GamePro Arcade

Interview: Mike Stemmle on Strong Bad Episode 3

Oct. 23 4:03 PM by Terry Terrones

Mike Stemmle is a gaming industry vet. After graduating from Stanford Mike spent a number of years at LucasArts working on such titles as Star Wars Battlefront II, Afterlife and Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. Stemmle left LucasArts to join Telltale games and is the designer for Episode 3 of Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. Recently he took some time to talk to GamePro about "Baddest of the Bands", set to release on PC and Wii this Monday.

GP: You've been a part of some well respected gaming/movie franchises (Star Trek, Star Wars, Indiana Jones) how does that experience help you with a series like Homestar Runner that's not as well known but with equally hardcore fans?

Mike Stemmle: It's strange, but I've never had anything but good experiences with the fans of the various franchises I've worked with. Either I'm lucky (possible), remarkably thick-skinned (unlikely), or the hardcore fans have been getting a bad rap all these years.

GP: How did you get involved with episode three? Was it something planned in advance or did you have some creative ideas that the Chapman brothers thought would work?

MS: My first day on the job, the five story seeds for the first season of SBCG4AP were already in place. Episode three was already sketched out to be the "rock concert" episode, and was preliminarily assigned to me. So it's a complete coincidence that the most music-saturated episode of the season fell into the hands of the guy who's been threatening to do a musical adventure game for over a decade.

GP: What exactly is a designer's role in a game? And how did your role in Baddest of the Bands differ from other non-episodic games you've designed?

MS: Basically, an episode designer is responsible for overseeing the creation of the puzzles, story, and dialogue in an episode. Not that they do that on their own. The puzzles and stories for every episode are "gang-designed" by the designers working on the series, to ensure a consistency of tone and difficulty, and the writing gets internally (and, in the case of SBCG4AP, externally) vetted to make sure that it's funny/grammatically passable. Ironically, even though these episodic games are considerably smaller than the ones I previously designed, there's a lot more design cross-checking going on... which is a good thing, believe me.

GP: How has the story arc for the series been determined so far? Were all 5 episodes mapped out way in advance or do you take feedback from the previous episode and make adjustments?

MS: The five story seeds for the season were laid out before I showed up, with episode 1 almost fully designed when I walked in the door. As the series has rolled on, we've firmed up the designs for the later episodes, both in our daily "gang design" meetings, and in more ad-hoc "ohmigod, the users/programmers/animators really love/hate/don't understand this, how can we change it for the next episode!?" scrums.

We do conduct play tests about halfway through an episode's production, during which people come into the office to play the episode and give us feedback. If we find that a lot of people are getting stuck in the same place or if the play testers make some good suggestions about the how the puzzles should be working, we often make changes before the episode is final.

GP: Was there anything cut from Baddest of the Bands that you wish you could have kept?

MS: I'm actually staggered by how much we managed to cram in, especially considering that we've got a monstro R&B song in the middle of it. I do kinda wish that we'd gotten to see a little more of Strong Bad singing, though.

GP: How involved are the Chapman brothers in the game? What exactly is their role and how did you work with them to assure character fidelity?

MS: The Chapmans are deeply and thoroughly involved with the series. Besides doing almost all the voices, they lovingly edit the dialogue, kibitz on the puzzle design, and provide valuable pieces of artwork to dress up our environments. It's like having two additional senior designers, artists, writers, and QA guys on the team. It's great.

GP: What about point and click games do you think makes them more conducive to humor?

MS: I'm not sure that point and click games are necessarily MORE conducive to humor than other types of games, but there are some things that point and click does well, like well-controlled comedic timing, and "the humor of unexpected results."

GP: What kind of trouble can we expect to see Strong Bad in with episode 4?

MS: Curiously, we see very little of Strong Bad in episode 4. I think he's off shooting a movie or something. I hear that it's quite likely that he'll be compelled to do a lot of jumping.

GP: Your wikipedia page says "He also has the uncanny ability to break into show tunes unexpectedly and can inject painfully obscure pop culture references into any conversation." Is there any truth to this? And if so, what show tunes do you like to sing? Songs from West Side Story? Do you do the accompanying dance routines? And how do you work stuff like that into casual conversation?

MS: Don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia. I should probably refrain from saying any more, lest I go off like a yo-yo schoolboy.

• << prev
• next >>