Stacking Interview
with Double Fine's Tim Schafer & Lee Petty
Tim Schafer's studio Double Fine is known as much for its promiscuous publisher-swapping as it is for its creativity. Having produced a couple of ground-breaking titles that were both critical successes and commercial underperformers, the Bay area company's lately moving away from the “one big game at a time” approach, trading it for a more varied, agile and small-game-centric business model. Using last year's charming adventure/RPG Costume Quest as a measuring stick, Double Fine appears to be heading down a new, potentially even more creative path and come this Spring, will release quirky new puzzle adventure, Stacking. This amazing new title is shaping up to once again break new gaming ground and in light of its impending release, we had a chat with Tim Schafer and Stacking’s art director and project lead, Lee Petty.
AtomicGamer: It seems Double Fine's been moving in a new direction lately with the release of “smaller” titles. Does that mean no Brutal Legend 2?
Tim Schafer: Never say never! We had actually started work on Brütal Legend 2 but the publisher pulled the plug. It was sad, but in the end it was a good thing. It turned out to be the shot in the arm we needed to begin our dream of turning Double Fine into a multi-project company.
AG: In the past I've read that Double Fine had some “bottleneck” issues in its production process. Have those been ironed out in the last few years?
TS: In the past we did have a bottle neck, and it was me! :) I wrote all the dialog, approved all the designs, the art, the character design, everything. So sometimes it felt like I had 60 people waiting for me. But now I’m just helping out the projects and they are free to move on their own. Lee and Tasha were empowered to make their own games, and I think that change really paid off.
AG: Has Double Fine had to expand to support multiple teams or is it a question of taking the resources that would have been committed to one big project and dividing them up?
TS: We still have the same number of people, we just split the BL team into four parts. Eventually, though, we expect to grow a little to fill the holes on each team.
AG: So Double Fine's apparently moving to the digital download model – what motivated that decision?
TS: We wanted to make multiple projects so that we could get more games out a year. And we moved to smaller projects because with the big budget games, people are very nervous about taking risks.
AG: OK, let's talk about Double Fine's newest project. Upon first hearing about it, I misheard the name as “Stacked” which made me think the game was either about well-endowed women or giant hoagie sandwiches. How did you come to call the game “Stacking”?
Lee Petty: How strange of you to associate well-endowed women with hoagies! I thought I was the only one who made that connection. Despite that obvious relationship, the game is named “Stacking” because that is what you do as a player – you stack into and control other dolls. Stacking into dolls and using their unique special abilities to solve challenges is the fundamental mechanic of the game.
AG: Why Russia? Why dolls? Why the 1930's?
LP: I was looking for a way to capture some of the things I loved about classic adventure games, but I wanted to give Stacking more moment-to-moment appeal, avoid laborious searches for hidden objects and people getting frustrated with the puzzles.
Using Russian style stacking dolls as the playable characters solved these problems in a strange sort of way. The act of stacking into and out of dolls is a very compelling moment-to-moment experience, inviting the player to collect unique dolls and have fun experimenting with different doll abilities. Since the dolls themselves are the only tools used to solve puzzles, we side step the need to have the player look for objects. The dolls themselves are your verbs for solving the puzzles.
We also structured our puzzles, or challenges, to all have multiple solutions. Not only does this decrease the likelihood that a player will become stuck, but it also lets a more core player challenge themselves to find all of the solutions to the puzzles they like, and earn lots of cool player rewards in the process.
AG: Hero Charlie Blackmore has some unique ability to jump inside other people and control them. Any conceptual relation to Raz of Psychonauts or were you thinking something more along the lines of demonic possession?
LP: The idea just came from thinking about real Russian dolls and how they might interact with one another. Dolls that are stacked together have an implied relationship with the other dolls that they are stacked with. To me, they suggest a story. We played with that idea in Stacking by featuring “Matched Stacking Sets” of dolls – which are dolls that are thematically matched. When the player finds and stacks them all together, more of the story is revealed and the game is moved forward.
AG: What's the inspiration for Stacking's unique art direction? Terry Gilliam perhaps?
LP: I’d say that older stop motion animations were probably our single biggest inspiration (other than actual Russian dolls, of course!). I grew up loving the Rankin & Bass animated features (Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, et al). These films had a great sense of a miniature world, or diorama scale, without specifically tying them to the real “human world” in anyway. They presented these little magical places that I always wanted to visit.
AG: Will Stacking feature 32-player online multiplayer where players run around frantically trying to stack each other?
LP: It’s more of a gentle waltz with friends than a frenetic donkey punch of death, but yes.
AG: Last couple questions are for you Tim. Who's your favorite employee at Double Fine? Excluding yourself of course.
TS: Is this a trick question?
AG: Okay then...you recently reunited with the Grumpy Gamer himself, Ron Gilbert on the commentary for Monkey Island 2: Special Edition and rumor has it Ron's working with you on a yet-unannounced project. Confirm or deny? If confirmed – WHAT IS IT?
TS: Ron is definitely here and he is definitely working on something with Double Fine. I can’t tell you what it is but it’s 100% new. And it’s awesome.
Thanks to Tim and Lee for all of their great answers. Stacking is out this week on PSN and Xbox Live Arcade.
