Thimbleweed Park Podcast #2

by Ron Gilbert
Apr 17, 2015

Hot off the presses, it's the second Thimbleweed Park Stand Up Meeting Podcast, recorded a few hours earlier and hand edited to perfection*.

You can also subscribe to the Thimbleweed Park Podcast RSS feed if that's 'your thing'.

- Ron

* Perfection not guaranteed.

Christopher Griffin - Apr 17, 2015 at 15:58

Holy cow, another one already? Where is the time going... at this rate the game will be released last year!

Peter Campbell - Apr 17, 2015 at 16:40

I think Thimbleweed Park's faster than expected development benefits enormously due to a combination of...

1) Ron, Gary and David having 25+ years of experience making games like TP
2)Not having to spend time working around any type of hardware/graphical limitations for the game unlike during the C64 and early PC days
3)Having much of the game already planned out beforehand around the time they launched the kickstarter campaign
4)Them basically being in charge of their own project, knowing how they want the game to be and being able to pick and choose who else they want to hire to help out with the game. So many games go through committee thinking and become a complete mess because of it.

Of course, as with any game and as Ron has said, the game will go through several alterations once near completion with rooms, story elements, puzzles, etc. etc. being added/removed as well as just smoothing out and polishing the game so that it's fun, glitch free and just overall a good solid point and click adventure game. That will take up several months of development time.

Tomimt - Apr 20, 2015 at 05:13

Experience doesn't always mean a speedy delivery time. I don't want to name projects, but I've seen seasoned developers dropping the ball pretty badly when it comes to development.

But Ron, Gary and David are a pretty good example on how well things can go when you do have all the cows in line. They seem to know exactly what they are doing and what they want, which is an extremely good thing. I've seen some newbie devs with similar attitude and they are hammering it down with similar admirable fashion.

Uli Kusterer - Apr 17, 2015 at 16:02

Thanks for the RSS link! My commute will by much Thimbleweediger (but hopefully with less parking)!

Mattias Cedervall - Apr 17, 2015 at 16:36

Great work, guys! ^_^

Brian S - Apr 17, 2015 at 16:40

Nice. I clicked on the RSS link above from my iPhone, and now the ThimbleWeed Park Podcast is added to the Podcasts App. Thank you!

Orcan Ogetbil - Apr 17, 2015 at 22:27

It the Monkey Island games, we were able to walk around (most of) the islands on the maps (Are the maps called "rooms" as well?).
Are we going to have interactive maps in Thimbleweed Park?

frank - Apr 19, 2015 at 13:06

Good Question!

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Apr 19, 2015 at 13:09

Yes, the maps were called "rooms". Everything was a room, even the close-ups, they were technically "rooms". There are some maps in Thimbleweed Park that you can walk around like in Monkey Island. I love maps.

Brian - Apr 19, 2015 at 22:58

Wow. It’s amazing that we can get so immersed in the game that we never stop to think about what’s actually going on behind the scenes. Until you pointed it out, I would have never guessed that the close-ups, maps, and cut scenes from MI were just “rooms”. Very clever!

Jura Snodtball - Apr 17, 2015 at 22:55

Question for Gary. Have you ever done any album covers?

Arty189 - Apr 18, 2015 at 09:30

No, not really- the closest thing was when I worked as as assistant to Neal Adams
in the 1970's- he drew a series of covers (with comics included) for a company called
'Power Records'- these were based on popular TV shows- Star Trek, The Six Millon Dollar
man to name a few- I did some backgrounds and coloring along with other members of the
studio.

Gary Winnick ✓ - Dec 09, 2015 at 12:46

You can follow-up on this with me through my garyart.net website

Natalija - Apr 18, 2015 at 02:44

Hahahaha perfection not guaranteed .. This post is perfect!

Patrik Spacek - Apr 18, 2015 at 12:02

What is the game resolution for this game? is it classic 320x200, which will horrifies me on my 60" tv (lol), i better keep my 14" crt, lol, or is there going to be any other tricks?

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Apr 18, 2015 at 12:19

It's 340x200 to fit the standard widescreen monitors, although it's something we are playing with constantly to find a nice balance. Nothing is locked in stone at this point. Also, unlike the old graphics cards, we can do some rooms in 320 and others in 640 if we want a long shot. Still doing a lot of experimenting.

Peter Frank - Apr 19, 2015 at 06:22

Will Mark Ferrari also be part of the team? I think his art was important for the early Lucasfilm Games...

