Mark Darin, lead designer on SBCG4AP responds to our questions:

GF: Obviously working with a license is risky in the gaming industry, as their success is usually pretty rare...Do you think having the Chapman’s aboard from the get-go helped you overcome that curse, or did the Homestar universe just fit better than the other average licensed games out there?

Mark Darin: Having the Chapman’s so directly involved definitely helped our street cred! Anytime the original creators of a license are involved in the transition to Video Game, it insures that the core idea and integrity stay intact. It also shows that both the Chapman’s and Telltale Games are interested in collaborating and doing the game right. People who are fans of Homestar Runner know that the Chaps aren’t in it to make a fast buck, they do it because they love it. And they wouldn’t trust their baby to just anyone looking to cash in on a Strong Bad cart racer or Homestar shooter.

We were very lucky to have them involved in the process, but success still comes down to making a great game! We have a great team of experienced (and funny) designers here dedicated to making the game as fun as it is funny, as well as artists and animators capable of making the transition from 2D cartoon to 3D video game nearly flawlessly! The final word, of course, comes from the gamers. They are the ones that have ultimately made the game a success.

GF: How do you find a balance between making a game that the fans of Homestarrunner.com will enjoy as well as people who’ve never even heard of the series? Obviously the fans will be the first to download the game, but is there a way to balance out the fan service and connect with those who are unfamiliar with Strong Bad and friends?

Mark Darin: There is a certain aspect of the Strong Bad world that gets it’s laughs form self referential comedy, but the core of the humor comes from observing the absurdity of the everyday things that happen around you... often in retrospect. Like the ability to laugh at that old TV show that you actually thought was cool when you were a kid. Or remembering fondly how you used to pick on your kid sister and steal her stuff! This stuff is universal and translates whether you know these characters or not.

I have read a few reviews that stated that if you are not already a Homestar Runner fan, you won’t understand these games, but all of these reviews have come from people who were admittedly already fans!! Every review I read that was written by someone who was coming to the franchise for the first time said that they quickly grew to know the characters and never felt that they didn’t understand what was going on. Granted, they certainly missed a number of inside references, but the point is that they didn’t know they were missing these references and still understood and enjoyed the game anyway!

GF: Looking back at the series, now that it’s available in its entirety, is there anything in particular you’d change or ideas that you feel could have been more fleshed out?

Mark Darin: Oh yes! Like a piece of art, the creator is never entirely satisfied with their creation. There will always be things that we wish we had more time to flesh out or tweak. The final cut scene of Dangeresque 3 just didn’t have the right music accompaniment for me, the controls in the Race to the End of the Race could have been tighter and more interesting, the animation of Strong Bad loading the Light Musket should have been used more often... In the end these things are so minor that most people are not even going to notice, and it’s much more important for us to be able to get the games into the hand of eager fans in a timely manner. At some point, we’ve got to let our chicks leave the nest... or something like that.

GF: Any ideas that you wanted to throw into the game to mix things up a bit that just didn’t work? (gameplay styles, story angles, that kind of thing?)

Mark Darin:  That’s hard to say. We rarely get to a point where we have started to implement some ideas for game play only to find they aren’t working. These ideas usually come and go quickly in the brainstorming phase of design.

That said there were some things we tried early in development that we ultimately decided to leave out. One of these things was Character Moods. In the prototyping phase, we wanted to have Strong Bad’s actions affect the moods and attitudes of the other characters in the game, and have those characters remember your actions. The downside was that this meant we’d have to write a LOT more dialog for each character so they could respond to you differently depending on what mood they were currently in. For our production schedule this was problematic. Instead we decided that we’d write some general lines that could be delivered in a generic tone and let the characters body language do the work. Well, have you seen these characters?! They don’t exactly have faces capable of subtle expression... and body language? Half of these guys don’t even have arms! In the end we decided that this was a cool idea, but probably not right for this franchise.

GF: Do you think there’s anything that you may try to introduce into future games? (Provided there’s a season 2, which I’m hopeful there is.)

Mark Darin:  We’re not talking about a season 2 at this point. We generally come to new game seasons with a clean slate. There isn’t anything I can think of that we really wanted to get in but didn’t.


Thanks to Mark Darin, Emily Morganti and Joel Dreskin for making this Q&A possible!

Posted by Jay Acevedo (AnodaJay)

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Posted by : Zach R. (BornOfAsh)