Taming the Design
Jan 27, 2015
"Pillows made America great! Pillows helped win the war!" - Uncle Chuck
Gary and I did a daylong brainstorm session yesterday with the objective of taming the design.
The problem is we had too many ideas bouncing all over the place. We had the core of the story figured out pre-Kickstarter, but all the loose threads never really came together into a unifying theme. We'd come up with good puzzles, but they didn't feel like they were supporting the story. They were just fun puzzles.
We started by listing all five playable characters and asking ourselves "What is their story? Why are they here and what do they really want?" They can all want different things, but they have to be related and come together to make one larger and stronger story. From a puzzle standpoint, it also helps if they are all driving towards the same goal, even if for different reasons.
It was time to strip everything away and rebuild it.
The pillow factory has always played a crucial role in the main story's climax, so we started by asking "Why do each of the playable characters want to get into the abandoned pillow factory?" If we gave them all the same puzzle objective, they (and the player) can be working towards the same goal. Each character is looking for something different, but it all leads to the pillow factory. In Maniac Mansion, all the kids were there to find Sandy, so the player focus was the same.
The other issue we faced were the two detectives. We hadn't fully fleshed out their stories or personalities. They were there to solve the murder, but we didn't really know who they were beyond a simple paragraph.
We wanted to make them different, not just male and female carbon copies of each other. They needed to have very different goals and deal with situations differently. We also felt it would be more interesting if they were working together, but also at odds, maybe some deep mistrust. Doing that would heighten the mystery of what was going on in Thimbleweed Park.
So we wrote all our ideas on two whiteboards and started to talk through everything. We'd have an idea that made sense for a while, then we'd abandon it in favor of a better one. It was a day of bouncing between "we're screwed", "this is genius", "we're screwed", "this is genius", goto 10.
The end result was we could talk through the story from beginning to end. We had five (six if you include the murder) different stories that all came together, then briefly separated for the epilogue. All five stories are serving the same overarching theme, yet have their own little "moral" and meaning for the character.
This morning I set out to write it all down as a linear narrative, much like a walk-through (hyphen? no hyphen?). If we didn't know the details of a puzzle or location, I'd write something like "You need to make the phone ring (TBD) so the hotel clerk leaves his desk". Seven pages later, it was all down and it all made sense and fit together better than it seemed to the end of the day yesterday.
The document is filled with (TBD), but now it's just a matter of filling those in over the next few months.
And lots of puzzle dependency charts.
* None of this is written in stone, any of it could change, names and locations are just temp brainstorm, so don't get too attached to it. By the time the game ships it will be a space shooter.
I was going to post here a couple links to some old print and video ads for cell phones, but I figured anyone interested can just do a internet search themselves. There's so many of them- and, they're pretty entertaining.
http://www.mobilephonehistory.co.uk/nokia/nokia_cityman_1320.php
http://www.motorolasolutions.com/US-EN/About/Company+Overview/History/Explore+Motorola+Heritage/Cell+Phone+Development
The DynaTAC 8000X was priced at $3,995 in 1983. Prior to cellular technology, there were also standards for non-cellular radiotelephones, much of the equipment for which was also designed and manufactured by Motorola for Bell Labs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502#Origins_at_Motorola
The later Commodore Amiga models used actual Motorola microprocessors.
Anyway, what I really wanted to say is that these posts as always a pleasure. Thanks!
Maybe this is a dumb question, as the adventure masterpieces have a positive answer for it, but are Chuck the Plant and Loom seagull included in the game? (It seems a necessary condition for the successfulness of Thimbleweed Park)
I can't wait to see the final result!
On a more serious note, I do agree that a single character game draws you INTO the narrative much easier. It's easy to feel disconnected when you're bouncing around in different scenes, using different characters, and trying to keep up with the big picture story, though.
Ron: Love the blog. Wanted to ask if you and Gary plan on recording a couple of your "significant meetings" as the game develops, just for the express purpose of letting us see some of the critical moments of the game's design after the release?
Please let me know if you want me to translate the game into Swedish for free. ;-)
Second best regards, Mattias
Maybe you should design the translation feature as kind of "open source". There will be hundreds of fans who just want (or even love) to translate the game into their native language for free. Give them a platform for this and you'll get the game around the world easily...
Of course, the official 5 languages are included in the game, with the easy ability to let someone translate in other languages (at last, supporting latin character set).
translated into Swedish so I think it would be appropriate to tran-
slate Thimbleweed Park as well. I'm Swedish, but I'm very good
at Swedish. I translated Zelda 1 and 2 into Swedish just for fun.
No hyphen, no space.
But seriously, reading this blog and seeing just how excruciatingly tedious and complex the design processes are that you guys have to go through in order to put the game together is both fascinating to read and makes me respect and appreciate you guys even more than I already do. Take your time with designing and making Thimbleweed Park, I think everyone here on this blog and all of the backers of the game could care less about the release date if it means having more time to polish TP into an even more fun, or funner (is that a word?) game lol.
We've learned a lot since Maniac Mansion, so designing with multiple character is going to be a lot easier. Also, we felt that if we were going to do a true spiritual successor to Maniac Mansion, it had to have multiple playable characters.
a great idea with these cell phones - maybe you should create an iridium phone with their very big antenna.
Could be very funny like that ACME-Comic style, if one character is called and gets the big phone out of the small trouser pocket.
Of course an Iridium phone naturally never fits into a small pocket... :-)
Using an Iridium phone make character look like an extraterrestrial.
The point and click Space Shooter by the People who brought you Maniac Mansion !
Dive deep into a Action Loaded Suspence Murder Story full of HD sprites that needs own ZIP Codes.
Join two Detectives in Spaceships who shoot their way all the way down from Betelgeuse deep into a mysterious Pillow Factory on Earth!
Is it really a Pillow Factory ?
What is a point and Click shooter ?
And what the Hell am i writing here ?
Find it out in Thimbleweed Park !
--- Coming 2016 to a Computer Screen near you ---
Plus, it's hard to tell when older posts have updates. I'm going to revive my IFTTT account to set this up. Thanks!
(Pillows are great too)