AdviceToolbox
open-ended adventure scene, but it’s grounded
by a one-off mechanic to make the scene feel
more special.
Our mechanic takes less than a second to
explain, and we don’t even have to worry about
who likes what kind of food. It’s a simple-to-
understand task that, at first, makes the time
and safety we have to catch up with our party
members feel like a gift, until we realise there’s
no way to ‘win’, and help
everyone. This is a clear
case of the ‘weight’ of our
scene mattering more
than completing a puzzle;
the stakes aren’t life or
death, but about how the rest of the caravan
members will ‘remember’ you going forward.
END ON THE PIG
Faith, episode one of Fables: The Wolf Among Us,
actually has one of the shortest scenes in the
whole game, but this is also what makes it flow
so beautifully. In this scene, we’re seeing the
small space Bigby (the sheriff) lives in, but the big
reveal is seeing who he’s sharing it with, and our
players getting to talk with the character Colin
(the pig). In the original layout for this scene,
however, there were actually more cameras and
objects to interact with. But as short as it was,
there were still multiple cuts made to the scene
- specifically, to the number of camera shots.
In the end, things are tightly framed to give
the scene an almost staged, linear flow. We
start inside the kitchen, head out, around the
corner, and towards a chair where our player
finds – what else – but a fairytale pig, fast asleep.
And what everyone realised about this scene
was, once the pig is on camera, there’s nothing
more interesting in the scene, so why encourage
backtracking, or going anywhere else but
forward? In the end, we decided to let the scene
get to its most interesting point as quickly as we
could, and called it a day.
“We were giving
our players free rein
to move around”THROWING EVERYTHING
AT THE WALL
These are moments where I think Telltale
became more focused and streamlined in
its approach to freewalks. My final example,
meanwhile, comes from Guardians of the Galaxy:
The Telltale Series, and, in this particular case, the
lesson we learned was to throw everything at
the wall.
Unlike other franchises where mechanics
were stripped out in order to keep the player
focused, Guardians of the
Galaxy was a case where
one of its characters,
Peter Quill, had powers
that the team felt would
be fun to try to realise
within our world as best we could.
This meant expanding and stretching the
limits of our freewalks by adding in three entirely
new mechanics just for Guardians (see Figure 2),
each of which had to play well with one another,
and work simultaneously together, because we
wanted our player to feel connected to their
teammates, and to have some futuristic gadgets
at their fingertips the way Peter Quill would in
the comics and movies.
Not every game could support such full and
expansive mechanics as Guardians of the Galaxy,
but our aim was to always make these freewalk
moments – whether they involved starving
survivors or slumbering pigs – as focused and as
memorable as we possibly could. Figure 2: In Guardians
of the Galaxy, we tried to
deepen our freewalks by
adding jet boots, a comms
link, and a Pulse Scanner. “So-and-so will remember
that” was a visual mechanic
Telltale created to continually
remind the player that they
were an integral part of – and
having an active effect on –
the ongoing narrative. Telltale’s first episodic outing was Sam &
Max Save the World in 2006, and there
would be six years, and 14 games, before
making The Walking Dead in 2012.wfmag.cc \ 39