Friday Questions

Given the creative freedom afforded to you making a game this way, is this the way you always want to make them from now on?

How do you see the chances for young creators in the current gaming business? With all these free Dev-Kits and platforms (browser games, iPhone, iPad, Indie-XBLA) – do you think it has become easier to make a name for yourself and actually fulfil your projects?

Re dialog recording:  Will the main actors be recording their lines together at the same session?  

I find that a game suffers when character names or places are pronounced differently by different characters or when two people in conversation have obviously incorrect inflections, emphasis, etc.  How will you handle this?

Thanks

How much do you rely on motivation and how much on discipline when developing games?

What is your philosophy on in-game hints?  Everyone seems to have a different view on this.  It seems to me like people have less patience now when playing adventure games (me included).  I know that you are taking great care for people not to feel lost - but will there be some way in-game to get a gentle hint or are external walkthroughs enough?  Thanks

can you send me a Mix 'n' Mojo disk? I've lost it and i need to play monkey island thanks
JOKING LOL
What's the process to understand the costs and make estimation about projects like this one?
How much the final effective cost differs about initial estimation in media?
^_^

What are your thoughts on adventure game UI (e.g. verbs at the bottom vs. a verb icon "wheel" like the MI special editions vs. no verbs)?  Obviously, Thimbleweed Park is a throwback to SCUMM, but can the TP engine adapt to different UI options for future games?

Will there be graphic filters so that we can make the graphics look like a CRT display? For example, ScummVM has the "TV2x" filter, which emulates scan lines, and also a "Dot Matrix" filter. I think both look great with big pixels. Much better than those anti-alias filters that smoothen diagonal lines.

Sample images:

TV2x: http://wiki.scummvm.org/images/a/aa/ManiacMansion_TV2x.png
DotMatrix: http://wiki.scummvm.org/images/0/05/ManiacMansion_DotMatrix.png

To each of you: Do you dislike clowns and why do you think everyone finds them so unnerving?

Have any of you ever received death threats because of a game you've worked on.

Q: I love the humor and tone in LucasArts adventures and Thimbleweed Park. Who comes up with the attitude and all the funny stuff? Ron? Team effort?

What is needed to see your way to doing another point-and-click adventure after Thimbleweed?  I am extremely impressed by everything I see so far and you guys really seem to be having a good time making this one.  But is there a financial (or emotional) target for you to consider a round two?  I'm hoping it's not "If we each become incredibly wealthy when the game is released..."

When (some of) you worked on the Indy3 adventure game, did you also watch Indina Jones 3 some time before it was released in cinemas? And if so, do you remember there being any differences in the rough cut you saw VS the final theatrical version?

Hi Ron - Can you give some more detail on your plans for pixel-retro™ mode?  

Things like:
- What kind of experience it will give
- Will there be limitations?
- Do you think it will be hard to implement?
- Any concrete ideas on how it will be implemented?

Question for David:

When working on Cadillac's & Dinosaurs did you have any plans for other sequences or gameplay mechanics?

Did Han shot first?

What ingredients do you put on your pizza and what beverage do you couple with such a yummy meal?

How were sound effects designed in the age of the C=64?  Was it trial and error with people manipulated the SID registers with code until it sounded interesting, or did someone record a natural sound and then analyzed it through an oscilloscope or something to break it down into harmonics?

Or was it (covers mouth with both hands dramatically)... magic? :O

Is Ron Gilbert really a "grumpy gamer"?  Because he sounds kind of cool on the podcasts and blog posts...

E3 is coming up in two weeks.  Do you guys know of any huge announcements and can you spoil them for us?

In the (very unlikely) occurence that Team Thimbleweed would take part in a game jam, and had to make a game from scratch in 3 days - what kind of game would it be?

Ron, can you tell us about your involvement in "From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years"?

In the demo I saw that Ransome's flashback begins during a dialogue, with the screen becoming "fuzzy".
Will there be some kind of  evident transition between the acts, MI style, or will the transition be smooth, without the player noticing (for example when act 1 ends and act 2 begins)?

Are there any ET type aliens in TWP?

Have there been any "issues" between team members on this project that resulted in any of the following: sulking, apologising, brawling, hugging?

Art question for Gary: do you use any fancy metrics to assess how long it takes to finish a bunch of art assets or do you go by crude estimate?

In your example screenshots, the verbs are left aligned in their columns, rather than centered. Is this deliberate? The old games appear to have left aligned verbs when using the game font, and then centered when the larger font was adopted.

