TellTale Games on Max OS X

bobmarleypeople

This may need to go in a different forum, but because it's a general post referring to ALL TellTale games in general, I felt it needed to go in general. Also, apologies for the massive post.

Now then, I'm going to take it upon myself to demystify the world of TellTale games on Mac OS X. First of all, I shall refer to a post made by the almighty Jake:

Jake wrote: »

Games made with the Telltale Tool have appeared on PC (everything), Mac (out from Boneville), PS2 (CSI3), Xbox 360 (CSI4), and Wii (CSI4, SBCG4AP)

(he left out Sam and Max on Wii, but it's new so I'll forgive him :P)

I was intrigued by the "Mac (out from Boneville)" part and the fact that this game was made with the TellTale Tool.

Now for the strangeness: According to multiple posts I've read from various TT staff members, the TT Tool is currently not compatible with OSX.

That doesn't sound right does it? One staff member says it's compatible and one says it isn't.

After a bit of virtual digging, I found that a company called Vanbrio was in fact the company that released it for Mac. So that tends to suggest that Vanbrio changed the code somewhat in order to Macify it as it's not a direct TellTale release. But still, it means that running games made in the TellTale Tool on OSX is definitely possible.

Unfortunately, Vanbrio have disappeared off the face of the planet leaving behind a Wikipedia reference, a gamespot page and a few angry people who bought the game and now have no support.

Now we return to the present: why won't TellTale release their flagship games for Mac when Vanbrio have proven that you can? Two BIG reasons: time and money. If TellTale went out of their way to produce Mac versions of their major titles such as Sam and Max and Strong Bad, it's quite possible that they will lose out. I do in fact own a Mac and it's my main computer, but I can still admit that PC's quite obviously dominate in terms of market share.

There are, admittedly, some companies that are realising that a lot of people are buying Macs now (heck, EA realised it and they released Spore on Mac and Activision released several Guitar Hero games for Mac, and apparently still are) but TellTale are still a rather small company (no offence guys) so it would take up a lot of resources at TT-HQ. It would cost them money to get Mac programmers in (assuming the current programmers don't know how to already) they'll need to divide their team up to cater for both markets and less time will be spent on the games themselves and more time to duplicate the games up onto multiple platforms.

Like I said: time and money.

This is possibly the reason why Vanbrio went under: because the lack of interest failed to give them a profit.

And now the conclusion: I'm not having a go at TellTale here, nothing in the slightest. I'm just clearing up people's ideas for the sake of the forum being cluttered with "release x on OSX" threads. I dual boot my Mac with both Windows and OSX Leopard, so I can still play TellTale games which rock my socks!

Personally, I'd love it if TellTale started making Mac games. Hell I'd probably re-buy the whole SBCG4AP and Sam and Max if they came out on Mac.

Either way, keep up the good work TellTale!!!!

natlinxz

Well, crossover games is full proof that it's possible to run the TTT on mac.

Also, on the apple website, there is a small list of games for mac. Wouldn't telltale like to be part of that small list? There are actually more mac gamers than people like to believe, although many of them run bootcamp. (cheaters)


I wonder how many people that play WoW or Spore are mac users?

bobmarleypeople

crossover and crossover games are a gray area because they screw around with the code themselves to try and get them to work. I've personally not managed to get ANYTHING working on any crossover product. I was on about natively programming the games for mac. You have a point with Apple listing games on their own site. Heck they may even get reviewed by Apple themselves and get a software front page mention (just a thought)

natlinxz

Okay, but about the telltale tool being compatible, it technically isn't.

When that company ported Out from Boneville to OSX, they didn't use the telltale tool. (as far as I know) If they had used the telltale tool, then all of telltales games could instantly work on a mac. But I think they had to re-write the engine.

I guess, the bottom line here is, does telltale want a new market for their games? And is it worth the time?

Jake

Out From Boneville, by itself, was ported by a company called Vanbrio (now defunct). Their port was just Out From Boneville -- not a low enough engine-level thing that it can be transported over to other series (which is the case with nearly all of our ports done internally), but it did happen .

For what it's worth, our games currently play pretty nicely with CrossOver. I was playing through Dangeresque 3 with some friends over Christmas, on a MacBook Pro. It was neat. CrossOver is nice enough to even create a .app and give it the icon and everything.

Chuck

One thing to remember whenever this topic comes up: development time is only a part of the total time & resources you have to spend whenever you're releasing a game for a new platform. There's also a lot of playtesting (on different machines with different OSes), and then of course customer support that has to go on as long as the games remain available.

