Report: Telltale is replacing its in-house engine with Unity

Article is here.

What do you think? Is it only just the first of many?

 

Old news.

But in this case it's probably because their in-house engine was truly terrible, not the sign of an industry trend. It (their old engine) was built by the owner and he refused to use any other. He was recently booted from the board, by the way, and is now suing the company.

 

Very interesting to hear. New to me at least. Thanks for posting @LurkingNinjaDev

Gives a huge credibility boost to Unity IMO.

 

Neat.

 

Hope Telltale will find and report some bugs so my studio doesn't need to find them all

 

Smart move

 

Makes sense. Their games don't really need a custom engine.

 

Especially since unity have improved on their animation workflow

 

Good. Their games looked hideous.

 

The later games have PBR and cel shading at the same time, I cant stand that style. Well I have a hard time liking cel shading as it is, but when combined with PBR materials it looks even worse

 

If adding a new tool allows them to make better games, good for them. I don't play their games, but I do know they've had financial success with them so there must be some "hook" to them. Either that or it's just the established IPs.

 

I only played the Back to the future games, I liked them.

 

It's more likely in my opinion that they're switching because it allows them to be cheaper.

 

And probably that John Riccitiello is a member of the board of directors at Telltale.

 

According to the following article some fans were expecting it to happen months in advance.

https://gamerant.com/telltale-games-layoff/

Getting your CEO into management for a video game company is a great way to push your engine.

 

Well IMHO Unity is not quite there yet.

But Unity as a company now has more AAA developers than a typical studio does. HDRP is an amazing achievement. Add Jobs + ECS.

Then you look at how damn friendly Unity is to work with and you're left wondering if big studios can justify the inhouse expense. The people working on these things ARE AAA developers, so there's that eye to eye respect that can't be ignored. It demands re-evaluation from time to time, so more and more big studios will simply use Unity because it's better than inhouse, with endless features and it's sickeningly easy to train new staff in Unity. Heck most will know it.

The performance that's coming is the sort of performance that requires a studio to start making their own compilers. Not many really want to.

 

The only real draw at this point for in-house exclusive engines is custom tech that provides a significant advantage. These things do still show up. I'm not expecting Bethesda to go all-in on Unity anytime soon, as they have ID in their back pocket. And ID has always been a powerhouse when it comes to under-the-hood tech with bells and whistles that can't be had anywhere else. A lot of their engine efforts still serve as a basis for existing game technology.

But this has become the exception, not the rule. The majority of developers have adopted cross-platform engines with broad support. (such as Unity, Unreal, etc...) The advantages, especially in terms of knowledgebase and training, simply offset any minor quibbles with comparative performance.

 

I for one do not hope in-house engines stop being developed, its good for tech innovation.

 

Who knows the level, but if you look at City State Games they went full in-house so their engine could handle the type of game they wanted to make with Camelot Unchained.

 

There's nothing wrong with tech innovation. But only a major publisher or an extremely tech-focused developer can actually afford to focus that much on engine development. And most of the time, they subsidize that tech-focus by licensing their tech out to other developers.

If you are a tech-focused developer, you are likely creating your engine to be used by others. If all you ever do is focus on developing the tech, the games you make suffer for it. (what I call the Doom 3 dilemma) Going all-in on the tech usually detracts from fundamentals of game design, there just aren't enough hours in the day. If you are licensing your engine out, that buys you extra time, and justifies the extra expense and research that goes into focusing on the engine so much.

If you are a major publisher, it is a different scenario. Publishers usually attempt to develop internal engines to give themselves and their in-house development teams competitive advantages. Exclusive engines can mean exclusive features and performance. Sadly, these decisions often bring about more chaos than quality thanks to a lack of proper planning. (what I call the Frostbyte dilemma) You can't just point to an existing engine from an internal team and arbitrarily decide that it is the new standard. That engine probably isn't a general-use engine. An engine that gets applied to multiple game types needs to have a flexible underlying structure. This is one of the biggest strengths of engines like Unity and Unreal. By generalizing their approach to game design, they give you a blank slate to build up from. You sacrifice a certain amount of performance and focus, but you gain the flexibility to make almost anything. If a publisher wants to adopt a proprietary engine, they need to design the engine from the ground up with this direction in mind.

 

I would actually argue they made the wrong decision. I think they pretty much already had their minds made up on wanting a custom engine, and were just looking for an excuse.

What they ended up with is what very much looks like a sub par engine that's not using the latest best known approaches to the problems they were actually trying to solve by going custom. Unity as of a year ago could do what they needed, and they aren't even in open beta right now.

They had other good options. They could have gone with Unreal. They could have used Unity and just gone with a custom renderer. There were IMO smarter choices that would have better leveraged the fact that commercial engines would undoubtedly make big gains in the time it took to develop that kind of game. As a startup that's something you have to give heavy consideration. Especially given that this kind of game isn't just released and done.

Big studios different story. But a startup making their own engine, that's just such a huge monumental risk. Like almost anything else if you can make it work, will be better.

 

@snacktime Time will tell. I am on the Closed Beta list for next week so I'll get my first look at some of their stuff. Won't see the AIR system this round I don't believe, but that will be the true test of them IMO.

 

Well, apparently it didn't make any difference...

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/3270...ead_developer_Telltale_Games_closing_down.php

 

~UNITY KILLS GAME STUDIO~​

Sorry, just being dramatic and stuff first, to save everyone else the bother.

 

Wasn't mr. Riccitiello sitting in the board of Telltale games since 2015... Edit: ok it was already mentioned.

