The story behind Grim Fandango, Brutal Legend, and more with Tim Schafer

Tim of legend

Tim Schafer and the entire team at Double Fine Productions must be feeling pretty good right now. With the first half of Broken Age now available and garnering the adoration of critics, point-and-click adventures are back in the spotlight after years of laying low. Broken Age has made quite the journey since its inception as a massively successful Kickstarter, and is a credit to those who helped make it. For Schafer, it's just the latest in a long and storied career in game design.

Schafer has been part of the gaming industry since the late '80s--and when you've worked on so many beloved games, you tend to pick up a thing or two from each project that'll make the next one run a little smoother. To find out more about the road leading up to Broken Age, I asked Tim about the important lessons he learned while making some of his most noteworthy titles (you can listen to the interview in full below). The answers may shock, delight, or terrify you--but they're all invaluable nuggets of wisdom for anyone who aspires to make great games.

It's tough being a tester, so give them a break

Before Schafer ensconced himself in the adventure genre, he had to cut his teeth on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Action Game. "[LucasArts] hired a lot of us SCUMMlets--people who were going to work in SCUMM, who they also had no respect for--the grunts," recalls Schafer. "And they didn't have anything for us to work on right away, so they had us test." So Schafer was put to work on bug-checking a 2D platformer based on the third Indy movie. "It wasn't an amazing game," laughs Schafer.

"I [remember telling the programmers] 'Hey guys, I was doing that Walk of Faith, and I jumped off the letters into the abyss and the game crashed.' And all the programmers turned to me like they wanted to kill me," says Schafer. "It's important for everyone who works on games to spend a little time in the test pit, and know how it feels [to experience] the 'kill-the-messenger' mentality. Be nice to testers. Don't get mad at them--say 'Thank you' when they crash your games. 'Thank you sir, may I have another bug?'"

Don't be afraid of silly ideas, even if you think they sound goofy

The Secret of Monkey Island was brought to life by three writers: Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman, and Tim Schafer. "That was the first game I really really worked on. It was a lot of fun," says Schafer. "We'd just write in silly dialogue, and we thought it wasn't going to be used--we thought Ron would come in and write the real dialogue later. That allowed us to take a bunch of risks that we normally would've censored ourselves from." To Schafer and Grossman's surprise, Gilbert was happy to keep all the one-liners, puns, and Star Wars jokes in the game.

It even led to one of the most memorable scenes in the whole game, when Guybrush has to make three villagers look the other way. "We just put in this stupid dialogue line: 'Look behind you, a three-headed monkey!' That's just illogical, and therefore can't be in the real game! And Ron [said] 'No, no, that's great, we'll keep that!' I was like 'But no, that's so stupid! There can't be a three-headed monkey!'" Once Schafer saw the finished product, though, he remembers thinking "I can't believe I was ever afraid of putting in something [I thought was] too silly. The thing I learned the most on that game was from Ron, which was not to censor yourself so much, and not to be afraid of stupid ideas."

Planning is good, no matter what George Lucas says

Day of the Tentacle had all the zaniness of the first Maniac Mansion, with the added comedic benefit of fully-voiced dialogue. "Sometimes I refer to that as the last fun game I ever worked on, because it was the last time it was just easy," says Schafer. "We planned, and executed on the plan, and it was exactly the amount of time we thought it was going to be. And then after that, it was all just taking on these super ambitious games… that were even bigger and scarier."

But a hitch in that straightforward development arose when George Lucas himself came to tour the LucasArts studios. "Day of Tentacle was the first time we had done storyboards; artists sketched out every environment in black and white with pencil," recalls Schafer. "We put them all up and planned every environment, and we were so proud of ourselves for being that organized. So we brought George in, and we showed him that. And he's like 'Yep. Can't make a movie without a script.' I guess that's what I learned. You can't make a movie without a script. Except for THIS IS A GAME. But still…it's important to plan, or [at least] try to plan."


Getting stuck in an adventure game isn't always a bad thing

The last big adventure game to use the SCUMM engine wasn't as wacky as its predecessors, but Full Throttle still told a unique, imaginative story, designed to be more cinematic and streamlined in the hopes that players would actually complete it. "A lot of people never finished adventure games," recalls Schafer. "You hit that puzzle you can't solve, and there's no Internet--you were stuck." But being temporarily stumped by an adventure game is just part of the process.

"I feel like there's good stuck and there's bad stuck in adventure games," says Schafer. "Good stuck is where you're like 'OK, I should be able to figure this out, but I'm just not getting it. What is it? I know it has something to do with that thing…maybe if I walk over here…' Bad stuck is like 'Fuck. Shit. I've gone everywhere, I've used everything, I'm so mad at this stupid game.' It's not so much that [the player is] stuck, it's that they're leaving the fantasy world of the game. They're now thinking of the game in terms of 'What did this game designer intend? Maybe there's a bug here. I hate Tim Schafer.' When they get to that point, you've lost them--you don't want them to get that stuck."