38 / wfmag.ccAdviceToolbox
From The Walking Dead to Guardians of the Galaxy,
John revisits the evolution of Telltale’s ‘freewalk’ sectionsTelltale’s
explorable spaces
AUTHOR
JOHN MAULDIN
John is a writer and programmer with a passion for interactive narrative and
story-driven design, having worked on games like Fables: The Wolf Among Us,
Tales from the Borderlands, and Guardians of the Galaxy: The Telltale Series.the story often meant exploring a scene and
dissecting the set-piece’s elements. What
became a constant push at Telltale over the
years, though, was to learn from movies and
television. Scenes became more tightly focused,
and systems like inventories were scrapped in
order to keep the player closer to the plot.
This balancing act of staging, interaction, and
narrative intent are well worth examining as one
long conversation about how to effectively fill an
explorable space. So, here’s a quick close-up on
a few of the memorable freewalk sections that
have stuck with me after all these years.SCARED IS HARD,
HUNGRY’S HEAVY
In episode two of The Walking Dead, Starved
For Help, the game takes a slight departure
from the nightmare-fuelled action of previous
scenes to give players a different taste of our
characters’ reality. Having secured themselves
at an abandoned motel, our caravan is running
low on food. Instead of timers, fail states, and
immediate danger, however, we’re safe to
explore our surroundings at our own pace.
This feels like a much-needed breather, and we
actually have the chance to talk with everyone,
in any order, before moving forward. This is
partly because the point of this scene isn’t about
‘winning’, but having more time and freedom to
absorb the weight of the current situation.
As it turns out, our player only has four food
items with which to feed ten hungry people (see
Figure 1), which is made clear at the beginning
of our scene, but not truly felt until the scene
plays out. It feels and plays slowly, like a classic, Figure 1: As Telltale evolved,
inventory systems were relied
on less and less because they
became a barrier to entry for
new players. That didn’t stop
us from developing mechanics
that were only used for one
particular scene.
T
elltale reinvigorated the ageing
point-and-click adventure genre
by simplifying and expanding on
its mechanics and marrying them
to dramatic, branching, episodic
narratives. The end goal was to better plug
its players into what was the most fun and
engaging for them: their stories. One of the
most fascinating parts of working at Telltale over
the years, though, was getting to see how they
evolved one of the genre’s oldest mainstays –
exploration, or, the ‘adventure’ part of the point-
and-click adventure.
In Telltale terms, we called these sections
‘freewalks’, because we were giving our players
free rein to move their characters around.
In classic point-and-click games, these were
sections where puzzles lived, and advancing