KickStarter Thimbleweed Park: A New Ron Gilbert Classic Point & Click Adventure

[Wizfall]

About keywords/dialogues tree.
Dialogues tree are useful to introduce tones and personalization to main character.
It was best use in Fallout 1/2 with great lines from the MC which would not have been possible with keywords.
On the other side if the MC answers are "neutral", the mechanism behind dialogues tree become obvious and the dialogues become quite boring (perfect example for this is FNV, writing wasn't stupid at all unlike in F3 but lacked any kind of flavour and felt very mechanical, not at all "immersive").

Keywords is much more "gamey", make you fell you are doing some kind of detective work (it can be super easy like Shadowrun SNES, it does not matter you still have this feeling IMO).
Dialogues feel much less mechanical too than tasteless dialogues tree (FNV).
But it requires a huge amount of work, impossible to convey if too much NPC because you need NPC to be able to speak on a damn lot of topics.

The only cRPG i know who managed it really well is Wizardry 8, the NPC have answers to plenty of keywords (moreover a fair amount of long interesting answers, not one-liner) making them very interesting and deep (and when you replay you often find some more dialogues for each one) .
Thing is there are maybe something like 20/25 "developed" NPC in W8.
The other "generic" NPC often have like 3 possible voiced one liner (you don't enter dialogue mode), the equivalent of floating text on unimportant NPC in F1/F2.
But it's a good trade-of IMO.

 

[Cazzeris]

Ron has posted another interesting update where he talks about the hard work it took to implement all those book titles submitted by the community in the Occult Books update.

Occult Bookstore

by Ron Gilbert
Sep 28, 2015

https://vimeo.com/140692039

Behold the Thimbleweed Park Occult Bookstore, serving all your Occult book and Ouija Board needs since 1948. If you're looking for a Rubber Chicken with Pulley in the Middle, please visit our sister location on Mêlée Island.

A few months ago, we asked readers to submit names of books for the Occult Bookstore, figuring we'd get a few hundred titles. Crap were we wrong! We got over 3000 submissions! What we didn't plan on was having to copy all those names from the website and into the game.

Mark finished the first pass of the art last week and he built the room so it could be easily extended up since we didn't know exactly how tall it needed to be.

All the book titles were put into a spreadsheet and were sorted and dups removed. The spreadsheet was then copied to a text file the game reads and builds all the book objects at run-time.

We haven't gone through the list and pulled out titles that are too long, offensive, or objectionable for other (legal) reasons, but our first culling says that is less than 50 titles.

There is a puzzle where you need to find a specific book, but you don't do it by trial and error and searching, there is another "object" that allows you to locate it quickly.

Huge thanks goes out to everyone who contributed a book title, this could mean the difference between a "Game of the Year" and "Bargain bin discount."

- Ron

Mark's art looks great as expected, and Gary's animations are starting to make the characters feel a bit more sophisticated without losing the Maniac Mansion's touch. I don't like when developers waste too much time doing anything related to implementing content created by the community, but it doesn't look like it's going to hurt the game in this particular case, considering how the resulting puzzle has been designed with this stuff in mind.

 

[Cazzeris]

Ron has decided to reveal the definitive development team for the production stage of Thimbleweed Park:

Spoiler

Team Thimbleweed

by Ron Gilbert
Oct 05, 2015
We left pre-production at the end of July and entered the grueling process of production, turning the crank on the big machine labeled "GameTron 3000™", feeding ideas and game design document in on one side as finished rooms rolled out the opposite end on a long conveyor belt.

Along with starting production comes carefully increasing the team size, because endlessly turning a crank is hard and tiring work.

So let's start with the introductions... please hold your applause until the end.

Octavi Navarro, a self-taught pixel artist and former children's books illustrator from Barcelona and the creator of the amazing 'Pixels Huh' , a love letter to pixel art and to all the classic videogames that marked his childhood since the day his parents bought him a second hand Commodore 64 bundled with a box full of games. His work has been featured on some of the world's greatest art and design publications and feels very lucky to work with extremely creative people who share his passion for pixel art and acknowledge it as a legitimate art form. You can find him on Twitter at @pixelshuh and Facebook.

Octavi will be doing animation and helping out Mark with backgrounds.

Lauren founded Dropped Monocle Games with her friend Sox Brooker in 2012. While discussing their love of point and click adventure games after an evening of DnD, and probably too much cider, they decided they could totally make a game! How hard can it be? This led to the creation of a "charmingly crap" point and click called Witchy Woo. In spite of its "flaws" (although it still won the game jam), people seemed to like her writing, so they kept doing it and whipped up a couple more games, including another jam winner, Mess Goblins, and Goatherd and the Gods, nominated for several AGS awards. You can follow her on Twitter at @boosegoose.

Lauren joins the team as a writer.

Jenn hails from Australia and has been playing adventure games since she could work out how to kick her older brother and sister off the computer. With a background in artificial intelligence, Jenn has been working as a game designer for over 6 years. She's made a number of point-and-click adventure games and twists on the genre. Her determination to challenge conventional gameplay mechanics led her to complete a personal challenge to finish 12 games in 12 continuous months; many of which were story-rich games. Her latest game, aglimpse: friends, is a photo challenge game that lets you re-connect with friends in a personal and visually unique way. You can follow her on Twitter at @jennsandercock.