Saw just his amazing Landscapes of old retro games on his Website:

http://markferrari.com/art/8bit-game-art/

Tomimt - Apr 20, 2015 at 05:19

It would be lovely to see a sequal done with Mark's style of art. His stuff is absolutely mindblowing. And maybe it would be fun to see the possible sequals to evolve grpahically from what Maniac Masion is to what The Dig is.

Frank - Apr 20, 2015 at 08:28

Here you can see some great exemples for his art:

http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/?sound=0

Here are also some informations, how he works:

http://mixnmojo.com/news/A-celebration-of-Mark-Ferrari

Frank - Apr 20, 2015 at 08:33

By the way: Mountain Storm looks exactly like the introduction of "Monkey Island 1".....

Geoff Paulsen - Apr 18, 2015 at 15:17

Have you thought about implementing a "state table" yet for the game? one location to store the state of all of the objects, so it's easy to save and restore? I'm curious to your approach for this.

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Apr 18, 2015 at 16:12

Grouping all the variables together doesn't really solve the issues. If I want to do a prefect save, then I need to save a lot more data than just variables, I need to save the internal state of every running script, plus every internal variable that scripting languages has, not just important ones to the game. And, all the rooms, objects and actors. It's a lot of data to iterate through, and more importantly, be able to restore. If I'm not going to do a prefect save, then yeah, the problem is much much easier, but it put some of the work (and possible bugs) on the scripters to make sure that everything that should be saved is saved, and that objects and actors are returned to the right state. It's not a problem I need to solve for several months, so I'm focusing on other issues.

Geoff Paulsen - Apr 22, 2015 at 06:39

Cool. Thanks for responding. I look forward to hearing more when the time comes.

Jammet - Apr 19, 2015 at 19:15

One of the absolute downsides of the audio podcasts is though, that there seems to be less written comments/feedback on what's going on. I really enjoy that kind of interactivity, so, it's good we're going to have both audiocasts and blog entries. :)

MrY - Apr 20, 2015 at 04:18

Wonder if they ironed out the details over the Ivy League babe. What Ivy does she attend? Dartmouth and Brown are the most party schools. But H had its 350 anniversary in the 80s. Real toughie!

Thomas - Apr 20, 2015 at 06:52

Do i need to buy a soundblaster card, or will that blog also support text output going forward?

DNA - Apr 20, 2015 at 22:45

No you don't need an original SoundBlaster or SoundBlaster emulator to listen to the blog. Besides, just to connect an original SoundBlaster, you'll need an ISA slot which hasn't appeared on motherboards for the past 15 years at least!

Thomas - Apr 21, 2015 at 03:34

Well, as i'm fan of games form 15 year back, who says i'm not still using the hardware from back then? :-P

DNA - Apr 22, 2015 at 02:00

You got me there! But will Thimbleweed park run on a 1987 PC? Seems it will probably require a 1GHZ processor.

Thomas - Apr 22, 2015 at 04:26

hahaha, maybe not - but i gonna use my nexus 7 to play it.

delMar - Apr 21, 2015 at 17:42

Closeups that have text on top of them?
Wanna see wireframe mockup preliminary fake preview teaser screenshot!!! Please

btw: are those standups scripted? is the blog "ghost written"? how do you find the time to be months ahead of the prospectded roadmap and still do all this?
Ron: "I have wired up the elevator buttons."
Gary: "Oh, really? Great."

But still: yes, I do care to listen next week. Great project, great blog, great podcast :-)

Ron Gilbert ✓ - Apr 21, 2015 at 18:26

No, the podcasts are not staged. They are edited slightly to take out bad umm and ahhh's and prolonged silence (not to mention one loud garbage truck going by outside), and I've edited out one spoiler so far (and will probably do that in the future). Other than that, they are just our conversations. Some of the stuff isn't new to us, because we do talk at other times during the week, but we don't fake surprise at hearing anything.

The blog entry is written by the person listed at the top as the author. No ghost writing from marketing and PR departments.

Pager - Apr 21, 2015 at 19:29

Getting a sense of a double bluff twist reversal in all this ;)

Heinz - Apr 23, 2015 at 16:09

I also like elvators, in adventure games, especially when they are working as time machines ;)

mr. T - Apr 29, 2015 at 11:39

Would be great to hear something from Ken Macklin. The Maniac Mansion cover is one of the most spectacular ones I've ever seen. Would be well placed in a graphic design handbook as an example of a near perfect design. Really unique. I wonder how he himself sees it. Anyway, really glad you brought him to the production. Classy move.