Occult Bookstore
Sep 28, 2015
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
Although I have to comment on two things:
First: Something seems wrong with some of the art to me. Have a look at 0:50 and at the left balcony. It seems weirdly scaled?!
Second: I had hoped the book store would be comically tall and somewhat self-aware. Like birds nesting in the upper half or something. I mean it's still huge but it doesn't look IMPOSSIBLY huge to me and that is what I had hoped it would be like.(Agent: "How hard can it be to find this one book?" - Screen scrolls up for 15 seconds....)
Anyway thanks for the post and update!
Love the spider/cobweb in the foreground as you make your way up the ladder. Nice touch.
And I would love it if it was the first reaction :-)
They could also add some dialogue when the player nears the top, like:
"Man, I'm way up here...my ears just popped."
Or have a book at the very top shelf about Acrophobia.
PS. Maybe you want to check your second last paragraph.
The light effects are subtle and look amazing. Love it!
Is this the final character art? (or as close as can be)
You'll be banned for replying to a banned person.
Oh, by the way... it looks amazing!
So the first submissions are the first books you are likely to find.
Still, they all need to be translated.
For Example: "The Imperial March, by J. Caesar"... it refers to the Imperial March song in Star Wars™ and to the third month of the year in the Roman Empire, when Julius Caesar died.
The word "March" has double meaning only in english.
Why don't translate the ones that are... translatable and leave the others in english?
I really like the classic Lucasarts adventures both in English and my mother tongue, German. Boris Schneider did a great job back in the days and now that he'll provide a German version, I expected that he'd produce (once again) top-notch quality "translations" of these book titles. Please, Ron, tell us that Boris and his fellow translators *will* create funny titles and keep us from having small bits of English in an otherwise German (or whatever language) adventure game.
Cheers,
S.
I'm not sure what languages this will be officially translated to, but how about a Google doc out there of the spreadsheet that backers who are multilingual could collaborate on? Then, folks like Sebastian could go and do some of the translations. It would be security through obscurity for the Google doc, as a blog post would let people opt-into helping translate, and then Ron could distribute the link to those users on the honor system. If some titles don't get translated, no biggie...I imagine European bookstores have varied language books mixed in occasionally.
Show de Bola
It would be fun just looking at the titles.
Is there some way to automatically go through the book titles and capitalize the first letter of each word? Some of them look a bit odd as titles, the ones written in mostly lower case...
But who is going to proofread all of this? I already found several mistakes ("upgade to Windows 10", "bildeberg group" etc.). And poor Boris for having to translate 3000 titles into German... ;-)
After some digging I also recently realized that the earlier wireframe animations were possibly a throwback to Labyrinth, which I didn't play... Nice touch ;-)
The lightning looks a bit flat towards the top of the room, perhaps? A bluish tint cast by the moonlight through the window might give the scene an extra helping of atmosphere. But that's a rather small detail, of course. And so are the lights at ground level. Would it be technically possible for them to flicker? Just a little bit, to breathe some more occult (possibly cursed) life into the scene.
The walking animation looks very nice, especially when the character is facing towards or away from the player. I love the way the seam of the jacket moves, giving the character some depth. The background and character graphics seem to sit together quite nicely now.
BTW: if this is going to be random system for finding a correct book name, its gonna be the most annoying part of the game :o))) hopefully there wont shuffle every time I run the game :o)
So, now over to the nitpicking part (I know, this is an early version etc. pp.): I'm not so sure whether it is such a good idea to sort the book alphabetically: Some books were probably supposed to be placed next to each other or would be more funny at specific locations in the shelves. Furthermore, the alphabetic sorting creates some kind of redundancy in the book titles for neighboring books (look at all those "50 Shades of ..." books).
And as already mentioned further above: It would be so cool to have the lights flicker just a little, and probably have some dust particles in the air where the moon gleams through the window.
Also; there was a spelling error in the guide to ghostbusting. It just said "guid".
Try running the stuff through microsoft word.
On the side note though, translating these will be a fun task for people, considering the amont of puns in there.
We got that sort of thing throughout the Monkey Islands series, so why not here?
GFX is awesome.
The room looks great, even if it isn't final, yet. The art and setting are prefect. If the rest of the atmosphere (story/sound/music) supports this even further, you are going to get midnight zombies of all ages (young to way past adult) hanging in front of their devices (PC!!!! ... xbox etc.) sucking in your game and replaying it multiple times, if not just for the old times sake.
The important part:
I know you had poster tiers in your Kickstarter (which I can't afford at all) and I know you probably didn't count on Mark producing this kind of quality graphics, however my wish would be the following:
4-6 panoramic posters of Marks art (best locations, definitely *this* bookstore) with a small Thimbleweed Park logo in the corner for the real viewing pleasure (i.e. no characters, no big logos etc, just panoramas) to an affordable price. I don't want to diminish the value of your art, but I would like a copy so 10-20 USD depending on the production costs plus what you want for yourself would be nice. If you'd have that with affordable international shipping (*waving from germany*), sign me up for a couple!
...if and when available, I would love to hang one on the wall in my office.
@everyone else: Who's with me?
Kind Regards,
Andreas
seems like nobody wants panoramic posters....
and of course there are 2 titles missing: "3 fine potions that make beta icons look great" and "how to get unbanned from forums"
Even though it would be foolish to try, it would be very cool if you'd manage to find it "the hard way".