Jenn comes on board as our second game play programmer.

Robert Megone is a Game Designer and QA Tester from Hampshire in the United Kingdom. Rob has worked as a tester for Clayton and I on Scurvy Scallywags and for David on his Rube Goldberg game. Rob understands point and click adventures from the perspective of a developer but more importantly from the perspective of a player. His first adventure game was Zak McKracken on the C64, a game that is almost entirely responsible for his obsession with point and click adventures. You can follow him on twitter at@robertmegone or on his website.

Robert joins Team Thimbleweed as its lead tester.

Malcolm was raised by pirates off the coasts of Bristol, England; Malcolm escaped to the circus, where through random fate encounters, he made a living cosplaying Muppets for underprivileged giants. Malcolm had his first game published at the age of 14, and has been working as a tech programmer/game designer professionally for the last 20 years. He now works as an independent contractor under the guise of "Confused Duck Entertainment" and promises one day to finish the website. When he's not working on Thimbleweed Park, Malcolm is trying to finish the iOS game "Naked War". In 2006, Malcolm happened upon the lovely Vancouver city in Canada-land where he and I met while working on Deathspank.

Malcolm has been on the project for about a month and is primarily responsible for the Xbox port.

Please welcome our latest team members!

- Ron

http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/teamthimbleweed#comment

Apparently Octavi made the new version of Ray (the woman agent) that can be seen in the latest Occult Store video, so it looks like he'll be a decent addition to the team. I'm a bit worried about Lauren and Jenn joining though, since their websites give me the "typical indie hipster developer" vibe (one of them made a game called Leisure Suit Larissa FFS). As a programmer, Jenn might not add too much incloosive bullshit to the game (despite having participated in brainstorming sessions for the game's design, as Ron revealed months ago) but Lauren's writing role could easily be relevant enough to make me raise an eyebrow.

I guess that having an adventure game designed, programmed and written entirely by former Lucasfilm people in this day and age was too unrealistic to be true. Can't say I wouldn't have hired Steve Purcell and Brian Moriarty instead of these people though

 

[Cazzeris]

Here's some gameplay footage brought to you by Ron. He shows a couple of new rooms, some nice animations and dialogue trees.

Thimbleweed Park Gameplay

by Ron Gilbert
Oct 12, 2015
There might be some small spoilers in this video. Nothing big. No puzzles or plot information revealed, but I know some people don't like spoilers of any kind, so we're disclaimering this one.

It's a five minute walkthrough of the Thimbleweed Nickel Newspaper, a little of one of the streets and the Post Office, all featuring some new art from Mark and a couple of characters from Octavi.



https://vimeo.com/142162301

Please, sit back and enjoy my soft, emotionless narration as I take you through a bit of the game.

- Ron

Looks good.

 

[Berekän]

Looking pretty good yes, love the seamless transitions between every stage.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

The bit in Malcolm's bio about muppets makes it sound like he made a living getting fisted. I'm not sure if that's an intended subtle joke or not.

Either way, I'm all for having someone with such experience on the team!

 

[Cazzeris]

The introductory part of the game seems to be finished.

Spoiler

Sprintastic

by Ron Gilbert
Nov 03, 2015
We just finished our first sprint. I know what you're thinking: "Don't you have a game to finish? Why are you out doing track and field? Worst Kickstarter ever!"

Oh sure, to the layman it might sound like we're running around the track, sprinting for the elusive 4 minute mile. But rest assured, all of us are firmly planted behind our desks, sitting for 8 to 10 hours a day slowly developing heart disease. You Kickstarter dollars are hard at work (and slowly killing us).

In the parlance of game development, a sprint is where the entire team focuses on one small area for a few weeks, or maybe a month, striving to being it to a finished (or some other) state.

Sprints are nice because they give focus. With a large project (yes, Thimbleweed Park is a large project), it's easy to get lost in all the "stuff" that needs to be done. I find without that focus, I tend to flit around doing little tasks all over the place, and mostly tasks that I find interesting, not necessarily tasks that need to be done.

Sprints allow you to focus and also attended to details. It's easy to push off the little things in favor of large tasks, but a sprint gives you permission to attack the details.

Ideally, sprints should last less than a month. Any more than that, and you're back to being lost in the sea of tasks. Sprints also help to give the team a sense of accomplishment. It's easy to see one section of the game go from raw to polished and it feels good.

This was our first sprint and the goal was to get beginning of the game and the town done and polished, at least up to the first choke point. It's a nice little section of the game and it served double duty in providing a nice demoable section of the game.

We're getting to the point where we need to have a publicly showable section of the game, and the town is perfect because it's also the intro and playing through it won't unveil any truly spoilerific details. Keep in mind, this is not a demo we'll release, this is a demo we can show at events and start the long process of playtesting (as opposed to bugtesting, which has already begun).

