Thimbleweed Park Podcast #6

by Ron Gilbert
May 15, 2015

David phones in from his car mechanic's waiting room and Gary gets a text message! What craziness will happen next on the Thimbleweed Park stand-up meeting podcast.

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- Ron

Peter Brodersen - May 15, 2015 at 14:42

Listening to the stuff about character backstories made me think about the awesome physical wall poster that was in the originally Maniac Mansion box where there are hints about the different characters. At that point it also hit me that one would lose a bunch of cool parts of the game univers if it was simply pirated.

At what point in the development did you do the poster at that time? And who made it?

Sewa-o-matic - May 15, 2015 at 16:20

Ron tells about that poster in this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzUb9e2m03w.

SemanticFrustration - May 16, 2015 at 01:36

Hey, that's not a podcast; that's a YouTube video!

vegetaman - May 15, 2015 at 22:07

Oh man, that poster was great. All the things I thought that were just red herrings that wound up as legit hints (like the radioactivity making plants grow). This is the type of add-on item that would be amazing, even if it was just digital content that came with the game. That way even neat character backstories that didn't make the cut for the game itself could still make their way into the lore.

Mattias Cedervall - May 15, 2015 at 15:11

I'm so excited about this game and I just can't hide it!
I'm about to lose the controller and I think I like it!

natalija - May 16, 2015 at 13:30

So what is the secret of Monkey island?

Sushi - May 16, 2015 at 17:54

Spoiler alert!
There are lots of wacky theories on what is the secret of monkey island... I'm pretty sure it's one of these:
a) simply the fact that LeChuck has this secret hideout below Monkey Island
b) a more intriguing title for a game than "pirate adventure"
c) they had to cut the secret due to disk space reasons
d) a running joke that has started to lead its own life for so long now that it's better to keep it that way. For sure better than being revealed it is actually a, b or c!

DZ-Jay - May 17, 2015 at 06:32

I have to ask: Is that a Death Spank song in the intro of the podcasts?

I love the "spaghetti western" soundtrack on Death Spank. :)

Mau - May 17, 2015 at 17:14

Yes it is.

Ron Gilbert ✓ - May 17, 2015 at 17:18

No, that's the music Steve Kirk composed for our Kickstarter. You can hear it on the trailer.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thimbleweedpark/thimbleweed-park-a-new-classic-point-and-click-adv/description

Geoff Paulsen - May 18, 2015 at 10:04

You mentioned you were beginning to code the puzzle dependency graph. How will that be expressed in code? Will the puzzle dependency graph that you've posted mostly just be used to organize your own thoughts? Or will there be a more formal C++ Graph that has nodes and edges, and transition criteria?

Ron Gilbert ✓ - May 18, 2015 at 10:08

The pdc is just a document we use when wiring everything up. The code is too complex to do anything automatically, not and have the game still feel fluid and natural. At the end of the day, you're coding up a lot of weird exceptions that the pdc can't really represent fully.

For a future post, we'll show some code that is used for some puzzles. Unfortunately, there is no magic.

Ron