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

[Tramboi]

A game that does the keyword stuff very well is Veil of Darkness. You click most of the game on underlined words, but at some points you have to provide (always in a logical context) your own keywords.
But once again, the hero is a blank slate.
Nobody was able to quote a good keyword based game with a proper PC characterization.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Nobody was able to quote a good keyword based game with a proper PC characterization.

That is because none has been made yet.

There is generally a dire lack of anything extra-ordinary, in the literal sense, in both adventure games and the RPG genre.

 

[Tramboi]

That is because none has been made yet.

I'm an empiricist, so I consider the dialog tree to be better for the sake of having being implemented with great success (regarding the PC personality)

 

[Crooked Bee]

I like adventure games and RPGs to do better, so I'm not an empiricist I guess

 

[Tramboi]

I like adventure games and RPGs to do better, so I'm not an empiricist I guess

Yes. You're not an empiricist, you're a dreamer :p

You don't expect wildly unrealistic things like natural language parsing and AI roleplaying your characters. So you shouldn't expect a team of writers in the near future for any adventure game

 

[Crooked Bee]

Yes. You're not an empiricist, you're a dreamer :p

You don't expect wildly unrealistic things like natural language parsing and AI roleplaying your characters. So you shouldn't expect a team of writers in the near future for any adventure game

Strawman. You don't have to have any of those unrealistic things for a good keyword+tone based adventure game.

 

[Tramboi]

Strawman. You don't have to have any of those unrealistic things for a good keyword+tone based adventure game.

"A team of writers"

 

[Crooked Bee]

"A team of writers"

What is unrealistic about having 2 or 3 writers instead of just one? Unless you're talking Wadjet Eye games. Even Daedalic games have more than one writer.

I also said I don't think something like MI 1 is anything one writer couldn't handle. There aren't that many keywords all NPCs would have to know about in that game, either.

Don't act like you didn't mention the ridiculous "natural language parsing and AI roleplaying your characters", either.

 

[Tramboi]

MRY, can you give us a few practical metrics so we can do napkin computations of what would be required ?
How many inventory objects in Primordia ? How many scenery hotspots ?
Is 6400 the count of lines of PC to NPC dialog or does it include all text ?
What would be a plausible count of keywords ?

 

[MRY]

By the way, what game does "mood + keyword" ?

To some degree, many text adventures/IF games have it: for example, they yield different responses when you "tell about X" and "ask about X," which is a binary mood, and some yield a third response if you "shout X."

Primordia had 6400 lines of dialogue -- do you honestly believe that's not enough to write a fairly good keyword system?

I guess it depends what you mean by a keyword system, and what you want out of your dialogue. When writing any dialogue (even non-interactive), my goal is always to write as little as possible while still satisfying what the player wants. I think dialogue trees let you limit things quite a bit more than keyword systems. In both systems, you have to consider the range of what players could reasonably say (more on this in a moment), but in a tree system, you can add an additional limitation, which is the range of what the character could reasonably say. In a tree system, the range of player options need only be the Venn intersection of those two areas, which turns out to be quite a bit smaller than the range of reasonable player choices.

Note that in an RPG with a fairly undefined protagonist, the range of character-permissible options should expand -- the most dramatic example is probably Arcanum. But I don't think it needs to expand to the entire range of what the player could want to say. We often put limits on player silliness or trolling or metagaming. Thus, for example, you can have a genre-unsavvy protagonist but a genre-savvy player, and as long as the PC doesn't come across as too stupid, it is reasonable to limit his options so that he doesn't immediately assume that such-and-such woman in distress is a lamia or whatever.

Moreover, I think it is just empirically true that players expect a broader range of choices from a keyword system. In other words, if you took the available options in a dialogue tree game and simply turned it into a keyword system, players would feel like it was woefully narrow. That is probably true even of a game like Arcanum or PS:T.

