Вопросы to the DOTT:SE team. Interviewed this time are Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, James Spafford, and Matt Hansen. First published by Cheeseness on 5th August 2015.
[An] old LucasArts interview [mentions] that the original DOTT team got a quote from Chuck Jones himself about the game [...] Could Ты use the quote in the DOTT:SE marketing? - daffy
Tim: We gave the great Chuck Jones a demo of the game HOPING he would say something that we could use as a blurb, but he never сказал(-а) anything that we could use. We should have just come out and asked him for one. Still, it was fun hanging out with him.
What is the most memorable moment in DoTT for each team member? (perhaps a certain puzzle, cutscene, dialogue, etc.) - Scrawffler
Tim: It’s all special to me! But the part that get stuck in my head the most is when Weird Ed says, “Are Ты making fun of me?” For some reason, I still repeat that line in conversation to this day.
Spaff: surely *everyone’s most truly memorable moment is purple tentacle’s decree to take on the world? Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.
The line of dialogue that I keep finding in my brain is Laverne saying ‘Yoo-hoo, mr Tentacle guy” . Also Hoagie’s lines about offering George Washington an ‘excellent smoke’
Dave: I would have a hard time even narrowing it down to a dozen. I’ve revisited the game recently, and after еще than twenty years there are still loads of things in it that make me smile. So, instead of picking the most memorable, I’ll just pick the first memorable
The very first thing that comes to mind is the dialog where Hoagie talks to Dead Cousin Ted. Why do I like that one? For one thing it was really fun to write, but also it’s an example of a kind of self-indulgent excess that highlights one of the enjoyable things about working on those games at that studio at that time, which is that we had the freedom and the bandwidth to create things for their own sake. I mean, there is no reason for there to be a dialog with Ted at all, или at least no reason in pure game terms. There’s no puzzle and Ты don’t learn anything useful. It’s purely a character exploration moment for Hoagie. I happen to think those kinds of moments are important.
Do Ты plan on eventually releasing concept art to the public? I understand it’s not appropriate to do so now, but how about after the SE has been released? - Scrawffler
Matt: We’re still looking for it, it wasn’t as well preserved as it was in Grim - we have photocopies of some of it, but we’re hopeful to find еще of the original stuff.
Is the DoTT Special Edition likely to lead to “special editions” of additional LucasArts titles? - ShyGuyXXL, dsc016
Matt: We’d Любовь to go back and revisit some еще games, especially Full Throttle, we’ll have to see how well DoTT is received!
What’s the point of being able to pick up the hub кепка, колпачок in the future basement after Laverne gets punched into the old time machine? - ShyGuyXXL
Dave: Point? This is день of the Tentacle, things don’t need to have an actual point, do they?
But I’ll say this: We had a general philosophy that if there was something in the environment that looked like it might be useful, then the player should be able to at least try to use it. Not letting Ты touch stuff for reasons that feel arbitrary disrupts the Фэнтези and makes the game world feel less real, and that’s bad, lazy game design.
Usually what we would do to avoid this is to remove all the ladders and pickaxes and so on from the background art, but in this case someone had done a really fun Анимация that wound up with that колпак, покрышку on the floor, and it was kind of late in the production and it was going to be a lot of work to change it, and we couldn’t think of a good enough reason for Laverne to refuse to take the hubcap, so, we just let Ты pick it up and try to do stuff with it even though it wouldn’t actually solve any of your problems.
Are there uncompressed voice recordings from the original game? Will they be used? - d_Stilgar
Matt: Yes. There are. We found the original DAT tapes from the recording session and we’ve painstakingly gone through and re-edited the sessions to pull out high quality audio for the voice, which is what we will be using for the special edition!
Will Ты be doing a super-high resolution version [for other platforms] like Ты did with Broken Age for iPad? - d_Stilgar
Matt: We’re making DoTT as high resolution as we feasibly can, so that we can make sure it fits in with the current and maybe even Далее generation of computers and consoles, we’ll see! smile
Will Ты be adding a “mega-monkey” mode with some new, еще difficult puzzles? - d_Stilgar
Matt: nope, sorry!
Any cool discoveries (that Ты can talk about) this time [regarding interesting things found in the game’s data files]? Maybe Grossman nonchalantly revealing the Secret of Monkey Island somewhere? Remnants of Остаться в живых puzzles? - Alfred J
Matt: We did find out one interesting thing actually, about Ben!
Spaff: Oh yeah! Whilst Чтение through Tim’s DOTT notebooks I spotted reference to one ‘Ruben Throttle’ - Was this Ben Throttle’s full name? I asked Tim and he confirmed it was. That’s a fun fact in and of itself, but it gets better. in 2001 или so my friend Jake and I asked Tim if Hoagie was Ben’s brother, and he сказал(-а) something along the lines of “how did Ты know that!?”. When I asked him about the Ruben Throttle thing, Tim brought up his relationship with Hoagie again and сказал(-а) “their mom named them both after sandwiches”. So there Ты go!