I wonder if in the library there is also three Cursed Monkeys and three Cursed Islands, or a single "Curse of Monkey Island" box??
too late for a title???
:'-(
--jc
I wonder. Would it be possible to make the lights "flicker" slightly? They very static to me and some variation could make the place feel more alive.
And guys, stop it with the flickering lights! Those are lightbulbs!
What about some additional occult junk in the upper area on the balconies or maybe on the wall? Maybe a dowsing rod or the mortal remains of a magician within an urn?
Regarding the light bulbs within the lanterns: There are also flickering electric lamps on the market, which I think would have been a bit more creepy (if they were already available in 1987 - elsewise I would have chosen oil lamps and candles).
If the bright flares in the fields of the lanterns are seperate layers, you could just make these layers flicker.
PS: The display cabinets in the foreground have not the same vanishing points as the rest of the room. Okay, you could argue that they are simply standing misaligned in the room.
and Delores' character design is explicitly mid-80s: http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/exploring_delores
Now, maybe the submitters could supply an additional "highlights paragraph" per title submission? The character could pick up one of the 3000 (or a subset of 3000) titles and read the paragraph without VO. I guess that would drive some people insane though. On the other hand I can't help but imagine how cool it would be if the character would crack a joke about some funny title or reading few lines from a book and reacting to it.
BTW, I always loved how funny the indy ladder climbing animation was on The Last Crusade.
BTW2 & off-topic, Just learned today that Disney cancelled another potential classic game in the 90s by artist&programmer genious Jim Sachs (Defender of the Crown - Amiga): http://www.pcmuseum.ca/sachs1.asp.
"For years I had been in talks with Disney regarding my doing a game based on 20,000 Leagues. Finally, they agreed, which is why I dropped Saucer attack. After I worked about a year on the project, they decided not to fund it after all, which sent me into a deep depression. I'm still convinced that it would have been the ultimate computer game of all time."
This is the last (jaw dropping) demo from the game (on Jim's Youtube channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVnOAy_9VMU.
i know its not final, thats just a hint: at 1:36 two book rows at the middle lefthand look to much the same.
Still amazing what you can do with just a few colors for the characters look.
reminds me of Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis, alongwith its good feelings.
And how long did that copy / paste thing take?
http://jennsand.com/
Also regarding making the store seem super, super absurdly tall, there could be another ladder at the top of the bookshelves which you can't use because the character doesn't want to go that high without a good reason, and then whenever you get the object that lets you find the book, it could trigger ascending up that extra ladder, with a cutscene where the screen goes dark with a *1 hour later* message, then comes back to the character climbing a ladder through some clouds or something before finally getting to the right book.
Well, it does....
I know I'm way too late but recently this came to my mind:
"When Mary met Shelley" by Frank N. Stein
Best regards
eMaze
I missed that one in the original thread.
Im going to have to find a way of watching this in slo mo to see if one of my entries comes up by fluke :)
Seeing how gorgeous the result is, I realize now that I don't care much about pixels, anyway :-).
I used to be attached to the pixel purity of the graphics, but I'm at peace with it now...
For fun, I've been pondering today how to make pixellated sprites scale nicely, and my conclusion was that you couldn't do it with a single layer per character.
The main problems being smudged faces and manually dithered gradients (like in Reyes' hair) that end up looking like lines because of moiré patterns.
You'd probably need to put the eyes and mouth on a separate layer with a different scaling logic, and, for the moiré, you could have smooth gradients on the art and dither them live after scaling (using a shader, for example). Sampling from higher resolution images may help too...
All of that would however be highly unpractical for the artists (well, Gary right now), more complicated, and for little gain, so I'm all for you not caring about it at all :-)
That's basically an art form to be invented.
But... I feel like there's a separate issue of alignment, which matters a lot more to me. In the video above, where the character seems to be at full scale — i.e. the room feels intuitively like a "1 : 1" room, and her pixels look basically the same size as the background pixels — she's still not aligned to the background grid. For example when at 0:20 she walks and stands over at the left, a much-narrower-than-a-pixel sliver of the background is visible just in front of her mouth. That kind of thing catches my eye and looks yucky — and that's only the very very mildest example of the kind of slivery yuckiness that's possible.
Isn't there some way that you can lock the bounding box of the character to the background grid so that as long the character-to-background scaling is designated as 1 : 1, pixel-to-pixel scale and alignment will always be maintained? Does the "native scaling" option encompass this, too? I can't see why you wouldn't want it in place for everyone.
Sorry to be a crazy obsessive.
P.S. Thanks for putting my dumb book titles in your cool game!
I'm glad you will include both versions, Ron. Like I've said before, Mark's graphics are absolutely stunning, but they do not spark in me the fires of nostalgia as seeing blocky Maniac Mansion-style graphics do. :)
- j.
What a about mobile? I see how a mouse could cursor over all of those teeny-tiny few pixels of each book, but watching this video on my phone it seems that amount of accuracy would be impossible on a touch based interface...?
Psst: look at the stretch goals…
otherwise, the voice actors will literally die.
By the way, my book appears at the minute 1:04, "Commodore 666, Programmers Reference Guide" :D
You (and all of us) are blessed that you got Mark Ferrari on the team, it really adds a lot of quality.
Thx for answer! :)
Is the crow is a fate of Atlantis reference?
I think your approach of doing a "rough" pass first and then doing polishing works out nicely, especially if you should run into any problems along the way. It looks like there's plenty of polishing you could skip if necessary.
Now I can swag till the end of times.