When looking at a dialogue system, you basically have several variables that go into the total number of lines. Among them are (1) breadth of topics; (2) depth of topics; (3) branching choices; and (4) total number of characters with whom you can speak. If you treat the number of lines as finite, then increasing breadth requires you to reduce something else. That's why (in practical experience) keyword systems tend to have relatively shallow but relatively broad dialogues, typically without branching choices (e.g., moral or practical choices).

Since you mention Primordia, much of Primordia's lines of dialogue consisted of: (1) reaction quips to environmental hotspots and inventory combinations; (2) the hint system; (3) Crispin's chiming in on the situation. So if you're talking about robbing that pot to fill the keyword system for the character dialogue, you're talking about removing things that (in the author's opinion) were more important.

I think it is entirely possible to make a good keyword-based dialogue system, it just tends to be married to either very narrow games (e.g., Emily Short's games) or games that have no pretension toward interesting dialogue or characters (e.g., Ultima IV). In the former context, you can pour all your resources into writing a single character who exists in isolation from almost everything except this one dialogue; in the latter context, you can use copypasta characters and responses, all of them written in bland functional text.

I suppose if you could multiply Emily Short by ten and have her managed by Kevin Saunders, you might be able to pull off depth and breadth and artistry, but the practical reality is that she's a uniquely talented writer (and even she has seemingly lost interest in the kind of absurd labor that such a dialogue system takes -- indeed, she's moved away from parser games in general). Moreover, such a system would take vastly longer to pull off than a dialogue tree system, and the end result might not necessarily be an improvement for the overwhelming majority of players.

I wish there were an easy solution to the problem because dialogue trees are often a least-bad solution -- it is very hard to allow for the player to "figure out" how to approach a dialogue because the options you offer tend to convey the answers. Keyword systems work great for that kind of puzzle/gameplay mechanic.

 

[Tramboi]

What is unrealistic about having 2 or 3 writers instead of just one? Unless you're talking Wadjet Eye games. Even Daedalic games have more than one writer.

I also said I don't think something like MI 1 is anything one writer couldn't handle. There aren't that many keywords all NPCs would have to know about in that game, either.

You'd probably be astonished by how many keywords would be tried by the testers during the game QA.
There are probably at least 20 reasonable topics every character should know about + each character's specifics.
I'd prefer more answers for trying wrong but not unreasonable things (for the same writing power).

Don't act like you didn't mention the ridiculous "natural language parsing and AI roleplaying your characters", either.

Did I ? I can't remember

 

[Crooked Bee]

I appreciate the input, and I will think about it more.

Earlier, it boiled down to feel and experience. Now, it also boils down to scope management. Both are fair points. Still, I believe I also hold my ground while conceding, like I mentioned above, that dialogue trees are also a means of economy.

The two are interrelated. While there is a unique feel and experience to dialogue trees that you can never have with any other system, a big part of the "feel and experience" aspect is that dialogue trees are the most efficient non-cutscene way to have well-written dialogue. If all of the best writers and designers were forced by a comissariat to write a keyword-based adventure game, I think they could achieve a keyword system that had better writing and flow than any currently extant tree-based game. But for any realistic fixed pool of resources, you will get better and more interesting writing with trees than you will with keywords, except at the low end where you'd be better off with functional text anyway.

Learning that dialogue trees is a means of economy is important to my goals, though.

Also, hopefully that's something I will have time to write a lengthy post on next week or the week after, since I believe there are several issues left to be addressed here, as well as some specific stuff related to Thimbleweed Park and Ron Gilbert.

 

[Tramboi]

I appreciate the input, and I will think about it more.

Earlier, it boiled down to feel and experience to me. Now, it also boils down to scope management. Both are fair points. Still, I believe I also hold my ground while conceding, like I mentioned above, that dialogue trees are also a means of economy.

I think nobody denied this
But developing a game (be it an adventure like MRY does or RTSs/other genres like I did) is managing complexity and state, so you have to keep stuff manageable.
Content must be produced, then it must be tested, often localized, and sometimes voiceovered (yeah I know most of us don't really care ) so costs add up real fast

 

[Crooked Bee]

I think nobody denied this

Except for that "dialogue trees are essential" part? Scope is also something you can't measure until you do it. Which is where your empiricist part kicks in.