Eddie Riggs is clearly related to them somehow too, but maybe as a cousin или something seeing as he doesn’t have a сэндвич, бутерброд name? Unless Eddie Riggs is a stage name, hmmmm.
Do Ты feel like pulling apart these classics and putting them back again is giving Ты a better understanding of what separates a good adventure game from a great one? Are Ты secretly being trained to form the most powerful point & click Дизайн team ever created to push Double Fine into a new era of adventure gaming? - Alfred J
Matt: *jokingly* We already are the most powerful point & click team ever!
Spaff: I guess DF already did enter into a new era of Adventure gaming though, right?
Matt: Yup! but seriously… hmm Ты can see the planning that went into this game up front, the game was largely designed on paper before doing anything - from my experience working on a handful of adventure games in the past, that hasn’t been the approach, it’s been a bit еще organic. There are pros and cons to both ways, but it was clear what the vision of this game was from the get go. Lots of careful planning! That’s not really how it works these days though.
Have Dave and/or Tim talked to Ты about alternative ideas for the game, from back when they were designing it in the early 90s? - Alfred J
Matt: well, we did discover there were alternate characters!
Spaff: Oh yeah, because it was Maniac Mansion, which has a load of characters to choose from, the original idea for Dott was to have еще than three also, right?
Matt: Yup! We’ll talk еще about them in the special edition commentary I think!
We all know Tim would Любовь to do a Full Throttle remake at some point, but what are some of your Избранное older games you’d Любовь to remake next? - Alfred J
Matt: I’d Любовь to remake Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders, because that was one of my favourite games growing up. It’s one of the only David лиса, фокс adventure games, it’s unpredictable and out there, and i Любовь it. I’d Любовь to see a special edition of that game, a talkie especially!
Spaff: There are a ton of things rife for remaking - Loom, Fate of Atlantis… Ball blazer?
Matt: Sam and Max Hit the Road too - we made some 3D Sam and Max games at Telltale, but it would be great to revisit them in 2D, it represents a lot of what Steve was trying to do in his comics. It’d be great to see that!
There are still many еще Вопросы to be answered. Expect them published someday soon!
[An] old LucasArts interview [mentions] that the original DOTT team got a quote from Chuck Jones himself about the game [...] Could Ты use the quote in the DOTT:SE marketing? - daffy
Tim: We gave the great Chuck Jones a demo of the game HOPING he would say something that we could use as a blurb, but he never сказал(-а) anything that we could use. We should have just come out and asked him for one. Still, it was fun hanging out with him.
What is the most memorable moment in DoTT for each team member? (perhaps a certain puzzle, cutscene, dialogue, etc.) - Scrawffler
Tim: It’s all special to me! But the part that get stuck in my head the most is when Weird Ed says, “Are Ты making fun of me?” For some reason, I still repeat that line in conversation to this day.
Spaff: surely *everyone’s most truly memorable moment is purple tentacle’s decree to take on the world? Anyone who claims otherwise is a liar.
The line of dialogue that I keep finding in my brain is Laverne saying ‘Yoo-hoo, mr Tentacle guy” . Also Hoagie’s lines about offering George Washington an ‘excellent smoke’
Dave: I would have a hard time even narrowing it down to a dozen. I’ve revisited the game recently, and after еще than twenty years there are still loads of things in it that make me smile. So, instead of picking the most memorable, I’ll just pick the first memorable
The very first thing that comes to mind is the dialog where Hoagie talks to Dead Cousin Ted. Why do I like that one? For one thing it was really fun to write, but also it’s an example of a kind of self-indulgent excess that highlights one of the enjoyable things about working on those games at that studio at that time, which is that we had the freedom and the bandwidth to create things for their own sake. I mean, there is no reason for there to be a dialog with Ted at all, или at least no reason in pure game terms. There’s no puzzle and Ты don’t learn anything useful. It’s purely a character exploration moment for Hoagie. I happen to think those kinds of moments are important.
Do Ты plan on eventually releasing concept art to the public? I understand it’s not appropriate to do so now, but how about after the SE has been released? - Scrawffler
Matt: We’re still looking for it, it wasn’t as well preserved as it was in Grim - we have photocopies of some of it, but we’re hopeful to find еще of the original stuff.
Is the DoTT Special Edition likely to lead to “special editions” of additional LucasArts titles? - ShyGuyXXL, dsc016
Matt: We’d Любовь to go back and revisit some еще games, especially Full Throttle, we’ll have to see how well DoTT is received!
