Game Developer May Issue Showcases Tales Of Monkey Island, Crunch Horrors

Author: by Staff

The May 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to print and digital subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats. This issue's exclusive postmortem delves into Telltale Games' Tales of Monkey Island, a game that brings the studio -- founded by LucasArts veterans -- back to its roots. Telltale's Emily Morganti writes: "To some extent, our episodic development prevents feature creep, because the schedules are fairly compact and the monthly release dates provide clearly defined endpoints. But if a scene isn’t reading right, this often isn’t apparent until late in the process. The game doesn’t come together in its fully playable format until a week or two before release, at which point there’s not much time left for changes." Also featured in this issue is an entire reader-supplied article on crunch time horror stories -- recollections that are almost too horrifying for print. For instance: "During one of these long company meetings, our producer began the meeting by blurting out angrily, 'We are going to keep having meetings until we figure out why there isn’t enough daily progress!' But of course we felt this was exactly the reason progress had slowed: too many meetings! We barely got to spend time in our offices long enough to complete anything significant; we only made adjustments to existing assets so we had something to show." In addition, adventure game veteran and The Secret of Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert writes about some of the design decisions that he made in that game, 20 years after its release. "Getting stuck on the ocean floor is one of my favorite puzzles because the solution is so obvious most people overlook it (put the anchor in your pocket). The other puzzle I did in the same vein was in the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade adventure game, where Indy has to have faith and just walk over a ledge. Players that had faith and just clicked on the other side of the crevice had no problem. Players that fiddled around and clicked on other stuff, ignoring the advice, always fell." Also included in this edition is an article on integrating Newton's laws of motion into physics engines and an interview with video game composer Akira Yamaoka. In addition, our regular columnists and special guests including Steve Theodore, Damion Schubert, Jesse Harlin and Matthew Wasteland contribute detailed and important pieces on various areas of game development. Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of May 2010's magazine as a single issue.