Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

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

justincz

Scholar
Joined
Apr 2, 2015
Messages
102
i like the visual style but the world is not that interesting, put it in the universe of blade runner though.. that would really be something.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1509125



New trailer and a way to upgrade your pledge!

Behold the latest trailer for the game to be henceforth known as Thimbleweed Park in all the lands.

And to celebrate it's release, through an astonishing feat of engineering and backroom deals and negotiation, you can now increase your pledge level.

In the next few hours, you will get an email with instructions and what-not.

That's right, you can now increase your pledge level and get that reward you feared had slipped from your grasp forever, including the much coveted phonebook.

Or get brand new rewards, like appearing in Ransome the Clown's Swear Jar.

a0694ff6e37724f95294000dab5bc4db_original.png


As always, subscribe to ThimbleMail™ and get an email dispatch whenever the blog updates! We're posting two or three times a week on the action packed development of Thimbleweed Park, including the award winning podcast.
 

bertram_tung

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jul 6, 2012
Messages
1,254
Location
Sunco Gasoline Facility
Insert Title Here
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1509125



New trailer and a way to upgrade your pledge!

Behold the latest trailer for the game to be henceforth known as Thimbleweed Park in all the lands.

And to celebrate it's release, through an astonishing feat of engineering and backroom deals and negotiation, you can now increase your pledge level.

In the next few hours, you will get an email with instructions and what-not.

That's right, you can now increase your pledge level and get that reward you feared had slipped from your grasp forever, including the much coveted phonebook.

Or get brand new rewards, like appearing in Ransome the Clown's Swear Jar.

a0694ff6e37724f95294000dab5bc4db_original.png


As always, subscribe to ThimbleMail™ and get an email dispatch whenever the blog updates! We're posting two or three times a week on the action packed development of Thimbleweed Park, including the award winning podcast.


Terrible voice acting on that trailer. Definitely will be playing text only.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Got emailed a link to a BackerKit thingy, authorized pledge.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Good interview with typical RPS bullshit title: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/03/15/thimbleweed-park-preview/

Why Adventure Games Don’t Have To Suck: Ron Gilbert Talks Thimbleweed Park

thimbleheader.jpg


Yesterday, I spent forty five minutes with influential adventure game designer of yore Ron Gilbert. We played a portion of his point and click revival Thimbleweed Park and discussed adventure game design in depth. Many of my questions were inspired by Gilbert’s 1989 statement of intent, Why Adventure Games Suck. As Thimbleweed Park looks back to that time, it seemed appropriate to ask what has changed for the better. And for the worse.

A clown is scrubbing and clawing at his face, attempting to remove the pasty makeup and honking red nose that are the tools of his trade. He can’t. The clowning is no longer a costume, it has become his reality. Long live the new flesh.


Thimbleweed Park is an absurd, sinister, comedic point and click adventure that looks back to the golden age of Lucasarts, when its creator Ron Gilbert helped to forge many of the rules and standards of the genre. I spoke with Gilbert at GDC as he and programmer Jenn Sandercock walked me through a few scenes from the story’s first act.

It begins with the detectives, the two first playable characters, but the demonstration is all about Ransome the clown. He’s grotesque, in both appearance and character, an uncaring celebrity made famous by a stand-up routine that seems to consist entirely of heckling his own audience. The insults he slings aren’t creative or witty; they’re cruel, attacking any visible difference or perceived flaw for cheap laughs.

thimbleweedpark1.jpg


In a flashback sequence, he targets someone whose words have actual power and she responds by cursing him, making the cosmetic alterations that are the costume he hides behind a permanent fixture. Of the five playable characters in the game, three will be introduced through similar interactive flashback sequences, set in self-contained areas of the wider world. They’re origin stories, of a sort, explaining how these people came to be the (in one case literal) ghosts that haunt this derelict town.

An important part of Gilbert’s design ethos, as I understand it, is that every part of the game should serve every other part of the game. At its most basic level, that means a puzzle should inform the player about the state of the world, the progress of the plot, or the motivations and flaws of a character. In a more intricate sense, as it relates to the flashbacks, it requires the self-contained puzzles within to teach the player, ensuring that the kind of logic they’re discovering is applicable in the large, nonlinear area of the ‘present day’.

