The Wrench Puzzle
Jun 23, 2016
A few blog posts back someone in the comments asked for some new art. I don't think I've posted this before, so here it is....
I'd love to share more art and animation, but we're getting to the point where most new art is riddled with spoilers. Not showing new art almost makes it look like we're not moving forward, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The game is getting downright exciting. Exciting, I tell you.
OK, one more... then that's it.
As we play the game and do more playtests, issues start to come up. One of them we are now referring to as "The Wrench Puzzle". Don't worry, it has nothing to do with monkeys and wrenches. Only a crazy person would design a puzzle like that. Crazy, I tell you.
There was a fairly long puzzle chain in Act 1 to get a wrench that unlocks a new area of the game. The puzzle had two problems.
The first was the moment you realize you need the wrench to progress, you had just solved another long puzzle chain that unlocked the room where the wrench puzzle is solved. At this point, you've been built up with anticipation, then you solve the first puzzle and bam! You now have to go solve the wrench puzzle and there is no forewarning. Solving the first puzzle became a moment of disappointment rather than triumph.
The second issue is that Act 1 was getting really long and the wrench puzzle was contributing to that. It's a long and complicated puzzle chain, but it's an interesting puzzle and we didn't want to lose it.
So the solution we came up with was to move the whole puzzle chain from Act 1 to Act 2. You no longer need the wrench to progress which makes Act 1 smaller and the returns the moment from disappointment to triumph.
It's what we in the biz call "win-win". Or maybe the younger generation calls a "double-win". But people in the know call it a "win-a-reno".
We did needed to come up with a different use for the wrench, but that didn't prove to be very hard, there was a puzzle just waiting for a wrench solution. And, as an added bonus, moving the puzzle chain from Act 1 to Act 2 involved very little work.
So now Act 1 is smaller and snappier and Act 2 is fuller and beefier.
- Ron
Wow I totally can't wait. Every time I see amazing new art like that the anticipation just grows uncontrollably!
Well, it's a matter of opinion, but however the game is an homage to MM which had no transition screens either.
If I may digress for a moment, on several occasions you have mentioned that Maniac Mansion for the Commodore 64 had a cursor but no actual mouse to control it with. I just want to mention that I (or rather, my dad) had a mouse for the Commodore, and I played Maniac Mansion and Zak McKracken with it quite happily.
If I recall correctly, by modern standards you had to move the mouse quite far to move the cursor, but since you never tried that yourself I can see why that is.
That doesn't count as mouse support, since the game couldn't tell the difference. There are very few games with real mouse support on the C64.
The puzzle joke doesn't make any sense because it's not called a monkey wrench in spanish. I'm not sure if there is a way out of this, because the game has to be translated to many languages, and puns will sound different in each of them and you can't make one work in all of them.
But, I don't know, maybe keeping it in mind helps. Although it might be late because I guess most puzzle design is already done.
Being a French native speaker, the term "Monkey Wrench" didn't ring any bells:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_wrench
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franzose_(Werkzeug)
The fun thing is, in Italian a monkey wrench is called a "parrot wrench", which is quite appropriate for a pirate story.
By the way: I have a serious crush on Delores. Is she available?
When volumetric fog is done, volumetric light and shadow follows suit..!!1
I've seen it too, but its not a big deal.
I would rather like to see whats in the envelope, USE bed, LOOK AT painting, PUSH crazy machine, TALK TO moon...oh boy, slobber is running down the flews, ehm im really anticipating the release. Best art department in the known worlds!
(Oh, where did i put my four map pieces?!?)
It would be great if there are a lot of those "forest" locations: They perfectly evoke a gloomy "Twin Peaks/X-Files" like atmosphere...
I'll probably spend altogether several hours only with analyzing and enjoying the artwork, when I play the game.
(btw. I wasn't a backer of Mighty No. 9 so I have no idea what's really going on, but I smell some disappointment)
...Yes, thanx, thanx, I love you too... :D
http://www.lipglossiping.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Thank-you-sign1.jpg
I'm thinking 320x200, like the old classics, but I'm not sure and I don't want to count the squares.
In fact, if you zoom in to the right you notice that the last pixel column is truncated at 2/3.
240 px may be correct in this case, but I don't know whether every room screen would be displayed with this resolution or not, if you turned on the retro mode, because the room screens themselves actually have three different resolutions. If I remember correctly, Ron said that there were also some screens with 320 px and 640 px respectively. I think you can see it in the "18 Minutes" video, in which the screen resolution in the street seems to be a bit higher
Ron, did you at one point decide to change the style from a more "flat" perspective only (e.g. the town's streets, the newspaper office), to also introduce alternative angles, like the last screenshot you posted? (and also the factory exterior earlier)
It's probably mostly his fault!
Here a comparison with Marks artwork:
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/wireframing
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/mark_ferrari
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/mark_ferrari2
All the best,
Ron
The discussed puzzle is maybe an homage, an excuse to include an actual wrench in the game which actually looks like one :-)
Btw. I cannot image you've never used one, don't you have water pipes in your home?
I've read a lot of your blog posts. Your writing is really impressive. I think this is not only a blog about an all new-point & click adventure game. This is an informative, professional and funny resource about the passion for game development. Thank you very much for that. Ondi
Enjoy... the weather will be clear and hot!
And on Monday night, starting from 6 p.m... Italy-Spain for Euro 2016 :-)
Setting the pace for puzzles in games is tricky and incredibly difficult to optimize. On one hand, those puzzles eventually need to be solved, but if you can give the player the freedom to do other things in the meantime while being able to think about that larger puzzle and perhaps learn and get new ideas for solutions by solving earlier, simpler puzzles, i think that works out really well.
In the older Resident Evil games for example you would need to solve a huge long-winded puzzle to advance to the next main area of the game (such as having to collect 4 or 5 different emblems to insert into a wall panel thing to unlock a door to be able to leave the mansion), but you could do those in several different orders and do a bunch of other stuff in the meantime.
Or in the original Shadowgate for example, very similarly there were puzzles in each room to solve, but they were so simple that solving them would kinda ease you into the type of mindset that you would need to solve the more elaborate puzzles. Although Shadowgate did have so much cryptic stuff that the devs kinda went overboard with certain puzzles, but you could still usually go to many other rooms and attempt to solve several other puzzles and find new items and spells before going back to the puzzles that the player was stuck on earlier.
Hmm...There won't be a day/night time cycle will there? That would be crazy.
Say's ThimbleweedPark will automatically Highlight the right Verb on mouse over, allowing you to just right click the item.
Uhm, it could the the next trivia:
"Guess how many options there are right now in the Options page of Thimbleweed Park"
For those who are impressed by the fact that the images are not final art: they are beautiful, they could get a child eat tons of salad, but there'still some perspective error (the desk and the book on the top of it for example), something that someone like Mark will surely note and work on it.
Here is the website: http://www.gamelab.es/2016/programa/horarios/
Maybe they will release a video or a live stream...
Actually Ron is in Frankfurt Airoport (he tweeted a hour ago from there). So I think he will land on Barcelona in the afternoon (CEST time).
I will buy the game 5 Times.... I' m a poor Boy from the Austrian Alps....... And jodeling....
Would you have jodelt the phone book entry?