(Compare these: https://www.scummvm.org/screenshots/lec/monkey/)

As a follow-up, will there be shortcut keys for the verbs, and will they be keyboard aligned, e.g. QWE for the top row, or P for Push, T for Talk etc?

Are you yet to reach that point in development where your minds have started coming up with ideas for future games that seem sooo exciting that they takes (some of) the luster from working on Thimbleweed Park?

Last time I predicted that you would say "dark chocolate", but you didn't believe that I am a Time Traveller, since I was not able to change the timeline.

Would you believe me if I went to help you in the past this time, for instance:

1) by erasing Podcast #46 from history (which would make the game a complete success - too long to explain why)

or even

2) by changing the name of the game from current "Rhododendron World" to, say, "Thimbleweed Park" or something like that? (which would draw 100 fold the number of players)

Nonetheless, I wish to thank you for this incredible shoot'em'up!

Anything we can expect from the voice acting since acting in games is (slightly?) more respected than it was in the early 90's? Or because I haven't come across it, maybe you've already answered addressed this.

When is the blog post explaining your content pipeline coming?

On what do you (the crew) chew while writing, programming, photoshopping, arranging, ..? (eg. pen, eraser, knive, fingernail...)

Q: Seems like game developers like to slip homages to other games into their work.  Are there any homages planned for Thimbleweed Park, if so, care to spill the beans?  If not, can you tell us your viewpoint on the practice?

Did you guys ever get any silly/awkward/annoying censoring demands from publishers? Something that really went against your creative ideas?

How big will the game be? (in Bytes)

If you will be beeping out all of Ransome's swear words right in the audio files, how will you manage lip syncing for him?

Pixelate (if it's possible to pixelate the game any further) his mouth or draw a black box over it maybe? Yet then the engine still would have to know when the beeps will occur in the audio...

Not a lot has been said about the sound design of Thimbleweed Park. Is it all outsourced?

Will there be a door on top of the Vista?

Disney replied to your tweet?

What would be age rating for TP? Will a 10 years old be able to play it?

Pie or Cake? Defend your answer. Violently, if neccecary.

Will there be an optional commentary reel like you did with the Monkey Island 2 Special Edition?

Will Ron provide sleeping bags for everyone when the Thimbleweed Park Team moves into his garage for 24/7 crunchtime?

This is actually a question from retroactive:
"would you use git again for game development? a lot of AAA studios seem to use perforce, some use svn as both seem to be better at handling lots of binary data and are more artist friendly. so do you think git is the future for game projects?"

In the recent planning you showed us, we can see there will be testing from now until January 2017.
Can you estimate how many testers, for each testing location (Seattle, San Francisco, London), do you plan to contact, for each month?

After the game is done: How will you archive and preserve the subscription based, volatile things like Photoshop CS and FogBugz for eternity?

Will the game have code to autocorrect variables and recover broken save games in case you have a severe bug? Like automatically give you items you are supposed to possess at a certain point in the game?

Question to all three: if you had to have choose one of the following limitations on your computer hardware for the rest of your life, would you choose EGA graphics or internal speaker audio?

Do you still fear you will enter the dreadful phase of the project where you are just endlessly fixing bugs and wish the game was *beeping* finished already? And if so, what is your favorite ice-cream to boost the morale?

Some of you guys mentioned your children before on the podcast. Did they play any of the LFL adventure games you have made and do they like them? Don't they ask you for hints all the time (like mine do...)?

How do you feel about "Let's play" videos of adventure games and do you think it impacts sales?

*THIMBLE POEM*

[Ron]: All over the mountains, below the blue sky,
A flower breeds, yellow, so tiny, and shy!
I wonder the reason we've chosen its name:
Please answer me, Winnick: you're too on the game.

[Gary]: Among all the flowers, you know, sure, my dear,
This one has the wisdom to gracefully appear.
But since my own answer may be unorthodox,
I'm joining your question: I'm asking the Fox!

[David]: You slackers, you suckers, you both tuna head:
YOU made the kickstarter, and drove us all mad!
The mistery comes from a time once upon:
Shall answer the question the one named Ron.

I want to see 14 exciting new adventure titles from Terrible Toybox. Is that possible?

Hey guys,

1a) I was wondering what you think of test driven software development and if it can successfully be applied to game programming. Do you unit test your classes and if so, what's your coverage?