I hadn’t expected to find the game as weirdly charming and creepy as I did. The entire setup of Ransome’s life has its own peculiar logic that serves as an efficient cornerstone of worldbuilding. We’re in America – the diner, the feds and the store signs are confirmation – but this is an America where an Insult Clown is not only a celebrity, but an apparent A-lister, who can treat fans and employees with Hollywood disdain and fly from show to holiday home by private jet. He’s a rockstar and circus tents are the stadia and arenas of this world.

thimbleweedpark2.jpg


And, yes, Ransome’s introduction is funny, packed with gags that in the current build are delivered through uncannily well-timed text that leaves just the right pauses and hits all the right beats (voice acting will come later). It’s also weird though. Why a clown celebrity, I ask Gilbert.

“I’m a huge fan of David Lynch and, as you pointed out, the agent coming to a small town to investigate a murder is reminiscent of Twin Peaks.” The Lynchian influence isn’t just present in terms of nods, winks and allusions though. “What I love about Lynch is that he can show an ordinary situation, something calm and everyday, and skew it so that it becomes strange.”

Strange and sinister.

“Yeah. He only has to change one or two details to make something recognisable seem incomprehensible. Thimbleweed Park isn’t about the corpse you see at the beginning. I can’t tell you what it is about but it’s much bigger than that and you haven’t even seen the beginning of the real mystery yet.

“It is a dark story. Not as dark as some of the things in The Cave but it does have a serious quality to it. That’s been the case as long as I’ve been making games – look back to Monkey Island and it’s a serious story about a man who wants to become something better than what he is, a pirate in this case, but he is a flawed character. It’s a romance as much as anything else.”

Any story can become funny when seen through the right lens, perhaps. I’m reminded of the Mel Brooks line: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Tragedy is when my aspirations are mocked and the person I love is abducted by a hideous undead brute. Comedy is when you make a point and click game about it. I suggest that point and click adventures have an inherent absurdity that can become comedic even unwittingly.

thimbleweedpark3.jpg


“I think you’re absolutely right. The way that you interact with the world and the things that you’re asked to do are often so unusual that it becomes amusing. If you need to open a door, you don’t get the key out of your pocket, there’s a whole sequence of convoluted events required to get where you need to be. If I don’t acknowledge the absurdity of that by having the characters respond humorously, the player will still recognise it.”

While we’re on the topic of convoluted and absurd things, it seems appropriate to ask Gilbert about puzzle design. I relate to good puzzle design in the same way that Justice Potter Stewart related to pornography: I find it hard to describe but I know it when I see it.

“An adventure game is like an onion.” Not that it should make you cry, The Walking Dead style, but in that it’s constructed of layers. “Every layer should feed into the ones around it. A good puzzle has to tell you something about the world, about the characters, about the mystery, about the plot. Too often, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, puzzles are used as roadblocks to slow you down and block your progress. Really they should be like signposts that you’re trying to decipher.

“In Thimbleweed Park we have a large world to explore and that can be intimidating so there are some obstacles to prevent you from going everywhere right at the start. But when you need to solve a puzzle to advance, that puzzle must have some context. When you solve it you should understand how and why it was necessary to do what you did in order to move forward and to open up a new area.”

A good puzzle should also make you think. You should puzzle over it. This is one of the reasons Gilbert and his team have returned to a verb interface similar to that seen in his SCUMM days.

thimbleweedpark5.jpg


“I sometimes enjoy the simplicity of modern point and click interfaces but I like to make the player think and explore the world in more detail. If you can choose to push or pull something, or use it or look at it, you’re thinking about the specific way in which the character is interacting. It helps you to understand the interactivity rather than clicking on something and seeing an animation play out that shows something completely unexpected. Maybe you didn’t want to, or understand that you had to, act in such a way but the game does the thinking for you.”

For convenience, Thimbleweed does highlight a suggested verb when you hover the pointer over an object in the world, but you’re free to select any of the available options. And the suggestion is the most obvious choice – for a door, ‘open’ or ‘close’, for a person, ‘talk to’ – rather than the correct choice. Correct and obvious might be one and the same in most cases, but not always.

“Having these interactions, particularly ‘look at’, is a way to add details to the world as well as more jokes. And the jokes are adding detail to the world as well.”

The same is true of dialogue.

“The two agents have different dialogue trees and they’ll reveal more information about the people you’re talking to and the history of the town, as well as characters’ motivations and thoughts. You learn about the agents, who are working together for the first time and don’t always trust one another, by seeing how they read situations differently.”

I asked Gilbert if he can think of a single puzzle that he’s created that captures his thoughts as to how good design can work. One that he’s particularly proud of. He thinks for a while before answering.

