Cutting
Jul 20, 2015
We cut 25 rooms from the game last week. No one panic, it's not a bad thing, it's actually a good thing.
Put. Down. The pitchfork.
Editing is one of the most crucial stage of any creative endeavor. I know it seems like you're losing something when stuff is cut, but the old saying "less is more" is actually very true.
You cut stuff to focus the story and the puzzles. Pointless rooms don't make the game bigger and better, they become useless traversal and dilute attention from what really matters.
The great purge of 2015 started with a mental exercise.
I asked Gary and David to make a list of 15 rooms they would cut. After each of us had compiled our lists in isolation, we sat down and talked through our choices.
The breakdown of the cut rooms is as follows:
We cut 5 rooms because we decided to have the circus flashback happen at night instead of during the day. This allows us to use the same rooms for the main game and the flashback (with some object overlay changes). CUT!
We cut two rooms from the circus because we never came up with a singe puzzle or purpose for those rooms. CRUFT! CUT!
We cut two rooms that were just the sides of the pillow factory. They seemed like a good idea four months ago, but felt like baggage after playing. CUT! CUT! CUT!
We cut three rooms from the Delores family manor. Again, we never really found a use for these rooms. One of them might come back as we still have a couple of dangling puzzle chains in the mansion and might find a good use for them. CUT! MAYBE! BUT CUT!
We cut two rooms from the hotel because they were just variations of the generic hotel room that are better done with object variations. CUT! CUT! CUT!
We cut another room because the puzzle was better done as long shot and not going into a new room. CUT!
We cut one room because we came up with a funny gag instead of having the room. CUT!
We cut three rooms in town because we never found a good use for them. The town of Thimbleweed is supposed to be a little old and decaying, so they got turned into abandon buildings. It works better that way. CUT DAMN YOU! CUT!
You might detect a small amount of glee is my ALL CAP outbursts, and that wouldn't be misplaced. I enjoy cutting. It means the game is getting leaner. A lot of rooms in Monkey Island were cut and no one noticed. I don't think I miss a single one of them and none of them would have made the game better, possible just to opposite.
That's not to say we cut solely for creative reasons. The rooms count was getting up there. We had over 100 rooms, far more then either of the Monkey Island games, which were much bigger than Maniac Mansion. Coming out of pre-production, we started to do a final schedule and budget and realized we couldn't get everything done in time or for the money we had. Something had to give.
But we knew that going in. I like to over design and then cut and that's what we did. Nothing we cut sacrificed the game.
It's also why we do a completely playable game during pre-production. In some way, these cuts are free. No one invested time, energy or ego into any of these rooms. CUT!
Whenever I've done post about cutting stuff, people inevitably ask if we can leave it the game as a "director's cut".
That's not easy to do. There is so much "connective tissue" that holds the rooms together and we're cutting early in production, so it never gets fully wired up or programmed. There are a couple of places that we'll leave some cut content in as easter eggs, but for the most part, the game moves forward too fast to make it worth keeping cut content in a useable form.
Or maybe during the end credits, paying tribute to the fallen heroes that made the game possible.
"We'll miss you bank vault."
- Ron
To a point of course - one room might be a little weird except for an escape adventure, but 100 is hardly starving.
Have you ever played some of the older Ultima games, I wonder? In these games there was a menu option, usually called "Quotes". It would be like the credits at the end of the game, but instead, it was a mass of funny lines and stuff produced through the production of the game.
So, maybe, throw something like that into the menu, and every time to find a tidbit that could show in there, instead of completely discarding it, throw it into the kitchen sink along with the Quotes. Unused pictures, music, silly animation, dancing characters, anything you want. The option could appear after the game is finished.
Could be something as silly as your buro, and you, Dave and Mark as character representations talking for a while, and presenting all these silly, funny, or interesting little things.
In Ultima, this looks like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1htR7X8pPPA
In the first, the treeline goes upwards. In the second down.
This was a good post! I think the breakdown of why how many rooms got cut was very insightful. The reasoning makes a lot of sense and I think the variations through overlays and/or objects are a good way to save some resources.
On the matter itself: Nothing is more boring than transitional or almost empty rooms without any real purpose. These ones won't be missed! "Glad you are gone, JERKS!"
Another famous kickstarter really failed in this aspect because it contained severeal rooms with only one object or character in it. But since the graphical production pipeline was VERY complex those rooms just ate a big chunk of the puzzles and actual content. Sadly they masked it as "Naaaahh, this is how we intended it to be" instead of being honest and saying: "Yeah, we miscalculated how expensiv the production of the rooms were"
Oh well. It's good to focus on what matters. I remember playing a game, and walk through a room dozens of times, and always thinking why is this room here, as there is nothing to do in there. It's just frustrating to walk through a meaningless room time and time again.
Some people can spend a lifetime trying to create drawings like that - and fail!
Thumbs up Gary!
1: It is best to make an agile game, that just is delivered on time.
2: Now that I know that there was more, I want it all (as freddy mercury once said). Just like when I buy special editions DVD's for the deleted scenes.
But all in all im sure this was a good choice. But you didnt need to tell us all. Because knowing such great looking rooms were cut fills me with a sense of loss.
And even using the wireframe art so no major work needed to keep them in. :)
PS. I've worked with producers and project managers who seem to think cramming as much in as possible. even after the supposed scope freeze. So get out the big scissors and cut cut cut!