1b) At this stage, do you feel, you have used an "anti-pattern" somewhere in your code and that if you had more time, you would love to refactor it?

How did you come up with the name Thimbleweed Park? Is it a common plant where you live? Or does it just sound funny? Which one you had in mind? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimbleweed

If you won the lottery tomorrow, would you still work on Thimbleweed Park?

Does anyone of you play or used to play "Pen & Paper" role playing games? If yes, which system?

What is THE best thing about making this game and why?

Do you think you'll have time to implement fog that reacts to the playable character's movement? Thank you!

Ron, you've mentioned that you aren't a fan of remakes. Which would you say is worse, the Monkey Island 1 & 2/DOTT style complete remake or the Grim Fandango style "make it work on modern machines, with no major changes"?

Also, what caused you to leave Double Fine? Were they unwilling to let you take on something like Thimbleweed Park? Or was it something else?

If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is around to hear it... What colour is the tree?

Serious question.
At the beginning of MI2, at the scene with the fireplace where Guybrush is talking to two pirates, there is this music fading in that sounds like it is played on a flute. This melody also appears after the end credits. It sounds so famliar, but I wasn't able to find out if it was originally composed by Michael Land or if he borrowed it from a traditional.
Can you finally answer the question, that haunts me for 25 years?

Thanks to ScummVM, most of the 'classic' adventures can still be played on
platforms that were not imaginable in the days they were made.

Do you think this will be also true for TP, years after the game is released?
Or are there any technical/license issues that will prevent this?

@Octavi
Unfortunately you usually do not appear on the podcast, but do you mind to make another speedrun if you have the time? Or even better, a speedrun of an character animation. Oh, that would be splendid.

Ron: You've said that the reason for making Thimbleweed Park look graphically sharper than MM and MI is that you want it to feel like how we remembered said games more than how they actually looked if you were to play them today. Makes perfect sense to me, but you've also said that you are against remasterings of old games other than for making them playable again. Even though Double Fine, for example, used the exact same argument about how we remembered the game looking when they did their remastering of DotT. Is that a contradiction or am I missing something? :)

So... what is the "Secret of Thimbleweed Park"?

Has the plot and story of the game changed much since you first started, or is it very close to what you planned at the beginning?

What do you think are the most important qualities for a voice actor, and will you get the actors to record separately or for conversations get them to record them together?

LOCALIZATION
According to the Kickstarter campaign, TWP is going to be translated into Spanish, Italian, German and French. This game is a 'point&click' adventure where dialogs and jokes are critical to its success (think in the fight vs. the Sword Master in MM). So I feel that just translating the game won't be not enough here (think now in the recently revealed meaning of Hodor's name from Game of Thrones, it just can't be translated). As game designers, could you guys comment your thoughts here?

I will play the original version in English because I love Ron's unique humor sense™, but I understand other people can't do that. IMHO, you shouldn't rely only on a external company offering translation services because they will hardly preserve the atmosphere of the game. I'd bet on native speakers in your own team to review the translations.

What will be the system requirements for the game? And how do you check that the game will run smooth on this system?

Is iMUSE unique or are you aware of another real time sound mixing engine nowadays? And, Thimbleweed Park music transition will be more like MI then MI2?

Are you already sick of this game project?

How many scenes (locations) should be in a good adventure game?

Will Thimbleweed Park have/make references or hidden jokes to Monkey Island/Maniac Mansion?
Maybe something in the backround like the Grog vending machine or the voodoo doll of Largo Embargo?

BTW: You guys are legends

Given your vast experience and knowledge of the games industry, I am curious to know what your thoughts are about games being released that are extremely buggy or so broken that they require day one patches out of box?  It seems the last couple of years this problem has been increasing at an alarming rate.

Keep up the great work and I am extremely excited to play Thimbleweed Park.

Do you guys feel that this is an era of a back to the roots, in a narrative way? I like to think that J.J. Abrams's Super 8 is the first stone on the mainstream art that understands that the story is the first important thing, and the FX the second one. A friend of mine, an art director, told me one time that the 2000´s was a decade of the digital's overuse (Star Wars prequels, the firsts Spider-Man's, etc.) and now all they're slowing down with the abuse, conceveing again a plot as the most important part of a project. Do you think this will happen with games? Patricio Martinotti from Argentina.

In the new game Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, there are a few Monkey Island references.  Are you aware of this?  Does it make you feel warm and fuzzy to have arguably one of the biggest selling games of all time pay homage to Monkey Island?