“The faith puzzle in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is one of my favourites. The game tells you that if you need to have faith to walk across a ledge that seems impossible to cross. If you spend time clicking on things in the environment and trying to find a solution, you will fall. To cross, you need to ignore all of the usual puzzle interactions and just click the other side of the bridge.

In that sense, it’s not a complex puzzle but the player has to read the situation and understand the context of the world in order to solve it.”

That subversion of expectation is something that has been a part of Gilbert’s games since the beginning.

thimbleweedpark6.jpg


“With Maniac Mansion, we didn’t really know what we were doing. Monkey Island refined our ideas.” I’ve never been sure if the fake death scene in the first Monkey Island game, in which Guybrush falls to his apparent death, terrifying any players who haven’t saved recently before delivering a punchline that allows them to continue, was a jab at Maniac Mansion’s punishing design or a jab at rival developers Sierra, whose Quest games required a great deal of trial and error.

“It was mainly aimed at Sierra,” Gilbert says without hesitating. “That whole situation was so annoying because we made these games that encouraged players to explore and experiment and rewarded them, and we got better reviews, but Sierra would outsell us. They sold ten times as many games as we did sometimes.”

That’s not to say there isn’t an element of self-critique though. “With Monkey Island we were supposed to make a forty hour game. That was the requirement, seen as value for money. That leads to filler and puzzles that serve to frustrate and delay the player rather than to tell a good story.

“Thimbleweed Park is challenging, the verb system is part of that, but there’s an easy mode in which the harder puzzles will be solved for you. You still encounter them but the solutions are in place. Even if you’re playing in the regular mode, those puzzles form part of the story and characterisation though. Everything that you do has to fit in with the context of the plot and the world.”

The entire conversation changes my idea of what Thimbleweed Park is, or of what it is supposed to be. I’d thought, backed up by the notion that this is a throwback of sorts, that Thimbleweed was about returning to a golden age. Finding solutions by looking to the past where problems had already been solved and correcting decades of deviation from the correct course.

Gilbert’s views are far more complex.

tp.jpg


“We want to make a game that is like your memories of those games. If you go back and play Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island now, they’re kind of crappy, and not necessarily as you remember them at all. We want to make a game like the thing that you remember rather than the thing that you played.”

The Lucasarts games, beloved though they are, were experiments. Not the ideal form of the adventure game but a process of discovery for the designers as well as the players. When he says that Thimbleweed Park should feel like the way you remember those games rather than they way they are, he isn’t simply talking about the addition of neat lighting effects and pixel graphics that are an improvement what could have been achieved on the machines of the time, he’s also talking about the design of the puzzles. And, perhaps most important of all, the storytelling.

“The behind the scenes fight in Monkey Island,” a scene in which a prolonged action sequence takes place entirely out of sight, “had originally been planned as a big visual setpiece. We didn’t have time to finish it so we came up with the solution of hiding the action and suggesting all of these things through on-screen text and visual cues. It turned out to be a great gag.

“Working within limitations is always helpful and makes you think of solutions that work. People sometimes say to me, what would you do if you had an infinite supply of money. What kind of game would you make? And I say, I wouldn’t make ANY game. I’d fuck it up.

“Good design needs limitations and flexibility. And that’s what we’re working within. It’s like a stage play, where you need to understand and work within the specific limitations of the set and the space.”

Thimbleweed Park will be out at the end of the year or early 2017.
 
Last edited:

J_C

One Bit Studio
Patron
Developer
Joined
Dec 28, 2010
Messages
16,947
Location
Pannonia
Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
If you go back and play Maniac Mansion or Monkey Island now, they’re kind of crappy, and not necessarily as you remember them at all.
If Tim said this, people would have put his head on a pitchfork. :M
 

GrainWetski

Arcane
Joined
Oct 17, 2012
Messages
5,082
It's the typical "everything used to be shit, our new stuff is the greatest" marketing talk. Usually comes from gamejournos at the behest of publishers.
 

