Terrible Posture Games, the studio behind "Tower of Guns" and "Mother Gunship," is trying something new and completely different with its next project. Gone are the guns and in comes "3 Out of 10," an "episodic, playable sitcom about life in the world's worst game development studio."

The first episode of "3 Out of 10" centers on Midge, a new animator at Shovelworks whose predecessor mysteriously exploded on the job. Her first job as an animator is to deal with a bunch of gamers who are angry at the studio's upcoming endless runner "Surfing with Sharks."

The absurdity of the game has much in common with Terrible Posture's past games. Creative director Joe Mirabello told me in a recent preview, "One of the things that really resonated in both games was that people seemed to enjoy the comedic elements, and they seemed to respond well to it." I never thought about writing something super exciting for a game, but people started responding really positively, so it's like the wheels started turning."

At first glance, "3 Out of 10" appears to be a point-and-click adventure, but it is not. Instead, it is a series of sitcom-style animated scenes punctuated by various mini-games, including Surfing With Sharks, a truly silly endless runner that Shovelware is tackling in the game's fiction.

"When Zuko (Terrible Posture Environment and Technical Artist Chris Zukowski) and I sat down after "Mothergunship" and talked about what we wanted to tackle next, the genres we wanted to tackle We had a lot of genres we wanted to work on, and '3 Out of 10' was kind of all of them," Mirabello explained.

"The nice thing about '3 Out of 10' is that you don't get locked into one genre or one game, you can keep making one thing for years and years and see what people think. If people like the driving game, they will feel that in Episode 2. If people really respond to the homage to the old games, we'll see more of those things, and we'll be able to do more of them."

The first season of the game is divided into five episodes, connected by a "meta-story" that unfolds over time. However, each episode is designed to be self-contained, allowing players to jump in and out as they please.

"This actually goes to the heart of the whole project. We know that gamers these days spend a lot of time on one or two games. But they still have time to watch their favorite shows, read their favorite comics, and immerse themselves in smaller things." So if it's easy to get into, short, funny, and familiar, I think players will like it."

3 Out of 10 also prioritizes accessibility: gameplay segments can be replayed for better scores or skipped entirely if you just want to follow the story, or you can rewind and replay scenes. If one wants to feel a sense of accomplishment, one can collect stars as one progresses through the game, but they don't really mean anything, and the leaderboards are fake.

An ongoing animated series is a huge undertaking for a relatively small studio, but it is possible thanks to the numerous animation processes Terrible Posture has put in place. Each episode is scripted into a spreadsheet, which the Unreal Engine (3 Out of 10 was produced with Unreal Engine 4) stitches together into a basic structure, which the developers then build upon.

"Automation is basically like a sous chef, preparing the whole slate for us. But we don't have to do the setup, we don't have to connect the dots to build the composition of the episodes, we just have to make sure that we've got it right." "

Despite the timing, Mirabello said 3 Out of 10 was not influenced by the Apple TV series Mythic Quest: some of the situations in the game were inspired by his real-life experiences in game development (Terrible Posture was Prior to founding Terrible Posture, Mirabello worked at Iron Lore and 38 Studios), but will not weigh in on the more serious issues currently facing the industry, such as the recent allegations of widespread abuse at Ubisoft.

"In a comedy game, you have to be very careful about those things. We feel there is room for satire." But we have to make sure that we feel we can actually satirize it properly. ...... The last thing we want to do is accidentally punch down."

Epic is supporting the development of "3 Out of 10" by offering all episodes for free, but otherwise they are just sitting back and watching. They've been a very good partner for us." Without them, this would not have been possible," Mirabello said. They are as interested as we are in seeing this experiment succeed, but they understand that it is an experiment.

The first episode of "3 Out of 10" is available today on the Epic Games Store. For more information, visit 310.show.