What version of Maniac Mansion made its way into the Day of the Tentacle remaster?  Did you know about or have any input as to what version of the game made it into Day of the Tentacle remastered?  Would you have rather seen the C64 version, or would it have taken too much work?

Syd from Maniac Mansion...Was he named after C64's SID chip?  Sid Vicious? Syd Barrett?  Or was the name simply drawn out of a hat?

Scenario: Disney gives the okay for a Maniac Mansion remake/remaster.
Any interest in participating?
They also are willing to allow you to redesign any puzzles that result in deas ends...Thoughts?

Have you designed a logo for Terrible Toybox yet?

Is that radio booth screenshot with the broken window a Pontypool reference?

Any of you guys into IF (interactive fiction)?  Any thoughts on the genre?

Any updates on UI design ideas for phones?

Back in the Maniac Mansion / Monkey Island times...what was your favorite non-LucasArts game

How long is a Loop of a Musical phrase and what is you're strategy to find a good interpolation between two Musical phrases in different rooms of the game. Are you creating permanent Repetition when You Loop the music or can you cremte different variations of a phrase to avoid, that the music is getting boring.

Will there be puzzles with multiple solutions, so that the entire content of the game cannot be experienced in one single playthrough?

Since February ( https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/podcast42 ), have you tried out the automatic lip sync processing and does it fit your needs?

What would you think of a computer that gets out of control, just as HAL 9000, in an adventure game?

Have you ever considered controlling both agents at the same time so they walk together and talk with the town people as a duo like it would usually go in "real life" with partner agents? And in case they needed to split up for a certain puzzle you switch to the way you are doing it now until they reunite after the puzzle is solved?

And why just one question - I have thousands!! ;)

Do we have to be afraid of the dark forests of Thimbleweed County?

Have you considered making Thimbleweed Park more like the Civilization games to attract more customers?

Will Michael Land or Chris Grigg or Matthew Kane return for later projects?

How are you?

If you're allowed to say, what advantages are there to the deal you did with Microsoft?  It seems to hamstring you in the last two months of development, and neither Sony nor Nintendo have such a restrictive launch parity requirement.

Which questions will you be answering?

Will the animation for the speech be just an up-and-down of the jaw like in MM and Zak, or a case-sensitive animation that mimics the syllables like in DOTT or S&M?

Thank you

Did you ever consider getting Michael Land, Clint Bajakian and/or Peter McConnell for the music?

What have you been doing this week, and what will you do next week?

You never mentioned sound effects. Who is taking care of those? Will you record your own or use a library? Even then, it seems like a lot of work to go through and find just the perfect squeeky door sound - I understand all puzzles will resolve around doors.

Hi Garry and team!
Was there a point where you thought stop at that?
What tipped to continue?
Thanks!

There are a lot of things in Thimbleweed Park that also appear in Monkey Island, not a bad thing at all, I love it. For example, the circus, the forest, the mansion, the witch, the house in the forest, the vista, etc. It was premeditated or it simply happened?

Don't know if already asked:
have you planned to create another point and click adventure after this?

Are you still using TesterTron 3000™? Are there specific puzzles it just never happen to "solve" where random clicking isn't enough (e.g. timing puzzles)?

[insert joke about a million three headed monkeys typing a million typewriters here]

Ron, can you talk more about your idea for "the perfect murder" adventure game, and would you ever be willing to actually make it?

What would it take?

Do a Kickstarter!

Also MI2 is amazing and I can't wait for Thimbleweed Park,

If Thimbleweed Park is successful, could one expect more point n' click adventures from you? How does it feel being back in the genre after such a long time? Would you ever consider doing a spiritual successor to Monkey Island in the same vein that companies like Playtonic Games have followed up Banjo-Kazooie with Yooka-Laylee? (i.e. create a new world and characters that still maintains the same personality and charm as the original franchise, but without having to get caught up in having to get back the rights from the companies that own them) Or do you find Monkey Island to be lightning in a bottle of sorts where it would feel like treating on someone's grave to do a successor that isn't within the IP?

The ending of Monkey Island 2: was it something you planned in advance or rather a spur of the moment? It has a slightly improvised feel to it, which makes it even better. Did you know back then how you would continue the story in a potential MI3?

I know I'm pushing it here, but could you give us a hint as to how that mythic MI3 would have started?

I'm curious about what it would have taken for this game to have been made in the time where this graphics style was cutting edge. How much would it have been different/more difficult/more expensive given the current scope of the game?