Interview: Tim Schafer And Tasha Harris Open Up About 'Costume Quest'

Yesterday we learned that Double Fine's next game would be a downloadable title called "Costume Quest." The game, coming this fall to XBLA and PSN, will star a band of trick-or-treating kids battling hordes of monsters who have invaded their neighborhood and disrupted Halloween. Last night I spoke with Tasha Harris, the game's project lead, and Tim Schafer, Double Fine's president and CEO, about how the company made the shift to the downloadable space and how "Costume Quest" came about.

A More Bite-Sized Age For Double Fine

The development of Double Fine's last game, Brutal Legend, lasted about four and a half years. That's a long time to work on a single game, and Schafer had the idea to refresh the creative spirit of the company with something called "Amnesia Fortnight."

"We took two weeks off [from 'Brutal Legend'] and we split the whole company into four groups and each group had to make a game in two weeks," explained Schafer. "That was so much fun, and we ended up with four little fun games that would actually work on the downloadable space. Then we did it again at the end of ['Brutal Legend'] and we got four more games. We had so much fun doing that and it had such an appeal to me in that we could get so many more creative ideas out there than just one game every four or five years. We have so many talented people at the company like Tasha and the other project leaders that have ideas for games and we wanted to get those ideas out there."

One of those eight games from "Amnesia Fortnight" was "Costume Quest," a concept that's been banging around in Harris' brain since she was ten. "I just always really loved Halloween and playing dress-up. The concept of becoming someone else for a day really appealed to me, and I always really loved video games, so the two things combined is my ideal project." Three additional games were selected from the group of eight, and the entire studio was split into four groups.

The Mightiest Of Spreadsheets

Unlike previous Double Fine titles, were everyone at the company was working on the same project, they suddenly had to divide the studio in quarters. Excel to the rescue. Schafer broke down the process for me:

"For the 'Amnesia Fortnight' project we let people fill out a form where they got to rank which game they worked on and then we also let the leaders on each team rank who they wanted on their team. We had this amazing Excel spreadsheet that, somehow, using algebra, or possibly calculus, decided the intersection of those two ranks to put everyone on the team they most wanted to be on and also where they were most needed."

Once the company was divided, the benefits of making smaller games began to become clear. Said Schafer: "Doing small games allows us to stay…well, not experimental, but we always want to do interesting and unusual things with each game and it's getting harder and harder to do these days with projects that are costing 50 million dollars. When you're spending 50 million dollars of someone's money, they always tend to be a little risk adverse, but with a small game you can do something fun like a Halloween-based trick-or-treat RPG."

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Tags costume quest, double fine, thq