Job Title: Game Designer
Organisation: Telltale Games
Location: San Rafael, CA
Background to the employer and job description
Telltale Games was founded in 2004 by Dan Connors and Kevin Bruner, it is located in San Rafael, California. Producing Episodic adventure games from preexisting franchising, including Sam and Max and Wallace and Gromit. Episodic games are shorter experiences with faster releases usually five episodes, a complete season, is released within six months of the first episode.Telltale employs roughly 70 people, of various disciplines (writers, artists, programmers), this number can fluctuate with current projects. Recently Telltale expanded their offices to include the floor below them, with workload increasing due to recently acquired licences from NBC Universal: Jurassic Park and Back to the Future. Many of Telltale’s employees are formerly of LucasArts, including Dave Grossman, who worked on many Lucas Arts games from the late eighties and the early nineties, including the first two Monkey Island titles.
Sean Vanaman is a game designer at Telltale and has been working for them since 2008. Having previously worked for Disney in Film and games during and after his college years. He was recruited after Dave Grossman read an article Sean wrote, with which he was impressed enough to make him an offer.
Sean’s official job title is game designer, the majority of the work he does is writing and design. He is an acclaimed comedy writer in the video games industry, having appeared on the Games Developers Conference with Juggernaut comedy writers Tim Schafer and Rihanna Pratchett in 2010. Other major accomplishments include being the lead writer for Tales of Monkey Island: Lair of the Leviathan and the lead designer on the recently released, massive cross over game, Poker Night at the Inventory, which involves characters from four distinct franchises.
Telltale is fairly relaxed in it’s atmosphere, where employees work in ways which allow them to be as productive as possible. They accommodate people’s needs, as much as possible, whilst remaining productive, such as those in working families. Standard working environments are shared low cubicles, Sean shares with Jake Rodkin, a graphic and web designer. This allows for easy communication between those working on the same projects, as well as being able to see what everyone else is doing. Along with the cubicles there are several conference rooms used for meetings, creative briefs and discussions.
Vanaman is usually in the Telltale offices from 9am until 6pm, however during crunch time this can extend much later. Often crunch time is seen as the biggest drawback of games development. Sean is usually one of the first on any particular project along with other writers/leads of the project. Early on Sean and his colleagues work on the core structure of the game and it’s overarching story. From here Sean will work with a programmer and an artist building rough assets for the game’s development, testing to see if the initial plan is viable and fun to play in the final product. During this time the overall design and script are being finalised by Sean and co-workers. Next the team working on the project expands to include other artists and programmers to produce final assets suitable for the final product. From here Sean’s creative process will be completed, he now assumes a directorial position making sure the game is as it was originally intended.
Recruitment, training and career development
Telltale are always looking for new employees, they pursue certain valuable people with applicable talents. Being a fairly small company Telltale are comfortable employing those that they have worked with in the past. Building a portfolio of your best work, is considered by Sean, to be the most effective way of improving how employable you are to Telltale. Being a small developer, employees have an influence on potential employees, hence impressing a designer can be a major advantage.
This is of course needs to be coupled with meeting Telltale’s employment criteria; which includes being able to work in teams, being great at communicating with colleagues, being proficient with various scripting languages. Of course with relevant experience in the games industry is a positive, however this is not usually an option for graduates. Creative writing skills and experience with several IT packages are also advantageous when seeking employment. Along with this Telltale offer a periodic internship in design, which requires less technical knowledge, but does require a certain level of talent. This is directed mainly at recent graduates and current students.
Telltale don’t offer any formal training, however other employees will help educate and train those that are talented but lack the necessary skill set required.This method can be more effective than a formal training program; Sean specifically has “probably learned more working at TTG in the past 3 years” than he “did in the five previous.”
Rewards and frustrations
Sean, having originally worked in games for Disney whilst in university was writing a lot of relevant material, which lead to him being recruited by Telltale. Currently he works as a designer, writer and project lead, which he enjoys. Ideally in the future he would like to transition from being a lead designer to teaching game design or writing. Though this is a long term goal, with Sean not expecting either to happen in the next few years.
Like any form of employment working for Telltale Games has both rewards and frustrations. However they stem from Episodic gaming’s business model. So the main reward of working for Telltale is releasing fantastic games which star great characters. Yet this is also a frustration, with such a fast turn-around on each individual episode it can feel that something is being left out of the product, which was originally intended to be included. Another frustration is that the job can control your life, with crunch time, long hours affecting your social life, however this is not limited to Telltale, it is a problem of the entire industry.
Personal skills needed
Sean considers that the 3 most important skills are communication, critical thinking and the ability to be humble.
Communication is needed throughout the entire games industry, as the majority of products are made by multiple people and others will work with what you produce and you will likely work with that which others have produced. Such as if Sean cannot get Jake Rodkin excited about part of the user interface or “crazy pop-ups” he isn’t going to execute it well, thus the original idea will not be implemented correctly.
Critical thinking is needed by Sean to allow each game to be released in a complete state. Objectivity is key here, if a scene is put forward and isn’t viable, it is likely necessary to cut it. An example of this is from Telltale’s latest release: Poker Night at the Inventory, whereby Strong Bad would use a Mobile phone, however with the game there were no systems allowing the phone to be managed during the game. Luckily it was cut before too much work was put into implementing the phone.
Being humble is also incredibly important. If you always think that your ideas are going to be better than someone else’s others aren’t going to want to work with you, or will implement your ideas badly. Being able to objectively judge an idea, independent of it’s source, which is related to critical thinking.
Would I work for Telltale?
I would absolutely love to have the same job that Sean holds. I would also be incredibly happy working for Telltale Games. It seems to be a fun place to work, with interesting staff working with fantastic intellectual properties. However I would rather work more specifically in design opposed to writing. I want to work somewhere where I feel I am producing a product not just a number, to say to friends and others: “I helped make this”. However this wouldn’t be applicable if I didn’t have the skills necessary to gain employment with Telltale, however the majority of criteria which they look for I can accomplish, with my abilities in creative writing and programming being the weakest areas. Communication, I have been playing games online with various employees of Telltale for the past three years, as well as talking to various staff members about various other subjects, such as map building in Unreal Tournament 3 and Team Fortress 2. I’m fairly humble, while I have ideas, I am quite happy to support another’s if it is better. I am a critical thinker, if something is not going correctly I will try and correct it or approach from a different direction, I can show this through running juggling workshops having to assess how well new jugglers are progressing and help them improve.
If I were to work for Telltale Games I would prefer to enter as an intern, as the skill-set required has a lower entry barrier, so less would be expected of me. I would need to learn a lot to effectively work for Telltale, having never used their specific tool set, however being familiar with other tools such as Unreal Development Kit, Source SDK and Python will give me an edge here. The main reason currently of why I cannot work for Telltale Games would be that I am currently not eligible to work in the United States of America. If I were to apply there would be the be the costly and stressful task of relocating to California. However if I could overcome all of these hurdles I would jump at the chance to work for Telltale Games.