We're aways from a releasable demo because the demo isn't hardened. Too many places it can go hopelessly awry. It's fine for controlled demos and playtesting, but not for releasing into the wild.

Thimbleweed Park is being divided up into seven sprints.

1 - Intro/town - Nov 1

2 - Circus (Normal and flashbacks) - Nov 25th

3 - County (Radio station and other misc locations - Dec 14

4 - Mansion - Jan 15

5 - Hotel - Feb 15

6 - Factory - March 15

7 - Panic!

Then from March until ship, it's general polish, plus getting translations and voice recording done.

Steve Kirk just started on the music but his track isn't following the sprints due to the music being more global.

As I mention above, we're going to start playtesting in the next week and if you're in Seattle or the Bay Area, there might be an opportunity to sit down and play Thimbleweed Park while one of us stands over you in a white lab coat and a clipboard.

Stay tuned.

- Ron

Highlights: Steve Kirk has started working on the OST, the first major area of the game is reaching completion stages, Ron gives some details about deadlines and the update also includes some of Mark's and Octavi's art.

 

[Lambonius]

Is it weird if I masturbate to these screens?

 

[Aeschylus]

Is it weird if I masturbate to these screens?

It would be weird if you didn't.

 

[Cazzeris]

Some interesting questions were answered in the last podcast. I remember some people in this thread who were pissed about having "modern" music in a low-res LucasFilm-esque adventure game. Well, it seems like Ron didn't think the chiptune music from the old days was as good as it could be, and ultimately wanted more advanced music for the games he worked on. That's the reason he's hired Steve Kirk to create non-chiptune music for TP and will probably do a similar thing in future projects even if he keeps his beloved pixel-art aesthetics.

Also, now that the amount of content that won't end up cut has become clear, Ron estimates the game's size to be as large as The Secret of Monkey Island and smaller than LeChuck's Revenge.

 

[Cazzeris]

Happy Birthday Thimbleweed Park

by Ron Gilbert
Nov 18, 2015
One year ago today Gary and I launched our Kickstarter for Thimbleweed Park!

So, Happy Birthday Thimbleweed Park!

In lieu of presents, please click on the Support Us link at the top of the page and buy yourself a collectors edition boxed copy. You're worth it.

As our present to you, here is some new art. Nothing says Happy Birthday more than a gorgeous piece of adventure game art. Or in this case, as horrible disgusting bathroom.

This weeks post is a few days late because we're all scrambling to get ready for the first playtest by a non-Thimbleweed Park team member. We're all giddy with excitement. I'll do a post next week talking about how it was conducted, how it went and what we learned (spoiler free, of course).

OK, back to the salt mines.

- Ron

Because any time is a good time to post Ferrari's art!

 

[Cazzeris]

There has been some nice progress regarding the character visuals!

http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/refining_ransome#comment

And also one more background by MFerrari:

Spoiler

 

[bertram_tung]

"Ransome the clown"... I love it. Can't wait for this game.

 

[buzz]

http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/18minutes

The first 20 minutes of the game and an interview with a guy from IGN.

 

[Infinitron]

Uh, I see dialogue trees at 15:00.

 

[buzz]

Yeah, you could see them in the video Cazzeris posted back in october too.

 

[Cazzeris]

I think dialogue trees were properly confirmed in September.

There is a line item for an additional writer. We made the decision to go with full Monkey Island style dialogs and I don't feel confident I can get all those done with everything else I need to be doing (like budgeting).

By the way, is there any music implemented in the 18 minutes video? Don't want to watch it because spoilers, and I'd like to know if the composer has finished something already (besides the KS track).

 

[buzz]

By the way, is there any music implemented in the 18 minutes video? Don't want to watch it because spoilers, and I'd like to know if the composer has finished something already (besides the KS track).

Nope, just cricket sounds.

 

[bertram_tung]

I am so excited for this fucking game.

 

[mindx2]

#20
Time to dust off that mic and get ready to record your voicemail message!
Posted by Ron Gilbert & Gary Winnick

For backers only
If you backed at $50 or more, over the next 24 hours you should be getting an email with instructions to enter your information for the Thimbleweed Park Phonebook and optionally upload a voicemail message.

The email will contain detailed instructions! So no one panic! Until it has arrived! After it has arrived! Still don't panic! It's quite a simple process.

If 48 hours go by and you have not gotten the welcome email (and you backed at $50 or more), contact me at...

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/contact

...and the Thimbleweed Park Fast Response Team™ will kick into gear.

Also, as an added bonus, please enjoy this nice piece of art from the game!

And this one, seen here first:

- Ron

I have NO CLUE what my recording should be.... suggestions?

 

[kazgar]

MULTI HEADED DICKS HITTING ASS AND LEG OH GOD ITS HEAVAN

 

[Infinitron]

Weird, I didn't get an email about that update.

 

[Archibald]

Anti-jew conspiracy.

 

[Lambonius]

I don't think I could possibly like these graphics more than I already do.

 

[Outlander]

I have NO CLUE what my recording should be.... suggestions?