DeepOcean

Arcane
Joined
Nov 8, 2012
Messages
7,394
Monkey Island is a pretty good game and completely playable nowdays, brain fart of his to say it was crappy.
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
I think his statement is impossible to judge until we see what Thimbleweed Park delivers. If Shigeru Miyamoto said such things about Super Mario Bros. 1 before releasing Super Mario Bros. 3 -- which seems entirely possible -- I think he would be utterly vindicated by what he delivered. Monkey Island 2 certainly improved considerably on Monkey Island 1, and there remains room for improvement. Of course, if Thimbleweed Park is totally lame then his statement will be revealed as :decline:
 

Aeschylus

Swindler
Patron
Joined
Mar 13, 2012
Messages
2,538
Location
Phleebhut
Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
Monkey Island 2 certainly improved considerably on Monkey Island 1, and there remains room for improvement. Of course, if Thimbleweed Park is totally lame then his statement will be revealed as :decline:
MI1 may well have had plenty of areas to improve upon (what doesn't?) but calling it shitty is just straight up disingenuous marketing-speak. Maniac Mansion *maybe* I can see him being a bit dissatisfied with in retrospect, but it's still a very tightly designed game, with a conceit (a very large group of characters each with a unique approach to certain puzzles) that has never really been copied or equaled. MI1 by the same token still contains some of the finest puzzle design ever in an adventure game, even if it did have an annoying over-reliance on mazes.

So yeah, either Ron is looking back at his previous work with the turd-colored glasses that creators sometimes get when examining their early work, or is just trying to appeal to the less-than-sophisticated RPS crowd by putting down old-school design (while simultaneously trumpeting it, so maybe he's laying a brilliant trap for the indie wannabes? Who knows).
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
Developer
Joined
Aug 15, 2012
Messages
5,703
Location
California
"Kind of crappy" seems different to me than calling it "shitty." I realize we're parsing scatology at this point, but I read "kind of crappy" to mean "had real room for improvement" or "had significant flaws." I think he's right that our memories often sand off the rough edges of games that we love -- for example, I'm sure if I went back and replayed Loom, it would be less endearing than it is in my memory, and for exactly that reason I have no intention of replaying it. I interpreted his remarks to mean, "Monkey Island isn't perfect. We may remember it is as perfect, but it's not. I want to make the game we remember, and I think I'm now able to live up to that nostalgia."

Again, this kind of talk is pretty meaningless to me. Lucas similar things about Star Wars and made it much worse. Moore said similar things about his comics and made them worse. Same with Adam Cadre and his text adventures. It's pretty customary for old folks to view their youthful exuberance with contempt, little realizing that the same things that seem goofy or excessive or unpolished are often what made the works so appealing. On the other hand, many creators improve considerably with age and reflection.

It is wholly possible that Thimbleweed Park will be terrible: over-thought, over-worked, smug, preachy, etc. But I think there is also a pretty good chance that it will be excellent because if you look at the substance of what he's saying it's entirely different from the usual claptrap about stories and experiences and so on. It's about mechanics and gameplay and how those things shape the game. He's at least looking at the right stuff, I think.
 

Blackthorne

Infamous Quests
Patron
Developer
Joined
Jun 8, 2012
Messages
981
Location
Syracuse NY
Codex 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
It's funny; I've met Ron, and heard him talk casually amongst people; I can hear this in his voice, and it makes a difference. Ron's paid more attention to the current adventure game scene than I think he lets on in things like this; I think this game will be good. Though Monkey Island certainly doesn't suck now - but, honestly, you're the most self-critical of your own shit. I play my games, and I see 1,000 things I'd love to change, fix, correct... etc. I get it; it's a personal thing that certainly isn't true for the whole world.


Bt
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1541153

635b364380fa1525e46e76887c4e7ad2_original.gif


We're heading to PAX East and Thimbleweed Park will be playable on four state-of-the-art, fully interactive stations. If you're going to be at PAX, stop by and tell them Ron said you could have a free neck rub*.

As a backer, you probably got an email about how we're using PledgeManager to handle upgrading pledges and collecting information. But did you know we also have an amazing FAQon our equally amazing blog? Check it out!

We also post at least a couple of times a week on our dev blog about what it's like to make an adventure game, so check it out for all the latest information.

"WTF Ron! You expect me to remember to come to your blogs 2 or 3 times a week?"

No! Not at all, sign up for ThimbleMail™ and you'll get a 100% spam free email every time we post a new story. It's that easy!

"Wow! Thanks Ron! Sorry I swore".

- Ron

* Not really.
 

rrc2soft

Educated
Patron
Joined
May 6, 2012
Messages
44
Serpent in the Staglands Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
GDC Talk by Mark Ferrari: 8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box

Mark Ferrari will discuss and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation. He will also discuss his current work for Ron Gilbert's retro adventure Game, Thimbleweed Park, and demonstrate techniques for using Photoshop to create what he calls '8 bitish' graphics for retro games today.
 

jfrisby

Cipher
Patron
Joined
Mar 21, 2013
Messages
491
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong
As I mention in the podcast, we've done some work on the UI. The big change is that we're taking all the rooms fullscreen, then floating the UI over the top. We also switch to a new pixel based font.

