Telltale Games

Last year I featured Telltale core engineer Bruce Wilcox on the blog when he won the 2010 Loebner Award because he successfully tricked a judge into believing his chatbot was actually a human. Chatbot season is back in full-force as this year's Loebner Awards approach and Bruce is back at it with another entry. I've asked him to write up a bit about himself to give you guys a look at what he does at Telltale and beyond and he graciously accepted. Read on to find out more about Bruce! 

Note: The above video above, while awesome, is not something Bruce has worked on himself but is related to the coming Loebner awards. Bruce mentions this video in his blog, below. So take it away Bruce!

I’ve been asked to write this blog about myself, so here it is. 

I am a long-time AI programmer, both in the real world (e.g., autonomous aircraft) and in the game world (among other things I wrote the first successful Go program). You’d think there wouldn’t be a lot of call for an AI specialist in a company like Telltale. Their games are adventure story. You point and click, the system gives you a visual result. It’s not like the characters get to act autonomously. If they did, they’d always be trying to kill you. Not quite the experience Telltale sells.

Read the rest of Bruce's tale after the jump!

In fact, Telltale advertised for a core engineer. At TTG engineers come in three flavors. Core engineers work on “the Tool” in C++, the combination authoring and playback system that runs all Telltale games on all platforms. Content engineers program specific games, using the Tool and Lua. Web engineers handle the website and servers. TTG games don’t interact with servers during gameplay, but have always been downloadable.

Telltale Games' very own core tech programming whiz Bruce Wilcox has just won the 2010 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence! Now you're probably wondering what the Loebner Prize is right?

The Loebner Prize is an annual contest that rewards the chatbot that the competition's four judges deem to be the most 'human-like'. The 'human-like' determination is made by a judge concurrently posing questions, by computer input, to a chatbot and a human and seeing if the judge can distinguish the AI's answers (called a Turing test). If the judge can't tell which respondent is the human, the chatbot passes the Turing test. Every year since 1991, the chatbot that is most convincingly 'human-like' wins the prize. Phew - that was a mouthful!

Call it a hunch, but I think this is something you guys want to see!

Yesterday, some of the Telltale Games Back to the Future team sojourned to the audio studio to begin voice recording with none other than Dr. Emmett L. Brown himself, Christopher Lloyd! Joining Mr. Lloyd at the studio was Bob Gale, producer and screenwriter of the Back to the Future film series.

That rush of familiarity as you play "They Stole Max's Brain!" may not be just because it's the third episode of Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse. It may be because Mike Stemmle scripted it. Seventeen years after co-writing/designing the legendary Sam & Max Hit the Road, Mike - who joined Telltale in 2008 and has penned episodes of Tales of Monkey Island and Strong Bad's Cool Games for Attractive People - is back. He joins lead designer Joe Pinney. While new to the Sam & Max franchise, Joe has a long and storied background with Telltale and adventure games in general, with a resume that includes Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, Tales of Monkey Island and a few LucasArts classic adventures, including Secret of Monkey Island.

Mike and Joe share some of their thoughts on the new game...

Mike, at LucasArts you were co-designer on the game that started it all: Sam & Max Hit the Road. How does that experience compare to your time on They Stole Max's Brain!?

You'd think there'd be an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu, but I think I used all my vu up last year on Tales of Monkey Island.  This was much more akin to being parachuted into the middle of a combat zone, handed a rifle, and pointed at the enemy.  Only, y'know, with jokes instead of a rifle, and deadlines instead of an enemy.  In any event, there was definitely a sense of vertiginous panic as I waded in to the dialog for They Stole Max's Brain!  It'd been nearly a decade since I'd written either of these characters.  What if I'd left all my good Dog & Bunny jokes behind with my out-of-control facial hair, my crippling sleep apnea, or my lonely life of not-so-quiet desperation?

Luckily, Joe gave me a spiffy design to work from, making it darned easy to fake it until I found their voices again.

Joe, you have a long and successful history working on adventure games, but this is your first stint with Sam & Max.  What drew you to this franchise, and what's it been like working on it?

Telltale's first seasons of Sam and Max, taken as a whole, are my favorite adventure gaming experiences of all time (followed extremely closely by Secret of Monkey Island).  They got me excited about Telltale.  Getting to work at this company, on this franchise, with this Mike Stemmle, is just a crazy huge privilege.

It took me a while to get my head into the Sam & Max zone.  I'm used to pretty grounded stuff and these guys are anything but.  Fortunately there are plenty of unmoored absurdists in the building.  I just followed their lead down the dog-and-rabbit hole.

What led to the whole noir look and feel in this episode? Seems like the "Philip Marlowe, hardboiled detective" vibe hasn't really been explored in the Sam & Max series...

Mike: If I'm remembering correctly, the noir act at the start of the episode was something we wanted to do from a fairly early point in the development of the season, and Joe kinda ran wild with it.  I just filled in some dialog.

And as for WHY this take on Sam hasn't been explored yet, I've got a couple of thoughts.  Firstly, when Max is around Sam, it's really hard to pull off the hardboiled vibe.  Chaotic randomness is something of  a noir-killer, as anyone who's ever seen "Emo Phillips: Private Dick" will surely attest.   Secondly, Sam's an easygoing guy - it'd take a LOT to get him so honked off that he'd start randomly roughing up people like Courtney Love at a People's Choice Awards Reception.  Luckily for us, removing Max's brain solves both problems.

Joe: What Mike said. It's great fun to push familiar characters into new dramatic zones IF it makes story sense, and here it does. 

So...who DID steal Max's brain?

Mike: 

1. Beauty...beauty stole Max's brain.
2. The one-armed man
3. Kevin Spacey
4. Professor Plum
5. In a way, didn't we ALL steal Max's brain?
6. Brain and brain, what is brain?
7. I think it's funny that Sam assumes Max keeps his brain in his head.  After all, we still don't know where he keeps his gun...

Joe: It's one of the answers above, but to decipher it you have to re-arrange the letters, write them in lemon juice on a piece of paper, cut the paper into little Max dolls, burn the dolls, and mail the ashes to Art Linkletter.