 

Well, it's maybe "only" a layoff https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/21/17888162/telltale-games-layoffs-the-walking-dead after all.

He is, but I don't think it has anything to do with the current events, I suspect the problems was on the management level, not on the director.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/20/...s-developer-layoffs-toxic-video-game-industry

 

Because they had far more problems than just having to maintain a custom game engine. I only played one of their early games (Sam and Max Season 1) but my dad played a few of them (same game plus Monkey Island) and his opinion was that they weren't that good. He's not one to care about graphics either. He's almost all about gameplay.

 

Yeah well there's 2 sides to every story and the verge is pretty much firmly in the drama camp as much as possible.

 

Sometimes I wonder who actually goes to the verge and reads it. Seems like everyone I know goes there by happenstance from some rando on the internet linking an article.

 

@LurkingNinjaDev - yep, I was just trying to remember and didn't bother to read. Also, how much have these latest Telltale games actually sold... at least the whole zombie thing is pretty much been already over used and popularity of Walking Dead anything has probably gone down... but then again, they had huge catalog of different games in last 4 years (Batman, Minecraft, GoT, Guardians of the Galaxy and Borderlands related games).

 

You don't lay off 90% of your employees if you have any expectation of your company continuing to operate over the long term. It takes 6+ months to get an employee up to speed in an industry like software development, even if you're not a developer. That's like a century of getting up to speed training investment they have put in that they just let go. They are obviously gutting the company to conserve cash or minimize debt accrual as part of closing it down.

Even if they were to sell the company, when you buy a software dev company the most valuable resources are the engineers, so they must not even be planning to sell the company.

 

They are over with. Only 25 employees left.

https://twitter.com/telltalegames/status/1043252010999410689

 

If I were one of the 25 employees I'd be sending out resumes, hitting linkedin, etc.

 

I assume they're all working to leave, so to speak. I've been in that situation before and it sucks. Any and all motivation to finish is drained and you work with the assumption anyone will leave at any moment.

Seems there was some massive mis-management / over-aggressive hiring problems and the Netflix deal they were working on fell through. That plus the lawsuit from the former CEO probably pushed things over the tipping point.

 

Well I'd like to spend my last reply in this thread wishing the people involved the best for the future. I'm sure all those hard working people will find themselves landing on their feet.

 

I was going to say that you could do a lot with 25 employees, especially if you've solved a bunch of the problems I've heard about TellTale's pipelines (nothing behind the scenes, just from interviews and such)... but the statement says they're there to fulfill remaining obligations.

Darn.

 

Indeed, layoffs are never fun. Hope they land soon.

The company is likely done for. Most of their work was licensed ip. And if they retired the engine, and with the talent loss, there’s not a lot worth acquiring.

 

Ya most of us dream of having a studio with 25 people, but it says it was 90% of their staff laid off. Once companies get to the size of TellTale with all the partner etc doing even simple things requires layers and layers of manager approval, lawyers etc etc. I doubt many coder/artist survived, if any at all. Probably only self important executives left.

At least that's how every layoff I have been part of works in the U.S.A.

 

That's a shame. Wolf Among Us was really fantastic.

 

I guess graphic adventures are a thing of the past from a time when Sierra and Lucasfilm Games were kings.

 

Afaik there are still small indie-teams making those successfully. When I read "only 25 left" my first thought was "why did they have many more in the first place?". Seemed kind of excessive to me. And just because a genre doesn't support big teams, it doesn't mean the entire genre is dead.

Check out these, I liked both:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/370910/Kathy_Rain/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/307580/Technobabylon/

 

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/ make a consistently good living.

 

It sounds like their in-house engine was mainly focused on the story-driven element of their games, wouldn't it have taken some serious effort to port this technology to Unity?

If you read the wikipedia entry about their toolset it sounds like it combined with the running of the studio was causing major problems with buggy releases.

Telltale tool was based on the Lua language is that easy to use within Unity/.Net or convert to C#?

 

http://www.moonsharp.org/

 

I've seen a few Lua ' compilers' projects like this one that looks like they have some good features but are not up to date and currently supported e.g. moonsharp looks like it was abandoned around 2016 and even states in the FAQ that it does not provide all of the Lua features.

Trying to bridge a Lua toolchain across to Unity without an official MS .net version of Lua could have turned the whole thing into a nightmare.

Would you be better off running Lua alongside Unity via a dll?

 

You'd be better off using the engine as it was intended to be used.

 

I'm guessing that that their staff size was more related to the amount of work there were doing at their height. They probably a higher percentage of designers on staff than the typical game. They had a lot of games in development (and in release) a few years back. If you have a few games in live ops, and 4-5 games in development plus an in-house engine... 200 person staff isn't really that big. But yea, who knows how it was actually structured, it could have been way too many producers and such.

My guess (and that is all it is, just a guess) is that demand for their type of games started to decline, but they didn't scale back at that point, and kept the big staff. Keep a huge staff when you have one or two games paying the bills gets to be a problem, very quickly. (been there...)

 

Certainly a lesson to learn for niche studios.

 

Knowing about the troubles they were having with their tools, my first thought was that they cut down because they didn't need that many people now that they were using Unity. That said, I didn't realise just how big they were.

 

What if game companies going into collapse triggered a disaster analysis team to analyse what happened and why, kind of like forensic analysis in the aircraft industry after an accident/disaster.

If the game engines/publishers/portals/industry set up a Global Game Development Agency they could fund the analysis and use that information to improve game development.

In this case is Unity duty-bound to look into why Tell Tale Games crashed and burned, especially as the CEO was on the board of directors.