You can always switch back to the classic C64 font if you want.

The black bar under the ui was a holdover from the SCUMM days. Back then we didn't have the memory to do full screen room, nor the ability to overlay the UI. It took me a long time to realize that none of this was a constraint anymore and needed to go.

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/paxeast_2016_report1
new_ui_1.png


:decline:
 
Joined
Apr 19, 2008
Messages
3,059
Location
Brazil
Divinity: Original Sin
Yeah. The black bar would mean that the whole scene is shown in the window above. When you take the black bar, it looks like they're obstructing the view. I guess in the end it would be a case of getting used to it after sometime.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1563358

Phonebook Deadline Extended!

If you backed Thimbleweed Park at the Phonebook level or higher, we've extended the date to submit your name and (optional) voicemail message to July 1, 2016.

f7d946ac0826c9124b0f0fa781ee5987_original.jpg

If you haven't submitted your name, you need to do so in order to appear in the phonebook.Your name is not automatically pulled from your Kickstarter profile. As of now, over 1/3 of our phonebook level backers have not submitted their name for the phonebook and will miss out on the glory of appearing in a video game.

You should have gotten an email from voicemail@thimbleweedpark.com with directions for submitting your name. If you didn't get the email, or have any other questions, please send them to support@terribletoybox.com for prompt action.

If you didn't back at the phonebook level, you can still upgrade to that level by going toPledgeManager and increasing your pledge.

As always, we update our dev blog at least two times a week and have an amazing podcast, so head on over there for the latest information about Thimbleweed Park.

And if you haven't already, please add your name to the phonebook. The voicemail message is completely optional.

- Ron
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1566964

State Of The Game #3

It's once again time for our big State Of The Game dev blog post, where we take you through the state of the game and all the fun we are and are not having.

1588c0196b672062d6d07a302ddf51d5_original.jpg

In this action packed post we'll talk about PAX, the new UI and moving the release date to January.

7db69f4d91e4600f59c9d559b40a9337_original.png

With one easy click (and a little typing) you can subscribe to ThimbleMail™ and get notified anytime we update the blog.

7fca30bf451bfd318767f40af85d1c62_original.png

Mmmmmmmm... that's good vista.

- Ron
 

Bumvelcrow

Somewhat interesting
Patron
Dumbfuck
Joined
Nov 17, 2012
Messages
1,867,060
Location
Over the hills and far away
Codex 2013 Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Strap Yourselves In

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Stupid article: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...tes-the-glory-days-of-graphic-adventure-games

How Thimbleweed Park recreates the glory days of graphic adventure games
Monkey Island creators party like it's 1989.

jpg


Thimbleweed Park's pitch is simple: Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick are making an oldschool point-and-click adventure that looks, sounds and plays like a Lucasarts title from the late 80s. You look at Thimbleweed Park once, think "yeah, I get what they're going for", and move on. But having played nearly a half hour of it at PAX East, it becomes apparent that by staying true to its quarter century old roots, Gilbert, Winnick, and co. have created something that feels genuinely fresh in today's landscape.

There's a few different ways Thimbleweed Park captures this lost art of the classic point-and-click adventure. My favourite is how it handles dialogue. Rather than have players scroll through a cyclical dialogue tree until they've heard all the witty banter, Thimbleweed Park stays true to the original Monkey Island where most conversations only let you pick one response before the natter flows forward in one direction. This means that players inherently miss a lion's share of the gags, but it certainly punches up the pacing.

When asked if it bothered him to spend so much time on jokes most players won't see, Gilbert tells me "No. Not at all. Because you can come back to it later, maybe on a second playthrough. In Monkey Island a lot of the dialogues people never went down and discovered and that's fine! I think it gives the game depth."

Another surprisingly delightful throwback is the comically dated UI where players interact with the scenery by selecting from a menu of verbs with their cursor. Lucasarts phased this out with titles like Full Throttle and Grim Fandango and the genre never looked back. Why would it? Why would you want to clutter roughly a quarter of the screen to issue different commands for "push", "pull", "open", "close" and more? Because it's fun, that's why. And why is it fun? Probably because the player has to be more considered in their actions rather than simply clicking on everything until something happens. Sure, you could exhaust every input option on every item, but that's a joyless activity for a reason.