What’s the point of being able to pick up the hub кепка, колпачок in the future basement after Laverne gets punched into the old time machine? - ShyGuyXXL
Dave: Point? This is день of the Tentacle, things don’t need to have an actual point, do they?
But I’ll say this: We had a general philosophy that if there was something in the environment that looked like it might be useful, then the player should be able to at least try to use it. Not letting Ты touch stuff for reasons that feel arbitrary disrupts the Фэнтези and makes the game world feel less real, and that’s bad, lazy game design.
Usually what we would do to avoid this is to remove all the ladders and pickaxes and so on from the background art, but in this case someone had done a really fun Анимация that wound up with that колпак, покрышку on the floor, and it was kind of late in the production and it was going to be a lot of work to change it, and we couldn’t think of a good enough reason for Laverne to refuse to take the hubcap, so, we just let Ты pick it up and try to do stuff with it even though it wouldn’t actually solve any of your problems.
Are there uncompressed voice recordings from the original game? Will they be used? - d_Stilgar
Matt: Yes. There are. We found the original DAT tapes from the recording session and we’ve painstakingly gone through and re-edited the sessions to pull out high quality audio for the voice, which is what we will be using for the special edition!
Will Ты be doing a super-high resolution version [for other platforms] like Ты did with Broken Age for iPad? - d_Stilgar
Matt: We’re making DoTT as high resolution as we feasibly can, so that we can make sure it fits in with the current and maybe even Далее generation of computers and consoles, we’ll see! smile
Will Ты be adding a “mega-monkey” mode with some new, еще difficult puzzles? - d_Stilgar
Matt: nope, sorry!
Any cool discoveries (that Ты can talk about) this time [regarding interesting things found in the game’s data files]? Maybe Grossman nonchalantly revealing the Secret of Monkey Island somewhere? Remnants of Остаться в живых puzzles? - Alfred J
Matt: We did find out one interesting thing actually, about Ben!
Spaff: Oh yeah! Whilst Чтение through Tim’s DOTT notebooks I spotted reference to one ‘Ruben Throttle’ - Was this Ben Throttle’s full name? I asked Tim and he confirmed it was. That’s a fun fact in and of itself, but it gets better. in 2001 или so my friend Jake and I asked Tim if Hoagie was Ben’s brother, and he сказал(-а) something along the lines of “how did Ты know that!?”. When I asked him about the Ruben Throttle thing, Tim brought up his relationship with Hoagie again and сказал(-а) “their mom named them both after sandwiches”. So there Ты go!
Eddie Riggs is clearly related to them somehow too, but maybe as a cousin или something seeing as he doesn’t have a сэндвич, бутерброд name? Unless Eddie Riggs is a stage name, hmmmm.
Do Ты feel like pulling apart these classics and putting them back again is giving Ты a better understanding of what separates a good adventure game from a great one? Are Ты secretly being trained to form the most powerful point & click Дизайн team ever created to push Double Fine into a new era of adventure gaming? - Alfred J
Matt: *jokingly* We already are the most powerful point & click team ever!
Spaff: I guess DF already did enter into a new era of Adventure gaming though, right?
Matt: Yup! but seriously… hmm Ты can see the planning that went into this game up front, the game was largely designed on paper before doing anything - from my experience working on a handful of adventure games in the past, that hasn’t been the approach, it’s been a bit еще organic. There are pros and cons to both ways, but it was clear what the vision of this game was from the get go. Lots of careful planning! That’s not really how it works these days though.
Have Dave and/or Tim talked to Ты about alternative ideas for the game, from back when they were designing it in the early 90s? - Alfred J
Matt: well, we did discover there were alternate characters!
Spaff: Oh yeah, because it was Maniac Mansion, which has a load of characters to choose from, the original idea for Dott was to have еще than three also, right?
Matt: Yup! We’ll talk еще about them in the special edition commentary I think!
We all know Tim would Любовь to do a Full Throttle remake at some point, but what are some of your Избранное older games you’d Любовь to remake next? - Alfred J
Matt: I’d Любовь to remake Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders, because that was one of my favourite games growing up. It’s one of the only David лиса, фокс adventure games, it’s unpredictable and out there, and i Любовь it. I’d Любовь to see a special edition of that game, a talkie especially!
Spaff: There are a ton of things rife for remaking - Loom, Fate of Atlantis… Ball blazer?
Matt: Sam and Max Hit the Road too - we made some 3D Sam and Max games at Telltale, but it would be great to revisit them in 2D, it represents a lot of what Steve was trying to do in his comics. It’d be great to see that!
There are still many еще Вопросы to be answered. Expect them published someday soon!