The general Telltale mantra is that we want to see the games on every platform possible -- and I know I've got friends who haven't played any of the games yet because they only have Macs w/o Boot Camp -- so it's not the case that we don't like or don't "care about" OS X. But as the OP said, Telltale is still a relatively small company without the resources of (to name one example) EA to support releases for every possible platform; but also with TWENTY games (not counting the CSI games, which are published with Ubisoft) currently out there to support.

Guybrush Threepwood

Looks like you'll have some rebuying to do if this news article has any truth. Those two big reasons you originally listed are a thing of the past. Time? Pah, we're in 2010, anything is possible. Money? We all know how successful Monkey Island was/is.

"We have it from a very reliable, confidential source that Telltale Games may be planning to release its entire lineup of games to Macintosh very soon, possibly next month (February 2010)."

Maybe. Depends how reliable that confidential source is.

bobmarleypeople

Guybrush Threepwood wrote: »

Looks like you'll have some rebuying to do if this news article has any truth. Those two big reasons you originally listed are a thing of the past. Time? Pah, we're in 2010, anything is possible. Money? We all know how successful Monkey Island was/is.

"We have it from a very reliable, confidential source that Telltale Games may be planning to release its entire lineup of games to Macintosh very soon, possibly next month (February 2010)."

Maybe. Depends how reliable that confidential source is.

WOW I forgot about this thread until I got the subscription email. I have a few points to add:

1) In the event that TellTale starts releasing games for Mac, they will probably do them incrementally starting with the most popular in order to gauge the popularity of Mac versions (though with the number of people asking for them, it's probably a safe bet on releasing them).

2) TellTale is one of the most forgiving and friendly game companies in the world. What will hopefully happen is that, those who have already bought the games for PC, will have the ability to convert or add Mac versions for a small additional fee. I don't expect them to allow people to convert for free as they will have spent time and money developing them for Mac. Also, they'd have to de-activiate a load of serials for PC versions for those converting.

3) If they plan on releasing the games simultaneously (or nearly simultaneously) on PC and Mac, then we can hopefully expect to see dual-release discs (i.e. Sam and Max season 3 disc containing all games for both PC and Mac). This would save production costs (yes I took business studies in high school).

4) In the meantime, it's possible that, assuming the Mac versions are popular, revised disc releases of games will be issued which include the Mac versions as well as the PC versions.

I think.

Just some thoughts for people to think about. Either way, this is great news as I have been failing to get Monkey Island working under Crossover.

Ender2

Chuck wrote: »

One thing to remember whenever this topic comes up: development time is only a part of the total time & resources you have to spend whenever you're releasing a game for a new platform. There's also a lot of playtesting (on different machines with different OSes), and then of course customer support that has to go on as long as the games remain available.

That said. once you have a port that works on Mac (assuming a real OpenGL renderer vs wrapping the current D3D renderer in winelib), you have the basis of something much more platform independent.

Playtesting is a pain at the best of times, given TTGs rapid development cycle I can see how the majority of playtesting must remain internal and thus be smaller.

I always see word of port to Msc as a sign that an engine has been generalized enough that it would now be much more portable. Then it turns out they wrap the engine in winelib and throw a Cocoa launcher around it :P

shinnphoto

A big thank you to the Telltale games folks! I really appreciate being able to play on my Mac! No more borrowing friends' PCs and having to finish games all in one go before I have to give the computer back!

I WILL buy more Telltale Games because of this. I've only ever played the Monkey Island games, but I'm going to vote with my dollars and buy other games to try now, too!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Best regards,

Andrew Shinn

--
Shinn Photography
site: www.shinnphoto.com
social: www.facebook.com/shinnphoto

bobmarleypeople

Indeed. Though I only have episode 1 of Monkey Island at the moment (from the promotion a while back) I am likely to buy the rest of the series once I have finished it. I deleted my Windows partition a while back and started missing my Telltale Games which I was then unable to play. I'm so glad you've done this, thank you so much ^_^

pwblaine

First off, I'd just like to say that any releases that find their way to the mac tend to make my day and possibly month. I've definately bought Wallace and Gromit on every possible platform, and i tend to do so with every new Telltale release. For the most part the games work, and normally very well. for some reason the graphics on my mac lose consistency in the framerate on any settings above 6 in most games, and i've been getting almost non-stop crashes with sam & max season 3 (still, i've played through the season 3 times now even with the crashings). Not sure this happens to anyone else, but the game will freeze up, often during loading of a scene or dialog, and when i load up my save upon reopening the game, it tells me Sam & Max are on "Flotsam Docks." As far as I know, this isn't supposed to be any sort of crazy Sam & Max/TOMI crossover, as when the save loads i'm greeted with a black screen.

Damn, and here I was hoping to see Sam & Max launch the screaming narwharl in search of LeChuck & Elaine

P.S. Admit it, you know you'd play that.