Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude Designer Diary #1

By Staff, GameSpotPosted Jan 12, 2004 2:34 pm PT

Design director Tom Smith discusses how basketball, Mad Libs, and other sources helped inspire the development team at High Voltage Software.

Graphical adventure games traditionally place you in a colorful world in which you must solve puzzles to advance the story and eventually complete the game. Sierra's Leisure Suit Larry series took this idea but made it much, much bawdier. Publisher Vivendi Universal Games and developer High Voltage Software are now working on the next Leisure Suit Larry game for the PC and consoles. In this designer diary, High Voltage design director Tom Smith discusses the creative process.

New Larry, New Game

By Tom Smith
Design Director, High Voltage Software

Larry gains confidence by impressing people on campus.

It's every red-blooded American game designer's dream to come up with a design for a Leisure Suit Larry game. Not only is it a classic game that is ripe for a comeback, considering Larry's ribald roots, but it's also a great excuse to surf the Internet for "source material," which I did. But a few days later, I realized I should probably write something, too.

It may come as a bit of a surprise to hear that the original idea for the new Leisure Suit Larry was pretty much a knockoff of The Sims. You would buy stuff, build relationships with other characters using simple menu choices, and take little jobs to earn more money--all done with a low-class, cheesy style to make fun of the nice posh pads people tend to build in The Sims. You would buy couches that smell like beer from the local fraternity, decorate with '70s disco equipment, and head to the Good Hard Luck casino. Oh, and there was a full create-a-character instead of a Larry, with Larry Laffer showing up occasionally as a support character. Weird, huh?

Somehow, the folks from Sierra were interested in this. They paid High Voltage big bucks for a few months of initial development. And by big bucks I mean more than two pizzas' worth. As we started working on a playable prototype, we realized that this early version of the game wasn't worth it. The Sims is fun, but it's not Larry. The most important thing to a Larry game is the funny. Sure, we could do little silly things with different locations and environments, but the really funny would have to come from compelling characters and situations and finely honed dialogue. We wanted more jokes. The game we started with had some of this, but it wasn't the focus. We wanted to focus on the funniest part and build everything from there.

But how do you do a game about jokes? While hitting on chicks? That's not remotely like shooting people, so the game industry doesn't give us lots of examples to borrow from. We really wanted to make the funny parts central to the gameplay. We'd seen plenty of games where you play a little bit of game, then watch a funny cutscene, and then play some more not-funny game. We wanted the fun and the funny to be all mushed together. The closest thing we could think of was the conversation options you see in some role-playing games. Picking an option from a dialog tree does give some feeling of control, but it's not fun. We wanted more.

Steering the conversation the right way will boost Larry's confidence.

Inspiration often comes from weird sources. In this case, it was Mad Libs, the PlayStation game PaRappa the Rapper, and basketball games. Thinking about Mad Libs made us realize that it could be really funny to have Larry say things based on player input, substituting words or phrases with random things if the player did something wrong. Our work on the console game NBA Inside Drive gave us the technology to mix different sound files together and make them sound smooth. And PaRappa gave us an idea for how to control this newfangled conversation game. So we got to prototyping that.

A hastily written script, an even hastier voice recording session, and a few weeks of hasty programming later, we had a working version of our great new idea. And it stank. It didn't sound good--whenever we substituted in a word, it would make a clear jump. It didn't play well--Simon Says didn't give enough of a feeling of control. And it didn't make sense--using random substitution meant that some phrases would come out totally garbled and meaningless. But even with all these problems, there was enough potential there to make us want to keep trying.

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jakeboudville
Posted Sep 16, 2006 2:04 am PT

looks good
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