The Secret of Monkey Island
"The Secret of Monkey Island" ultimately cost $200,000 to produce, and was developed over nine months.
Tales of Monkey Island
The game's artistic direction was developed by former LucasArts members Derek Sakai and Dave Bogan; both of them had worked on "The Curse of Monkey Island", "Escape from Monkey Island", and several earlier LucasArts adventure games. The game's final art direction was an attempt to combine the realistic look of the first two "Monkey Island" games with the whimsical, stylized graphics of the third. While those games feature entirely two-dimensional graphics, and their successor, "Escape from Monkey Island", is largely pre-rendered, "Tales of Monkey Island" is rendered in full 3D. Grossman explained that both Telltale's art department and game engine are oriented toward 3D graphics development, and that the company enjoys the benefits 3D offers in the areas of animation and cinematography. Improved capacity for the latter resulted in the appointment of a "cinematic director": someone to help the designers locate scenes needing more dramatic activity, and to assist the animators and choreographers in creating it. During development, the necessity of this position was highlighted by a ship battle scene in "Launch of the "Screaming Narwhal"", which was initially static and unexciting. This was remedied by changing the time of day from dusk to night, adding rain and other weather effects, and using camera movement to simulate rough waters.