Listen Up! - Tone Control

A podcast on the design and development of Teltale's The Walking Dead that strays into the personal

Lee and Clementine - Image: Telltale, The Walking Dead

The man behind Gone Home and Minerva's Den is back with a new podcast series where he talks to other game designers about their backgrounds and how they go about making games.

First up Steve Gaynor talks to Jake Rodkin and Sean Vanaman, the design and story leads on The Walking Dead. The duo have left their jobs at Telltale and branched out on their own with new studio - Campo Santo.

This conversational interview looks at how they both got into gaming, and how they work together. There's an indept section on the development of The Walking Dead - it's origins and the specifics of how and why the cast took the form it did.

One particularly personal section just manages to avoid being uncomfortable - it touches on the personal investment that goes into creating a video game character.

Well worth a listen. If the rest of the series can live up to the quality of episode one, Tone Control should be of interest to anyone who wants to know how their games get made.

You can hear Rodkin and Vanaman regularly on the Idle Thumbs podcast. Tone Control is hosted on the Idle Thumbs website and new episodes will be released every two weeks.