Thimbleweed Park Podcast #nan
by Ron Gilbert
Nov 27, 2015
Nov 27, 2015
There will be no Thimbleweed Park Podcast this week as David, Gary and I are off enjoying Thanksgiving, but we'll be back next week with an episode guaranteed to be riveting as it will be the first podcast of the month and we'll be taking reader questions again.
I get asked a lot about when backers who get their name in the phonebook need to supplies details, including the VM message. That should all be set up by the end of the year and come January 1st, we'll be sending out an email with details. We look forward to our witty, insightful, boring or entertaining VM messages.
- Ron
I wonder if you'll be encoding the voice files using an actual GSM codec or another (Ogg Vorbis?) in equivalent in quality. :) It would sound quite authenthic in terms of quality.
To everyone's reading: why don't WE do the blog post this time?
I suggest this headline: Remote Virtual Fictitious Whateveryouwant Playtesting.
Everyone wants to be playtester: let's just do what we can from our houses!
For one time, let's NOT say "what a great game", "Ron you're so awesome", "you're gods".
They already know we're right :)
We could answer ALL/SOME/ONE of the following questions:
1) do we have any general feedback on the game, from what we have seen?
2) How would we describe the story and the characters in VERY SHORT from what we got?
3) Is there anything confusing from what we've seen until now?
4) Is there anything we don't like from what we see?
which are (shrinked) the after-playtest questions posted few days ago.
Just a suggestion. Carlo
I personally don't want to know too much details if the game, before the time of the release. We already know the number of characters, their names and roles, we know the main structure of the plot, we know there will be fladhbacks, parts. Inside the posts of the first months of this year, there were a lot of information.
Anyway, for what I have seen (I stimate 1% of the total), I can say:
1) I feel the game will be exactly as I am expecting to be. Because users of this dev blog are interacting with the Creators, and they are listening to us, making changes to the game. I remember the questioning about the movement of the jawbone, for example. It's use was decided after our feedback. From the pictures of the last testing, I feel completely satisfied!
2) The story and the characters are thrilling, in Maniac Manson style or in X-Files style, and I loved both of them.
3) For what I have seen, there is nothing confusing. I have seen many little particulars which enrich the beauty of the game: objects referring to the past, color dithering... it's simply beautiful to see to me.
4) There is anything I don't like.
Ciao!
1) GENERAL FEEDBACK: until now, I've seen mostly parts from the town. The town looks to me like a set of very separate environments connected by empty roads. I don't have the feeling of a continuous world. Partly, I think this comes from not playing the game and just looking at pictures; but from the videos I still have a bit of this feeling.
2) DESCRIPTION OF STORY AND CHARACTERS: I understand there is a complex plot, made of apparently separate threads coming together. I find this very intriguing. Fact is, we are only seeing two playable characters up to now: may this indicate that the other characters are behind/lower in development? If so, are the two main detective characters sufficiently complementary to give movement to the interactions, or maybe you could just collapse them to one, and no one would notice?
3) CONFUSING? I don't know, I'm confused about this.
4) DON'T LIKE: while I like the arts in general, I never had the courage to tell this until now: I find the approach to the graphics of rooms/environments a bit too flat. I now, it's good old '80s, we all love pixel art, but must that be all so flat?
Hope you don't hate me for this :)
However I realize that probably all screenshots that we saw have a very similar, frontal perspective (just an observation, no opinion here). Other adventure games sometimes have pixel-art oblique views of buildings etc (e.g. you see a corner and two sides of a house). This has IMHO nothing to do with being more 3D, it is rather a question of vanishing points.
Maybe those rooms exist in the large parts of the game that we have not seen...?
In my commenti, please translate "flat" to "completely frontal perspective".
This, I am not enjoying too much.
I realize this is very Maniac-like, Zak like, but this is not what I appreciate most from those games. Rooms a la Indy/Monkey/Loom are what I really cannot forget.
It's just my opinion and taste. Thank you for asking clarifications.
But if I remember correctly, in a previous post on this blog, there was a testing room with the purpose of testing lights, parallax and pixel resize of the characters, because of perspective, like Guybrush in Monkey Island 2 when he walks on the quayside.
Anyway, I really don't care too much about it. Even in Zak McKracken, there were some room with perspective (the outside of Zak's house, you could see the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance :-) ).
I wonder how the promotion was back then, and the game announcements? Was it shortly before the release or long time in advance? More on the revealing side or more mysterious?
Maybe some of you remember these days and can write a little bit about it? (I was too young, my cousin had the games, and each one was a big surprise for me.)
In the late '80s there were a few games magazines. The editor department could test the game before everyone else, so it was possible to write a game review, just before the game release.
That was the only *official* existing communication channel to know which games there were on the market.
As a reader, I loved two games magazines: "ZZAP!" and "THE GAMES MACHINE".
But.
There were some *unofficial* channels. A smuggling ring of games. Once a month, for example, it was possible to get hunderds of games, paying a person, usually a teenager student.
In Italy, it was very common to get many games in that way, because it was the easiest way to get them. In the shops there were only about half of the available games.
There were no copyright laws on this computer sector until 1990, so it was legal to "pirate" copies of the games.
For me, it was thanks to this smuggling ring if I could know Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken. Otherwise I would not have ever known them, except, perhaps, through friends who had a Commodore 64.
When I finished Zak McKracken (1989), I was so happy and so proud of their creators that I felt compelled to buy a copy in a game shop. So I did it.
But that's another story :-)
If Italy had copyright laws on computer software after 1990, those laws were completely ignored. :-)
I visited Rome in 1993 or so and while I was there, I saw an Amiga store ad in a bus and decided to see what they got. What I found was row after row of pirated programs. If you wanted something, they would copy it while you waited.
This was a real shop with ads. Not some back alley "Hey, you want to buy a game? First one's free..." kind of thing.
A couple of years before, I had visited Hong Kong and seen the same thing there. The shop in HK was just a little more "professional". You would get a (black and white) photocopy of the manuals too.
But I clearly remember reviews of games like Loom, Indy 3+4, MI1+2 and so on and how excited I was. Playing Lucasfilm Adventures was like watching the latest Disney animated picture. Both were released once a year around Christmas (with some exceptions).
EDIT: nope. I dug up my old Lucasfilm scrapbook I compiled almost quarter a century ago, and it seems most of previews there was from UK and US magazines. But Finnish reviews and walkthroughs were galore.
I do remember the developer blog in Zzap! by David Walker. Happy memories!
https://archive.org/stream/zzap64-magazine-032/ZZap_64_Issue_032_1987_Dec#page/n11/mode/2up
Zak review:
https://archive.org/stream/zzap64-magazine-047/ZZap_64_Issue_047_1989_Mar#page/n69/mode/2up
(also check out the cover page)
state of the art adventure game engine in 1986:
https://archive.org/stream/zzap64-magazine-017/ZZap_64_Issue_017_1986_Sep#page/n69/mode/2up
Luckily Ron wrote his own!
I do remember the Q-A-style hint section of some computer magazines where you could send a letter describing where you are stuck and would get an answer one month later.... are we all less patient nowadays?
Nowadays everything is fast, quick, speedy, hurry, I have finished the synonyms... users born after the internet explosion are more impatient than users born before it.
I remember the solution of Zak McKracken published in two issues of ZZap!, dated February 1989 and March 1989! Two months! And everyone was happy!