The idea that a Lucas Arts style game -- in this case, Thimbleweed Park -- requires dialogue trees remains nonsensical, though.

 

[MRY]

MRY, can you give us a few practical metrics so we can do napkin computations of what would be required ?
How many inventory objects in Primordia ? How many scenery hotspots ?
Is 6400 the count of lines of PC to NPC dialog or does it include all text ?
What would be a plausible count of keywords ?

It would be hard for me to break it out specifically.

In terms of keywords, I think I would probably want to have dozens if not hundreds per character. My approach is that if I want to do something, I want to do it right; this may be a flaw (or I may be wrong as to what is right), but I wouldn't want a keyword system where 80% of the viable topics yield, "Not interested, tyro" or "Ask all you want, I won't say a word, unless it's a topic about which I've heard." I think I failed in my goal with the kiosk, but the idea at least was that the kiosk would contain more topics than the player could possibly want to ask -- I think it contained about 30. But the kiosk was specifically limited to momentous historical topics.

What is unrealistic about having 2 or 3 writers instead of just one? Unless you're talking Wadjet Eye games. Even Daedalic games have more than one writer.

The pool of talented writers is not as deep as you could want; the pool of talented writers with an interest and the ability to work in a keyword system is even more limited. (By "talented," I mean here something like "capable of writing with a strong and interesting voice or with humor.") I would say that the farther you get from "screenplay" the more limited the writing pool becomes, which is sad because I think the farther you get from screenplay, the better the game is likely to be.

And, again, assuming a fixed budget, more writers means fewer artists, coders, musicians, what have you. It's always guns or butter. More writers also means an added tier of review in order to maintain a consistent "voice." So there's that cost, too.

At the end of the day, all of that would be to yield a system which almost certainly would lack the same flow and sense of repartee to the dialogue that you get from trees -- something that most players like a lot. The only games I've played in which a keyword-based dialogue system has not felt like a database-lookup are City of Secrets and Alabaster, and the latter was a crowdsourced art experiment more than a game. Obviously if you think the "feeling" of a dialogue not seeming like a database system is irrelevant, then that is not a meaningful factor and if there were more than five or six people in the world who shared that opinion, I'm sure we'd see the market cater to their needs.

--EDIT--

Earlier, it boiled down to feel and experience to me. Now, it also boils down to scope management. Both are fair points.

The two are interrelated. While there is a unique feel and experience to dialogue trees that you can never have with any other system, a big part of the "feel and experience" aspect is that dialogue trees are the most efficient non-cutscene way to have well-written dialogue. If all of the best writers and designers were forced by a comissariat to write a keyword-based adventure game, I think they could achieve a keyword system that had better writing and flow than any currently extant tree-based game. But for any realistic fixed pool of resources, you will get better and more interesting writing with trees than you will with keywords, except at the low end where you'd be better off with functional text anyway.

--EDIT 2--

(It seems like this whole discussion is pretty much OT to this thread, but . . . )

Has anyone considered or employed an integrated keyword/dialogue tree system where the keywords unlock dialogue lists?

In other words, conversation starts, and on the left is a pane that says, say, TOPICS, and on the right is a window that looks like a typical Infinity Engine dialogue tree. (Sadly, text formatting is not working here, imagine the topic list is to the left and the dialogue pane is to the right.)

TOPICS
Goodbye
Add Topic

DIALOGUE
Merchant: Step right up, step right up, here are the finest goods in Smalltown! Much better than the garbarge sold by MRY down the lane -- some of them I've even smuggled through the embargo.

Then all the boldfaced words get added to the topic list. So it would become:

TOPICS
Goodbye
Goods
Smalltown
MRY
Embargo
Add Topic

DIALOGUE
Merchant: Step right up, step right up, here are the finest goods in Smalltown! Much better than the garbarge sold by MRY down the lane -- some of them I've even smuggled through the embargo.

Click on a topic and the options in the list change. So, say you click on MRY. It would become:

DIALOGUE
Merchant: Step right up, step right up, here are the finest goods in Smalltown! Much better than the garbarge sold by MRY down the lane -- some of them I've even smuggled through the embargo.
1. What's wrong with MRY's goods?
2. I heard that Crooked Bee was trying to drive MRY out of town. [assuming you've heard this information]
3. Where can I find MRY?

Click on Where can I find MRY? and you'd get:

DIALOGUE
Merchant: Step right up, step right up, here are the finest goods in Smalltown! Much better than the garbarge sold by MRY down the lane -- some of them I've even smuggled through the embargo.
PC: Where can I find MRY?

Merchant: He's down by the docks, consorting with lizardfolk.

1. What's wrong with MRY's goods?
2. I heard that Crooked Bee was trying to drive MRY out of town.

These are then added to the topic list (which is NPC-specific).

Clicking on "Add Topic" in the topic list would create a little text-entry field, and you can try adding a topic. If it's a topic that the PC could plausibly say something about but the NPC has nothing to say, you get a response like, "He doesn't have anything of interest to say about that." If it's something the PC shouldn't yet know, you get a response like, "You don't have any reason to talk about that." But if it's something that you have reason to know about and there are dialogue list options on that topic for this NPC, then you it adds the topic and selects. So, say you've encountered lizardfolk already. You could Add Topic: Lizardfolk, and get:

1. Who let lizardfolk into the town? [if you've seen them in town or have heard they're in town]
2. Have you seen any lizardfolk in the area?
3. What can you tell me about the lizardfolk?

Or whatever.

If a given option had more than one-level of depth to it, then the options list could update and the topic list would lock. So, for example:

DIALOGUE
Merchant: Step right up, step right up, here are the finest goods in Smalltown! Much better than the garbarge sold by MRY down the lane -- some of them I've even smuggled through the embargo.
PC: Where can I find MRY?
Merchant: He's down by the docks, consorting with lizardfolk.

PC: What can you tell me about the lizardfolk?

Merchant: Disgusting creatures. I avoid them whenever I can. Don't tell me you're a lizard-lover?

1. Yes.
2. No.

[Topic list locked.]

DIALOGUE
Merchant: Step right up, step right up, here are the finest goods in Smalltown! Much better than the garbarge sold by MRY down the lane -- some of them I've even smuggled through the embargo.
PC: Where can I find MRY?
Merchant: He's down by the docks, consorting with lizardfolk.
PC: What can you tell me about the lizardfolk?
Merchant: Disgusting creatures. I avoid them whenever I can. Don't tell me you're a lizard-lover?
PC: No.

Merchant: Good to hear.

1. Who let lizardfolk into the town?
2. Have you seen any lizardfolk in the area?

[topic list unlocked]

You could also have an option that allowed text entry where the NPC is asking for a specific, one-word answer. Like.

DIALOGUE
Merchant: Step right up, step right up, here are the finest goods in Smalltown! Much better than the garbarge sold by MRY down the lane -- some of them I've even smuggled through the embargo.
PC: Where can I find MRY?
Merchant: He's down by the docks, consorting with lizardfolk.
PC: What can you tell me about the lizardfolk?
Merchant: Disgusting creatures. I avoid them whenever I can. Don't tell me you're a lizard-lover?
PC: No.
Merchant: Good to hear.

PC: Who let lizardfolk into the town?

Merchant: I think it was MRY. Who do YOU think let them in?

1. MRY.
2. CrookedBee.
3. You did!
4. [Other.]

It seems like this kind of hybrid system could conceivably achieve some of the benefits of both approaches, though I still think it would end up requiring much more dialogue than a normal tree approach. I can't really think of any game that does anything like that, though, which probably means it would suffer from problems. (Fallout obviously used a combined system, but it didn't really merge them so much as have them running in parallel.)

 

[talan]

I tentatively think that their omission might not be a bad idea in a game that is driven more by puzzle and interaction than by narrative. Obviously, if dialogue trees are replaced by long jRPG-style conversations, that is purely bad (in my opinion). But if they're replaced by short responses, then I think you avoid a typical adventure game problem which is that dialogue trees often are just a semi-interactive "click to continue" where you get to choose the order of content but have to get through all the content -- trees thus encourage long dialogues (and mask lengthy non-interactive or minimally interactive sequences). As a writer, I certainly enjoy being able to have long dialogues, but that's because the games I like to make are narratively dense. I'm not sure Thimbleweed Park should be narratively dense, and if it isn't, then having a lighter dialogue system may be better.

I haven't read your later responses, but Ron has blogged on this before in the blog: http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/dialog_puzzles

 

[MRY]

I haven't read your later responses, but Ron has blogged on this before in the blog: http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/dialog_puzzles

Yep! Read this a while ago -- his game-theory and game-history posts have always been on my reading list.

 

[V_K]

You don't expect wildly unrealistic things like natural language parsing and AI roleplaying your characters.

There was that fairly unique (though reportedly not very good - never got to playing in any depth it myself) dungeon crawler caller Parhedros that tried just that. The catch is, of course, that the are exactly 3 NPCs in the whole game.

 

[Tramboi]

There was that fairly unique (though reportedly not very good - never got to playing in any depth it myself) dungeon crawler caller Parhedros that tried just that. The catch is, of course, that the are exactly 3 NPCs in the whole game.

Didn't know of this one.
There's Façade, too, that tried a novel approach to conversation : http://www.interactivestory.net/

 

[Beautiful Clown Painting]

All this doesn't help us to know who let the lizardfolks in town.

 

[MRY]

King Comrade, obv

 

[Cazzeris]

Another interesting update has been just posted. This time Ron talks about budget, which is a somewhat relevant topic these days because the team stated in their most recent podcast that they are worried about the thought of running out of money:

Spoiler

Budget

Sep 07, 2015
During last week's podcast, I asked Gary and David what scares them the most about the project. I find this a useful exercise to do with the team to see what they are worried about. The answer always changes as the project progresses and new worries come and go.

The common theme from the three of us was the amount of work there is to do. It's daunting. But as I've said several times on this blog, that's normal. I've never not been daunted by the amount of work facing me on any game I've done. If you're not daunted by the amount of work, there's probably something wrong and you need to be pushing harder. Be daunted and push yourself right up to the point of being overwhelmed.

During the podcast I mentioned my concern about money and seeing the bank account go down each month. This was somehow turned into "we're running out of money", which is far from the truth. I am worried about money, anyone running a project should be.

The thing is: I worry about things so they don't become problems, and worrying about money is one of those things. If we didn't worry about money everyday, we would run out of money. It sneaks up on you.

Seeing $500,000 in your bank account can make you cocky. It can seem like an endless supply of cash and more money than most people (including me) have ever seen in their bank account. But you have to treat that $500,000 like it's $5,000 or even $500. Every dollar matters.

It's why I like to have a budget.

It is one of the advantages of having a publisher, they will poke your budget full of holes and challenge your assumptions. The downside is, they will also push your budget down and it's not uncommon for developers to then fake the budget so they get the deal (which their studio is often dependent on to stay alive). It's not malicious, they (and I have done this as well) just convince themselves they can make it for less, and that's often not true.

I want to know where every dollar is being spent from here until the end of the project. You start putting line items into the budget and you instantly see your money starting vanish. A few line items later and you're out of money. It's sobering and a necessary process. It really makes you appreciate spending anything.

We had budgets back at Lucasfilm, but we were very isolated from the gory ramifications of those numbers. I could make a budget and if I went over by 20%, I might get a stern talking to, but it's not like people weren't going to be paid. When you're running your own company and project with your own money and you run out, people don't get paid and they don't like that. In the real world, they stop working.

I do a first pass budget before I start designing. I often know how much money I have and I want to see how many people and how long I have before that money is gone. If I know I have 15 months and can afford 5 people, then that helps me in scoping the design. If I have 24 months and can have 100 people, that's another scope.

Once I've done the preliminary budget, we'll start designing and then enter pre-production, all the while, adjusting the budget as I know more. When pre-production is done, we can look at the amount of work and do a final budget based on the schedule. Budget and Schedule are two different things that feed into and help refine each other. You can't do one without the other, but they aren't the same thing.

A schedule lists everything you have to make and who is going to make it and when. A budget takes all those people and how much they cost and tells you what the project is going to cost.

Below is the current budget for Thimbleweed Park. It's what I like to call a living budget. You'll notice that the first monthly column is October, not the beginning of the project. Money spent is "water under the bridge" and is only relevant for historical and educational reasons. What I want to focus my attention on is how much we have and how much we need to spend going forward.



Anyone who has a real background in accounting is probably having spasm right now. There are much better ways to do this, but I'm not an accountant and neither are most indie devs. This is a much simplified way of budgeting and it works for me.

Each month I look at what we spend versus what we expect to spend then make any adjustments to future costs. I then remove the current month column, look at the projected total and the bank balance. If there is more in the bank then we're projected to spend, then we're OK, back to programming and designing.

Let's go through the budget.

First up are the people. Gary and I are working for peanuts (nice honey roasted ones). Neither of can afford to work for free for 18 months and we're making about a quarter of what we could get with "real jobs" but we do need to eat and pay rent.

Everyone else is working below what they could get, but I do think it's important to pay people. I don't feel getting people to work for free ever works out and usually ends badly (and friendships) or you "get what you pay for". The reality is that when someone works for you for free, you aren't their top priority. They may say you are, they may want you to be, but you rarely are and you end up dealing with missed deadlines and hastily done work.

It's important to have team members that can work as professionals and you pay people that are professionals. You should respect people's time and talent and pay them for their work. It's what the Kickstarter money was for after all.

Everyone is budgeted in at 5 days a week and 8 hours a day as we're trying to keep normal hours. I have no doubt these hours will go up towards the end of the project, but I try to never budget crunch time, it's a dangerous precedent. It's a cost we will have to manage down the road, either by hiring someone new, spending for extra time, shifting resources or cutting content. There is enough slop built into the rest of the budget to cover some of this, but I never want ink to paper, because then crunch becomes real.

We do have two additional artists budgeted and yet to be hired. We don't know if we'll need both of them, but I've budgeted them just in case. We might need help with animation and there are also a lot of close-ups (telephones, control panels, bulletin boards, etc) and ancillary screens that aren't on Mark's schedule right now.

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).

Testers, testers, testers. One of the most important and often forgotten roles in a game. It's money well spent because not testing will cost you down the road in emergency patches, dissatisfied players and crappy player review scores. The original budget had 3 testers, but I added a 4th when we added the Xbox. I over budgeted for testing and it's an area that will probably come in under budget (ass, prepare to be bitten).

It's important to distinguish between testing and beta testing as they serve very different functions. The paid testers on a project are there to (primarily) find and help squash bugs. This is a paid role because it's grueling work and, quite frankly, not a lot of people are really good at it. Testers don't just "play the game". They are "testing" the game and that often involves countless hours of playing the same 5 minutes over and over, trying to get an elusive bug to appear. Testers need to write clear and concise bug reports and endlessly regress bugs to make sure they are fixed. It's a hard job. Good testers are worth every penny.

Beta testing is different. Beta testers (an unpaid role) are still finding bugs, but what you're really looking for are big picture issues, like puzzle complexity, game flow and story clarity. You want beta testers to "play" the game like normal players will and get feedback (mostly through analytics and debriefs). You want to turn 50 beta testers loose and see where they go and what they do.

Next we come to Music and SFX. Musicians usually charge by the minute, so if you're going to have 15 minutes of unique music and they charge $1000 a minute (not uncommon), then your budget is $15,000. That $1,000/minute includes a lot of exploration and revisions and mixing. If you're saying "Hey, I'll do your music for free" you need to ask yourself if you're willing to spend weeks exploring different styles and tracks while getting constant feedback, then spend months composing it all, then additional months of making little revisions and changes, then producing 3, 4 or 5 flawless mixes. It's a lot of work and all the while, you have to hit deadline after deadline. And this is all for a relatively low budget game.

