Any gamer that’s pointed, clicked, and adventured for more than two minutes in their lives has experienced the fun-crushing frustration of getting stuck. Given that Telltale Games resurrected the point & click adventure with games like Sam & Max and Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures, Telltale Creative Director Dave Grossman knows a thing or two about getting stuck. While talking with Dave at GDC 2009, I learned about his efforts in the good fight against this odious demon.

Is there anything you’d like people to know about who you are or what you do?

DG: What I do... wow. It’s hard, what I do.

Respect the writer, huh?

DG: Yeah. The writer’s job is difficult in the industry as a whole.

Writing for Telltale must be somewhat different than in the industry as a whole though, I’d imagine. What changes about the writing process for episodic gaming from other types of games? Naturally, the script has to be shorter, but more in terms like - you want players to finish each episode so that when the next one comes out, they’re not stuck on the last one and buy the new one. What special differences do you make for easy flow versus the old style of adventure games where you have to scare a cat past a piece of tape to make a fake moustache?

DG: That’s where the puzzle design meets the righting, right there. We’re making a game that is designed to have some challenge for the user, because it’s not very interesting otherwise. They need something to think about, and yet we do want them to get through it by the end of the month and not have too hard of a time. There is more coming, and we want them to get all the way to the end so the next episode makes sense. You get right down to one of the toughest things about storytelling in games which is pacing.

Normally you don’t really control the pacing when there is a player involved. They can do whatever they want to, they can get up out of their chair and go get a sandwich, and they can get stuck on stuff. That is the worst enemy, having them get stuck on stuff and get frustrated and give up. We’re always fighting the good fight against frustration. We’re not trying to specifically make things easier, but we are trying to identify the points where a player might get in to trouble and make sure all the information is there to puzzle their way through.

The machine is actually watching you play and trying to decide if nothing’s happening. If you’re just wandering around not finding anything new, and you didn’t see that lamp on the table, the game will respond and start highlighting that lamp when you walk in the room. Really, we want you to notice this lamp - go over there and get it. Characters will start piping up and slyly dropping more information in your lap. It’s kind of like The Truman Show where everyone around you is conspiring to give you a good experience and to get you from point A to point B.

So how are scripts written at Telltale? Since you guys put one of these episodes out a month I imagine there must be a creative solution in place.

DG: We actually borrowed a model from Hollywood which is the writer’s room. In the beginning, when we were doing the first Sam & Max series, it was two guys and while we were writing the script we were designing the next episode and managing the production of the one before it, and we just went completely insane.

Must be impossible to maintain a train of thought on anything too, since you’re designing this episode, then switching over to this completely different script...

DG: And I still have to do that - but I’m the only one who has to do that so it’s good. What happens now is there’s a group of guys who are designers for the season. For Wallace & Gromit there’s three guys: Andy, Joe, and Sean. Each one is taking command of an episode in turn, and we all brainstorm together, them plus me. We work out a puzzle structure for the first episode and then Andy goes off and writes the script. Then we start Joe’s episode. Andy’s now spending an hour with us a day designing Joe’s episode, but he’s spending seven hours a day writing his own episode. Then we start working on Sean’s, and by the time we’re done with that, Andy’s first episode is out and now we can start on a new one. We’ve got a rotating thing going on, and we have one of those for each of our series.

I get to pay attention to six or seven different things in the course of a day, but for most people it’s relatively sane. The writers get a little focus and each episode has the loving care of a parent going through the whole way, and a little individual character.

When I imagined Telltale and the fact that you guys make games so quickly, I imagined some sort of rotating structure where one guy would come in, you’d pow-wow for a little bit, and then he’d walk out and high-five the next guy coming in on the way out. Planning would be like, ok, we’re doing this for this episode, and this for this one, but multiple steps are done at the same time.

DG: Yeah, and it’s really great to have these guys talking to each other every day, for an hour at least. Then, that makes all kinds of great stuff possible. Like, ooo, we just got this great idea for the third episode, but you’re still making the first one, so let’s put this and this in there so that when people see it later, it matches up - even if we don’t think of it up front.

Ah! I’ve seen some of that in the games.

DG: Plus that helps them keep cohesion with the style of the game.