Besides there are a lot of items that can be moved into other rooms (such as a radio: You can have a radio in the living room, in the kitchen, in the rest room, in the garage et cetera).
And the inside of the bank reminded me of the shopkeeper's shop on Mêlée Island.
The way of the cut mockup is much more sensible, as you stated, no one has yet spent a lot of time or energy in trying to make them cool or full of purpose.
I actually have some semi-serious thoughts to type out but I'm too sleepy right now to coherently put them together lol.
Monkey Island did this really well, I think, particularly the first part on Mêlée Island. Mêlée Island completely felt like a real place where real people lived, and whose locations were connected in a way that made sense. The fact that you had to revisit a limited number of locations, and that your actions changed what these locations represented, and what happened in these locations, really gave the game a sense of place, and a sense of reality; Mêlée Island felt like an actual place, not like a string of set-pieces guiding the player through a plot.
That's a point, will there be "soft" deaths in thimbleweed? That is deaths that result from a specific action, but just put you back where you were before you took the action with no consequences after the cutscene(so are really more for humourous effect). Think I missed this if it was answered before.
I did.
The ones I really missed were Stan's exotic animal zoo, Herman Toothrot's underground bar, the casino on Melee Island, the space station above Monkey Island, and LeChuck's white-water-rafting excursion center.
Still haven't forgiven you guys for those cuts.
I'd much rather have a tighter, leaner, more focused on game world to explore and I feel like the game itself already became huge and robust compared to what was originally planned when Mark Ferrari joined the team. He puts so much work into every room he draws and he makes the rooms so lush, beautiful and chock full of detail that would otherwise be absent if you guys stuck with the Maniac Mansion style of art.
With Mark Ferrari drawing the rooms, Gary Winnick drawing everything else, and Ron Gilbert, David Fox, and perhaps this mysterious Jenn person doing all the programming, no doubt cutting filler rooms was the right decision and allows you all to focus on making the existing rooms and the entire game as great, interesting, detailed and fun as possible. I didn't even know that Gary had drawn over 100 rooms, I thought the project had stood at about 80-ish rooms and when you initially said that you had cut 25 rooms that you had brought the room count down to the 60s or upper 50s, thank goodness that isn't the case otherwise I'd be raging right now lol.
It's the type where there are either numbers or letters on every drawer and you have to open tons of them to find the thing you're meant to be looking for and there are millions of combinations to potentially get stuck on.
Eg: Space Quest 6 filing cabinets, Monkey Island 2 library cards, etc.
I like the first cut room the best... looks to be a giant TV screen with bottles of beer either side of it.
http://i.imgur.com/Qk9m052.jpg
On a more serious note, somehow this post made me think about a painter who after finishing his vision sees some extra canvas still with no paint and just decides to cut the extra canvas. And another who has painted the whole canvas but after some careful thought makes the decision that some areas on the corners don't bring anything in to the story of the painting. To his great annoyance, the latter has done more extra work and also used more paint...
P.S. Actually, I would love to do some gratuitous lock picking in that vault. Who knows what you'd find there... Some gum perhaps, Rusty's yellow jacket or that collector's edition of Huckleberry Finn so many of us yearn for and hear stories about. Now we will never know!
Yes good idea!
Anyway this blog is wonderful.
Keep the good work guys!!!!
Then you have an Easter Egg way in. Imagine a bookshelf loaded with books you can look at with funny titles, or comments when checking them. (Eg "Falling off a cliff, Eileen Dover" - Just please do better than that). One of the books is called "The History of Scumm Barr by Wally B Feed". What you do is look at it 3 times, try to pick it up 3 times, look at it three times again. After you do that, the bookshelf becomes a door and you can have a look around. It adds nothing to the game, possibly you can get a useless low-res iconed item for your inventory, but otherwise is an easter egg for people to find.
A secret puzzle in effect.
Another adventure game based ONLY on those rooms. ThimbleweedPark^-1, or What if we cut only the rooms we actually kept.
I think it should be called "Cruft Town"...
In 1987 three people were transported to a place beyond time, beyond space. A hastily-drawn wireframe world where nothing was as it seemed. Where doors lead to unrelated rooms and items were barely decipherable. Welcome to... Cruft Town.
I like the idea.
This could also be an easter-egg when making a step through a mirror. ;-)
Not just the rooms which did not make it but also those who survived the purge although being candidates to get cut. I guess that there would be lots of spoilers involved, so this cannot happen on this blog at this point. But it just would be too interesting to learn about those things. Maybe later?
I like those weird/empty scenic rooms from old adventures, but there's some really obscene burn-rates of rooms around (Universe, Microprose stuff. Prisoner of Ice).
What are the plans for Wimpy after the game is finished? Are you just going to scrap it, or is it going to open-source? (Essentially what I'm asking is will I be able to get my hands on Wimpy at some point in time).
Sincerely,
Nolan 'Duphus'
But if it had been in the actual game, we'd barely have noticed it.
The sad truth: cut a piece of art and post a small photo of it in the background on a computer screen, and it will become a "lost treasure"
Put it in the final game with no puzzles, and we'll call it "the boring room".
If you did cut it, it's a good thing. Otherwise there's too much emphasis on the fact that it is a pitchfork, rather than on the "put down" part.
Unlike this guy:
https://youtu.be/FiQnH450hPM?t=114
http://tinyurl.com/navr7al