Next up on our journey through budget land is Translations, Voice Recording and Mobile. I'm kind of rolling the dice on these. I don't have a good idea what these will cost so I've padded the hell out of them and I expect this is where a lot of the slop will come from to fill other leaks. I got bids for voice acting and translation then added 30%. I have no idea on iOS and Android. I just chose a big number. This is where the voodoo of budgeting really plays out. If we had a producer, they would be spending more time nailing these numbers down. I've added enough extra that I feel comfortable.

Next up: Events. This is for stuff like PAX, Indiecade, E3 and other events we might want to show the game at. All this is really marketing and PR. It's also where we will pull extra money from if we get in trouble down the road. Not showing the game will screw its long term hopes, but not finishing the game is worse. Plus, it's a number we can scale up and down as needed and it's far enough down the road that we'll have better idea of how we're really doing.

Then it's on to the really exciting part of the budget: Legal, Accounting, Software and the always important Misc. Assuming we don't get sued, these are fairly predictable and fixed expense, but don't forget them.

And finally, the Kickstarter physical rewards. We have a fixed budget that was based on our final Kickstarter pledge numbers. It's probably around 25% too high, but that gives us some flexibility to make a better boxed copy or use the money elsewhere on the project. Or, we might have estimated wrong.

At the bottom is a total. I look at that each month and look at the bank balance. So far, we're fine. But that's because I worry.

One thing that is not on this spreadsheet is the money that is currently coming in from Humble Bundle and new backers. It's not significant, but it's not inconsequential either. I chose the leave it off the budget calculations because it provides this small margin of error.

We are planning on some new stretch goals in the next few months, and those are also not in the budget because if we don't make the goals, they won't become expenses. If we do, then all the numbers will be adjusted to account for the new work.

It's also possible that we'll move resources around, spend less on an artist and add a programmer. Budgets are living documents.

One thing to note, and I'm sure it will raise some eyebrows, is the monthly burn rate. That's a lot of money to spend each month. No one line item is very large, but they add up and can catch you by surprise. This is a pretty barebones project (but not scrappy) and it still costs $20K-$30K a month. It why when I look at other Kickstarters asking for very little money and they have a three page long team list, I get skeptical.

I hope this was informative. There are a lot of ways to do budgeting and I'm sure there are better ways, but this has always worked for me.

Please be respectful that we're sharing a lot of information with you, not only to be transparent, but also to educate and inform. This is how games are made, they take time, cost money and it's a very messy process.

- Ron

http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1

Interesting bits:

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).

Also, it's surprising to see a developer that approaches budgeting in such an open way. I like how Ron has planned a lot of stuff that probably won't end up costing that much (like those two extra artists that will be hired from october 2015 to april 2016), since it'll provide him some margin. Ignoring all the post-KS backers produces the same effect.

 

[twincast]

I really, really regret not going for the phonebook tier.
I gave them more than the base pledge mostly because of the verbs♥, but while I kept pondering it to the very last minute, the Maniac Mansion/Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders era style graphics simply made it impossible to justify to myself said jump in expense. And then they went and turned it pretty! (Never mind everything else sounding great as well.) Oh well, it's merely a vanity reward, after all.

Anyway, Thimbleweed Park, Mage's Initiation, The King's Challenge (et al.), Rogue to Redemption; so many adventure games (/hybrids) to look forward to! Plus The Devil's Men, of course. Whenever that one's supposed to come out, that is. Hmm... I do wonder how Dropsy turned out. And I've postponed actually playing Stasis because reasons.

 

[Blackthorne]

Yeah, I'm excited to play Dropsy. I genuinely looks like something different from the usual suspects when it comes to adventure games. I met the designer, Jay Tholen, at PAX this year and we had dinner, with a bunch of peeps, and he's a really cool dude. I hope it's a good game - I know he was super passionate about it.


Bt

 

[tuluse]

I leave for a few weeks, and I miss an awesome debate between CB and MRY. That'll show me.