Thankfully, Thimbleweed Park doesn't barricade every obvious interaction behind this intentionally cumbersome UI. Click on a closed door and the game is smart enough to know you want to open it. Click on a mirror and it'll know you want to look at it. Click on a person and it'll know you want to talk to them. Plus it provides a bevy of hidden jokes, particular when you try to "pick up" people. (An oldie, but a goodie.) This retro input system runs the risk of being tedious, but in practice it's exquisitely measured.

Gilbert defends this archaic mechanic saying that it's only frustrating when it's nonsensical. "As long as you're doing it in a clever way," he says of the verb select system. "You don't want to do it in a way that's just obscuring the solution to a puzzle. People shouldn't feel like they have to just randomly try all the verbs on all the objects. It should make sense."

Another controversial concession to the days of yore is that unlike Broken Age or Telltale titles, interactive hotspots aren't plainly marked. You need to actually hover your cursor over an item to see if it's interactive. "When you're highlighting all the touchable items I think you take away a lot of the mystery and exploration of those games," Gilbert says.

jpg

One of Thimbleweed Park's only concessions to modern gaming is voice-acting, though this wasn't present in the demo and can be disabled should you wish. I found it wasn't missed.

Of course, the downside to this was that a lot of old adventure game puzzles were needlessly difficult due to certain mandatory objects being itty bitty hidden puzzle pieces you need to painstakingly search for. But Gilbert is adamant that's not what they're doing here as each interactive item looks like it should be interactive. "Pixel-hunting is horrible and you should never do that," he states. "We don't do pixel-hunting."

Thimbleweed Park's minimalist approach also gives it a grander sense of scale than something like the visually splendid, but ultimately shallow Broken Age made by Gilbert's old comrade-in-arms Tim Schafer. That game's scope shifted drastically as its budget expanded then condensed, resulting in a polished title that ran out of steam far too early. Gilbert promises he won't make that mistake, which he hypothesises is due to its smaller budget and low-res style creating an easier road map to plan.

"We've really tried to keep the scope of the game in line. We did a lot of work in the beginning budgeting and scheduling and so we knew this is how much time we have," Gilbert says. "I think there's points where restraints can actually be a good thing. Having constraints on your budget or time can focus you down to the important things to do. Had we raised $3m we may have gone completely out of control."

A small budget doesn't necessarily mean Thimbleweed Park will be a small game. Gilbert says it will be "about the size of Monkey Island 2" with close to 100 different locales. Gilbert recently revisted the original Maniac Mansion and first two Monkey Island titles and found their slow and steady pacing to be on point. "The thing that really struck me with both of those games is how they opened up the world. You're kind of a little area of the world to explore, and then as you solve puzzles the world kind of opens up more and more and more. It's like on of the rewards of solving a puzzle is new art. So that was one thing we really wanted to do with Thimbleweed."

jpg

Characters from old Lucasarts games make unofficial cameos as background extras.

Beyond simply revitalising old lessons, Thimbleweed Park promises to tell its own original tale too. The demo I play focuses on a Mulder & Scully-like duo of special agents (cutely named Agent Rey and Agent Reyes) assigned to a murder case in the backwater Pacific Northwest town of Thimbleweed Park. Given that The X-Files and Twin Peaks are returning these days, Thimbleweed Park's detective spoof could not have come at a better time. "I like to think it's because we did our Kickstarter they decided 'oh, we should jump on the Thimbleweed Park bandwagon,'" Gilbert jokes.

The agents only play a small role in this demo, however. The bulk of this section focuses on an extended flashback about the town's prime suspect - a cursed insult comic named Ransome the Clown whose life has fallen to pieces after mercilessly taunting an old gypsy woman in his audience. Now he's cursed to never remove his "goddamn makeup". And his wife left him. As did his mistress. Plus his house burned down. Oh, and he's bankrupt. Ransome the Clown was never a nice guy to begin with, but it's impossible not to sympathise with his plight, giving a surprisingly effective human angle to this gag-a-minute parody.

Thimbleweed Park shows a lot of promise that's predicated on a lot more than mere nostalgia. It doesn't seem to invent anything new, but it salvages elements of game design that were perhaps buried prematurely. Based on its early demo, Thimbleweed Park is a retro throwback that lovingly preserves something we didn't know we missed.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom