I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed.
* The writing is hit or miss
* The story is just serviceable
* Only about 20% of the jokes land for me
* The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad
And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the genre's "what the hell" moments... And it's really long. About halfway through I started using a guide and for the majority of the latter game puzzles, there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters, about 40 things in my inventory (most of which can be given to other characters) by the end game and 30 or more locations, there's just too much.
I'm going to finish this - probably today actually, I'm right at the end - but I'm not finishing it by feeling excited for the second one.
By contrast I replayed the broken sword games last year and while they show their age and have plenty of what the hell moments, a big difference is that I cared about the story and characters while playing. George and Nico are funny, dumb, endearing. I don't feel that way about anything or anyone in Thimbleweed Park.
I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.
Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.
Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).
I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.
The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good... partially because the episodic format forced the designers to keep things reeled in. A single 3 hour episode can't get to the point that you have a couple hundred possible solutions to the problem and nothing but brute force to resolve it.
This style of game died for a reason. I'm not saying it needs to stay dead, but I do think every entrant to the genre needs to grapple with those reasons and have an answer to them. The episodic format provided one decent answer, even if I don't necessarily love it as a monetization technique. Adventure games all tend to pass through episode-like gates anyhow because the combinatorial state space becomes overwhelming without them, but they often still carry over state from the previous phases of the game. The full clean-slate wipe of the episodes prevented that from becoming a problem.
A better Indy movie than the last 2, IMO. I go back and replay it every so often.
> The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good
Some of them were funnier than others. It helps if you were attached to the characters having read the comics or watched the show. (The comics had the most concentrated humor - see: the comic about Dracula)
I recall the episode featuring the Abraham Lincoln statue running amok was very funny.
People keep saying that about Atlantis but why can’t the game be enough without a movie remake .. don’t you all want new stories? Isn’t that why Disney star wars sucks?
>
They need an editor who will go through and identify the puzzles that must be solved through brute force
Barely any adventure game has a puzzle that requires brute-forcing. The problem is rather that sometimes players don't have the same kind of thinking as the developers.
This issue can be aggravated if the player comes from a different culture or is playing a translated version of the game; for a famous example: the "monkey wrench" puzzle only works if the player is used the the US-American English name of the respective tool.
"read the author's mind" is a puzzle type closely related to, and in practice often overlapping with brute force.
If the author has a solution in mind but it is not properly hinted, for most players brute force is the only option. In the case of point and click adventure games, if you don't think "I could stick the bubble gum to the mouse to run through the wall and grab the key" you are left trying every combination of item and action, which isn't fun.
This style of game died because the median attention span across the population decreased over the last 2 decades and something. I don't see a problem in getting blocked and try to brute force your way out of it. Games should be fun but this trend to have perfect, non frustrating gameplay 100% of the time is also part of the problem, IMO.
I disagree. I write and play in long-form puzzle competitions, so for many people I know attention span isn't the issue. What is the issue is that writing fun puzzles is a skill. A totally different skill from designing or implementing video games.
Anyone can design a hard puzzle. Guess the number in my head. Unscramble this 200-character anagram.
The real magic is in the "Aha!" moments where the solver makes a connection and is able to proceed. Great puzzles are supposed to make the player feel like they are smart, not that the author is smart.
Many point and click games fall apart here. Brute force isn't fun. Games where you think you'll need something in the future but the game won't let you take it now just so you'll have to backtrack when the game wants you to do that aren't fun.
A lot of modern point and clicks are by people who don't understand that and think suffering and click mashing are the point. I don't remember much of playing Thimbleweed Park, but VirtuaVerse was very much that.
The canonical criticism is Old Man Murray's Death of Adventure Games describing one mad puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 (1999) with an improbable solution which admits no simpler or more logical solutions. Not to pick on it, because the adventure game market had been making more and more convoluted puzzles and reached peak idiocy some time ago.
> Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.
What I quite like in Joe Richardson's Death of the Reprobate is that Joe breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the player character for feeling sad that Joe told him the puzzle solution and robbed him of a "Eureka moment". "IF THE PUZZLE DIFFICULTY IS PITCHED JUST RIGHT, THAT'S MY TRIUMPH, NOT YOURS" says Joe.
Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.
I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.
You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.
> Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding). But indeed being contrived and self-referential didn't help.
Or maybe adventure games were always a niche genre for a niche of people, it just happened that the niche of computer/console players in the early days coincided more.
> Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding).
True as well; the race towards photorealism and natural immersion (mostly first-person 3D across various genres) had an almost suffocative, and sometimes obliterative, quality.
> The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
That's a name I haven't heard in a long while. And the "Cat Stache Puzzle", once an infamous case-study of virtual insanity in game design, now nearly forgotten...
I reckon there's an important difference between a challenge being frustrating because it's hard, and a challenge being frustrating because there's no interesting way to approach it. Hard puzzles can be fun and satisfying to solve (albeit frustrating at some points along the way) when the process of solving them involves doing something clever or creative. But when the difficulty arises because the solution is basically arbitrary, and so I just have to do a brute force search, that's a tedious waste of time.
The boundaries can be blurry, and a puzzle can wrongly seem to fall into the tedious category because I'm missing something. But, in my opinion, classic adventure game puzzles too often really are arbitrary and boring.
I agree but IMO it's better to have a puzzle that's frustrating because, like you say, there is no interesting way to approach it rather than just have easy puzzles.
Tell me about it. I played the French translated version, and the pun does not translate at all. "Monkey wrench" was translated as the french equivalent, "clé à molette", which does not reference monkeys at all. I remember being stuck for ages, and finally checking the solution online and concluding that the only way to find the solution is to systematically try all combinations as there is no way to apply logic. Only years later I realised that in english, "clé à molette" is "monkey wrench".
If you like the vibes but not the humor you might like The Dig. It's more serious, and has Orson Scott Card and Stephen Spielberg credited as writers. I last played as a kid it in the 90's, but still I have very vivid memories of it.
It's not that I dislike the humor, I just don't think it's as hilarious as it's often made out to be. Insult sword fighting, for example, is at best a sensible chuckle and gets pretty long in the tooth after the first two attempts or so.
It's an point and click adventure made by a renowned point and click designer for point and click adventure enthusiasts. Some moon logic is to be expected - I didn't find it to be particularly bad in this game. I think its OK to have games that are targeted at veterans of a certain genre.
The 4th wall breaking was lame though, especially the ending.
Moon logic - I've just got to the end and the solution to the very, very last puzzle to finish the game... is apparently to be found in the kickstarter video from more than fifteen years ago.
You're given a random balloon dog, there's no reason to be given it, there's no in game meaning behind it, and to finish the game you have to use it on a specific thing that you'd never think to try unless you were just trying random stuff.
That's not "moon logic". It's complete bs and a terrible puzzle to end the game on. When people talk about game developers disrespecting players, this is exactly the kind of thing they mean. Expecting the player to have watched their kickstarter video! Seriously...
> there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters
Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that adventure games are nostalgic, but the ones I played growing up were Kings Quest 6 and Myst (games with only one playable character). These other multiple character adventure games are nowhere near enjoyable for me.
I have generally found it to be some tedious bullshit that stretches out the length of the game far, far too much, and I grew up playing a lot of these point and click adventures.
Seems to be a tradition rooted in the original Maniac Mansion. In Thimbleweed Park the multiple characters became tedious due to having to walk multiple people all over and pass items between them, though I enjoyed being able to see the world through the different lenses of how Ray and Reyes vs. Ransome vs. Delores react to things.
Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.
> Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated.
I've not played that in decades, but I remember liking the mechanic. For the most part it wasn't much different from one character with more freedom to move between areas (timezones in that case), but the need to pass objects through time added some variety and humour (send hamster via freezer, but then how do you warm it up again?).
A strange take, as the Lucasarts multi-character games, like Dott and Maniac Mansion at least try to push you forward and have reasonable hints. KQ6 has fewer nonsensical dead-man-walking situations (you should see how much worse earlier installments were), but it still has them. Oops, the game is unfinishable now, because of an item you don't have, and it's not even hinted that you need, or you could have obtained earlier!
Thimbleweed park is, if anything, on the easy side of the genre. Not quite as easy as Loom, but it's still on the easy side, and with a built in hint system. Day of the Tentacle's main problem is dependence of US culture. Just like the old "monkey wrench" thing in Monkey Island 2, using an actual monkey as a wrench. Still, in DoTT, you get in-game dialogue that will basically teach you some of it, although it doesn't work quite as well.
The complaint would make more sense if it was limited to Zak McCraken, as that one really s quite tough and random.
I heard Charles Cecil make the same comment about "monkey wrench" in a recent podcast interview, and I must say it was not my experience at all. In my world (45+ years in Western Europe), monkey wrench and pipe wrench have always been synonymous. An adjustable spanner is another tool entirely.
And honestly the Lucas Arts puzzles were serviceable (their philosophy was always "you can't go wrong" (with very obvious but little exceptions), the Sierra "logic" of fucking you silently in the middle of the game was just tiring. Nobody got time for that
I gave up half way through. There was a lack of direction (for me) and too many permutations of clicks, characters, items and locations. The humour was ok, the story I was willing to give a chance. But I didn't want to resort to a walk through so I just kind of petered out.
I agree Thimbleweed Park was a little rough, a bit like Maniac Mansion if you like. What gives me hope is that Monkey Island 5 was really really good, so I feel he's back in his grove.
Agreed. I don’t mind having to use a hint book or look things up on GameFAQs, but if, even after that, the solution to a puzzle still makes me go, “How the hell would I ever have figured that out?”, then that’s profoundly unsatisfying for me.
This is my biggest problem with adventure games in general, and I'm a huge King's Quest fan, but sometimes the number of cryptic "What you didn't realize you needed to kneel in front of a cliff with a red crystal to summon the tornado Uber? so obvious" stuff definitely can put off newcomers from the genre.
Looking back I do wonder if Monkey Island etc would appeal to me at all fresh, only one I think would still land is maybe Loom but I think the jokes in it would be the worst part.
These games definitely felt magical as a kid but I think the feeling of it being this whole rich interactive little world full of characters carried a lot of weak jokes and writing.
MI1 was nice IMO. Not too hard, the insult game was innovative. It established a lot of characters. MI2 was way way too hard for me. And when I played it first on Amiga a lot of transitions took one minute to load from floppy which made it incredibly tedious. So I never finished that without a walkthrough.
Was my favorite game for a long period as a kid and I loved it then, I'm saying if it looked at the same thing today without that nostalgia without what felt magic about it.
One recent game I really liked was VirtuaVerse. Not incredibly hard, really good music and art design. It really felt like it took the lucasarts game style into the next century.
Meh to each their own - I haven't played it for a while but I quite like TP's style/music/atmosphere, and the surrealness/metaness was a feature not a bug for me. I played SoMI2 with my friends telling me that the ending was super weird, so I didn't feel completely cheated when I got to that one and I think TP's ending is very Ron Gilbert.
Agree that some moon logic is present/inevitable but I think the Gilbert games are friendlier than most in this respect.
I would have preferred the same team working on a new IP. Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever. Just an endless series of being told that I am a big dummy for having suspended my disbelief. I see no way of believably returning to that world without the retcon of a lifetime.
I'm guessing, given they're relying on private financing, the ability to reuse assets from TP1 is the major reason to make it a sequel instead of a new IP.
Personally I liked TP1 a lot for the most part, but I agree that the ending was a horrible misstep. I'm not adverse to metafiction, and this is Gilbert after all, that's kind of his jam, but the sheer nihilism of it all left a horrible taste in the mouth. Ironically, for someone who cares so deeply about game design, it felt like an ending entirely borne of Gilbert and his fellow designers pleasing themselves, instead of thinking about how it would feel for the player.
That said, I'm still glad there's going to be a sequel. Hopefully it has more of what I liked and less of what I didn't.
Yes, the ending was kind of lame. Worse, it has been done before, again by Ron Gilbert. It is practically a rehash of the Monkey Island 2 ending, which got us nowhere in the long run.
If you feel like trying a hail Mary to perhaps improve the ending I have two theories that I couldn't muster enough strength to check. Also, spoilers from here on.
First, there's a fridge that you can't open close to the ending of the game and that I understand as containing the body of the ghost character. I imagine there must be a way to open it, if only to give him closure.
Second, and related: given that the ending shows you a Basic prompt I imagine there has to be a way to use it for something other than restarting the game. I believe there was (for instance) a part of the game about getting a videotape but, once you had the right equipment, was no longer available to get. Perhaps those parts of the game can be unlocked if you know how to use the console to set the proper variables.
I've long hoped that we've all been getting the bad ending while there's a second one hidden somewhere (which has been hinted at [1]), but since I was fairly down after the ending I got I couldn't muster the energy to replay it all again.
> Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever.
I see that someone hasn't played the latest Monkey Island.
If you every played the first two Monkey Island games, and understand the lore behind that, then the ending is pretty good. Thimbleweed park, in many way, was a spiritual successor to Monkey Island 2 that Gilbert couldn't make for IP reasons back in the day. With at in mind, I enjoyed the ending. That said, Monkey Island 2 got a lot of criticism for its ending too...
Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.
And that's why Curse of Monkey Island is and will always remain the best MI game.
> Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.
Isn't it a bit different with Return to Monkey Island? The story is told to kids by Guybrush and Guybrush being an unreliable narrator, it's uncertain how much of the story was real or an imagination by him.
The last scene though shows that something real somewhat similar to what Guybrush told did happen.
Also it completely retcons the ending of Monkey Island 2.
Can't say i disliked Return to Monkey Island much. I liked the art style and the characters. The story wasn't amazing.
MI1 will always be the top for me i guess, but i still remember almost every scene after all these years, so it's not really fun to play again and again. You can play it on almost anything by now [1]
I found Thimbleweed Park 1 very difficult. The puzzles were too hard. I didn't complete it. I tried to play it with my girlfriend, I thought it would be a nice game to work together to play/solve. It stumped both of us. No fun.
Steam has a CLI that installs games. I’ve been meaning to use it to install each of my games and archive their installation for future offline use.
That’s not as convenient as an easy-to-download offline installer, certainly, but seems workable in theory. Maybe I’m unaware of limitation(s) to this approach?
SteamCMD doesn't strip Steam DRM - even with files backed up (which the Steam GUI will do, no need for SteamCMD), you wont be able to use them without an internet connection and authenticating with Steam every now and then.
GOG's bundles are offline and DRM free. You could store them on a disk, and 30 years from now reinstall and play on an airgapped computer with no authentication required.
The final scene of TP1; the one where they show the rising sun over a hill, that felt so at home for me. It was the only reason I played the game, to see that scene. Something about the colors reminded me of my childhood.
Of course I could just see it on youtube or a screenshot but I wanted it to feel natural, I wanted the story and characters to take me to that hill scene. That’s all I cared about.
Great news! Thimbleweed Park is a lovely game. I played it with my children and manage to recreate the atmosphere of those evenings in 1990, spent in front of a Commodore Amiga 500 running Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion.
Yeah, I loved it, too. Not quite on the level of the first two Monkey Island games, but still a great experience. One of the few games I actually finished in the last bunch of years.
I think the time between the original and this will work out well for me to be excited to play a sequel.
I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park personally, however for all those old Monkey Island fans like myself I'd encourage you to read this[0] analysis of the game series and lore to uncover the secret of Monkey Island by DM81
I found it a really enjoyable read and a plausible take, so I thought it was worth sharing here
It's relevant as it's posted in the Thimbleweed Park forums ;)
As someone who didn’t play many of the point and click adventures growing up, thimbleweed park was a lot of fun. I also like the genre more than visual novels. I kind of felt like the dialogue was supposed to be cheesy so I just rolled with it. Were some of the things a little frustrating? Yea, but I think there is a lot of life left in this genre and I’m sure Ron will make some improvements. I can’t wait to play the next one.
Not enmeshed in game development and have only done it very lightly: what takes a game like this 1.5 - 2 years to finish?
Like at a minimum, it's art, sound, graphics, and programming. If they are re-using assets, that's one of them ~done. So what's taking them 2 years?
My background is in SaaS type stuff and if I went to who hired me and said it would take 2 years to build out a non-cutting edge product I am pretty sure I'd get fired. So can any game devs briefly/not-briefly explain why game dev like this takes so long? I am just curious to understand the dev cycle.
I'd assume that with investment, he'd have at least one person per team so all of these can largely be intertwined with each other but largely running at the same time.
I think you’re underrating the sheer amount of iteration that occurs. SaaS has requirements and then implementation- it’s a product that has a target it hits. Yes, churn happens, but the point is you’re working to a specific goal.
Games and any creative work isn’t like that. There’s constant iteration as new ideas come up or developers learn in play testing that certain parts of the game work better than others, and so they realign things continually and keep refining. I’m not a game dev btw, but blogs from devs show a continual cycle of refinement and feature creep.
You need to build the engine/tech, need to support various platforms including building a rendering pipeline (so Vulkan, DirectX and Metal). You need to support animation (probably just 2D?), audio (including various effects and params), different types of input, a UI system, etc. To author the assets you need editors of some form for building the scenes, for cinematics, for the narrative, for the animations, a lot of these will be custom. Then to get the assets in the game you need a pipeline that coverts everything into platform specific formats. And all of this has to be performant, targeting 60fps ideally and cross platform.
That's just the tech side. Then you need all the other disciplines to be in sync. Can't start on animations until you have characters, can't start on those until you have concepts but can't have those until you have a narrative. And these will go via a lot of iterations as you try things out and figure out what works.
Then there's testing, the possibilities from a user perspective are really broad so the bug surface is massive. For a simple app the user is quite limited so it's simpler to enforce rules and unit tests. With a game a user can do a lot across many platforms and the issues can be on the low level graphics driver or just logic puzzle errors.
Then you have certification, platform holders have a book of tests they do to your game so you don't brick the console. Things like, does you game handle unplugging the console while you're saving to disk?
I can imagine they'll reuse a ton of tech from previous games, but there's always new things you need to do. Two years is actually pretty fast for the industry.
At a quick glance: four months for the engine (which they wrote from scratch [1]) and, based on the budget [2], roughly nine months for crowdsourcing and pre-production (setting the overall story and puzzles, deciding on the look of the game, building small proofs-of-concept), seven months for production, three months for testing and bugfixing, and two months for release (which they overshot by three months).
I'll add that, unlike what your parent wrote, asset reuse will be minimal, in adventure games, one of the reward for solving puzzles is unlocking access to new locations and thus new art.
In this case, they may reuse some of the sprites for the main characters (default animations). Most of the animations are custom and can't be reused.
Likewise for the voice acting (I'd expect them to start from scratch here, the mood of the games may be a bit different).
In my experience, business software has narrow and predictable use cases. Note taking: You need to add, delete and update notes and the real meat of the product is usually in the note organization. Even SAP has use cases simple in nature: Account for milk cartons sold. The use cases just grow complex once you work in 30 countries or more. "Pay the right taxes on milk cartons sold" becomes tricky.
However, this is parallelizable: You can work on all 30 countries at once and ship when ready. You can work on taking and organizing notes in parallel. You can work on scaling in parallel. You can streamline UX in parallel while introducing tagging, or trees, or groups, or anything.
A game, and especially a narrative game, has an intrinsic linear component, the plot. You can work on a certain amount in parallel, sure: Once the rough shape of the plot is laid out, you can start working on assets, necessary engine features, sounds, dialog in parallel.
But you still have a strong need that a player or play tester has a good progression from act one to act two to act three, and a good progression from puzzle one to puzzle two to puzzle three. This takes a lot of very slow iteration.
This involves human testing by nature. You get a playtest every few months, if you have the money. You can easily throw more CI hardware to run your integration tests more often for more countries. Playtesters, especially those who don't know the game, are very, very limited.
Then you also want characters and settings to be consistent across the plot. If done well, this takes a lot of adjustments and refinement both back and forth. Sometimes the setting of Act three requires a character to have a certain trait, and that trait should be developed, so you now go back to Acts one and two to see if you can build up the character -- without knocking down the entire house of cards already in place.
And once you get to polish and atmosphere, it becomes even harder and more time consuming, because then you need new playtesters even more.
From a past job and working on some features, I spent a day or two presenting like 6-8 different options, and then spent half a day in different testing groups to figure out which procedural generation option "feels the best" for what the game designer wants. With a better spec, that could've been an hour. This made players more excited. Probably.
Don't really have the context, but I'd trust the expert that it will get done on the schedule they want. I'd say people on the outside of things often ask these kinds of questions due to lacking any context on production schedules. See: the last time your PM said "can't we just..."
He's also a small shop and perhaps they intentionally move slower. I suspect he doesn't need to urgently get paid for this.
Story writing is probably non linear in time it takes, and I imagine there's a fair amount of waterfall. E.g you can't schedule voice actors until the story and dialogue is done. Oh wait, the voice actors have other commitments so they'll be by in 3 months. Etc.
It was fun at the beginning but I got bored of it 2/3rds of the way in. The puzzles were an absolute chore to figure out and solve and the story kinda run out of steam.
Hmm I don't remember completing the first and other than finding the phone amusing I don't remember much else about it. Will await reviews once done but if anyone hasn't played The drifter yet that is worth checking out
The Drifter is a great example of a slightly more modernized take on the classic adventure genre. Had a slow start and some grating voice acting, but gosh it ended up being a great experience.
After how he basically gave the middle finger to fans waiting 100 years for the "real" ending to Monkey Island 2, my reaction is
meh -_-
Though Thimbleweed Park 1 was awesome in every way
I wish/hope someone else would take up the mantle of continuing the -spirit- of Monkey Island and make a new franchise with a similar rename: call it Ape Archipelago or something :)
Even though Monkey Island now has a real (i.e. canonical) ending, it sucks. I prefer the original continuation of MI3 to the 25-years-late official, canonical sequel
The link given elsewhere here about the multi-layered aspect of the stories from 1, 2 and RMI gives it a bit more depth. Obviously if you take it on the surface level only it's low effort.
It's not just the ending, but the flat humor, the lazy puzzles (like clicking multiple times on multiple objects to open the porthole) and the meagre number of interactions on each of the islands after the first one..
It's like his heart just wasn't in it anymore
It felt like a "ehh let's get this over with" at best
or a medium-effort nostalgia-pandering money grab at worst.
I've been playing Thimbleweed Park on Android recently. In general I do love point and click puzzle games but my feelings on this one are very mixed.
* The writing is hit or miss
* The story is just serviceable
* Only about 20% of the jokes land for me
* The constant 4th wall breaking is just bad
And then there's the puzzles. Maybe I made a mistake in selecting hard mode at the start but it's got the worst of the genre's "what the hell" moments... And it's really long. About halfway through I started using a guide and for the majority of the latter game puzzles, there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters, about 40 things in my inventory (most of which can be given to other characters) by the end game and 30 or more locations, there's just too much.
I'm going to finish this - probably today actually, I'm right at the end - but I'm not finishing it by feeling excited for the second one.
By contrast I replayed the broken sword games last year and while they show their age and have plenty of what the hell moments, a big difference is that I cared about the story and characters while playing. George and Nico are funny, dumb, endearing. I don't feel that way about anything or anyone in Thimbleweed Park.
I played it when it was released and mostly enjoyed it, though I can't remember what difficulty setting I picked. I bought it mostly because I like Mark Ferrari's art, but ended up completing it. Some characters and jokes were intensely annoying, especially Ransome. I did like Delores, though.
Afterwards, I revisited some LucasArts games I'd played before (Monkey Island 1 and 2), and tried my hand with some I hadn't (Fate of Atlantis, Sam'n'Max, Full Throttle and also Flight of the Amazon Queen, which isn't from LucasArts). I think what you describe is actually fairly representative of the overall LucasArts experience. Character building is limited, even the funny jokes get tiresome after you've clicked through them a fifth time, some puzzles are illogical even for games with a sillier tone (monkey wrench, anyone?), and there's often a lot of walking about, repeating conversations, and clicking randomly just to see what happens. Some of them (Thimbleweed Park, MI2) also have exceptionally poor endings.
Out of the games I played, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis was the best, though I got stuck (by forgetting some object in a room outside a complex labyrinth) close to the end and didn't bother completing it. The main character is pre-established, the plot feels like an Indy movie, and I can't recall any genuinely preposterous puzzle solutions (though it was a few years ago now).
I love the Monkey Island games, they're a part of my childhood. But I mostly love them for the music and graphics, not necessarily for the puzzles or the many gags that other people always seem to find a lot funnier than I do.
The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good... partially because the episodic format forced the designers to keep things reeled in. A single 3 hour episode can't get to the point that you have a couple hundred possible solutions to the problem and nothing but brute force to resolve it.
This style of game died for a reason. I'm not saying it needs to stay dead, but I do think every entrant to the genre needs to grapple with those reasons and have an answer to them. The episodic format provided one decent answer, even if I don't necessarily love it as a monetization technique. Adventure games all tend to pass through episode-like gates anyhow because the combinatorial state space becomes overwhelming without them, but they often still carry over state from the previous phases of the game. The full clean-slate wipe of the episodes prevented that from becoming a problem.
> Fate of Atlantis was the best
A better Indy movie than the last 2, IMO. I go back and replay it every so often.
> The Sam and Max episodes were pretty good
Some of them were funnier than others. It helps if you were attached to the characters having read the comics or watched the show. (The comics had the most concentrated humor - see: the comic about Dracula)
I recall the episode featuring the Abraham Lincoln statue running amok was very funny.
Adventure games can have amazing stories - I still think Star Trek: A Final Unity could be a great movie, or novel even.
People keep saying that about Atlantis but why can’t the game be enough without a movie remake .. don’t you all want new stories? Isn’t that why Disney star wars sucks?
Well... We got new stories with Indy and they were less good. lol
What these games need is a good old-fashioned Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill.
(Though I guess in the context of these games, that would be considered new-fangled.)
> What these games need is a good old-fashioned Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill.
For those who are out of the loop:
> https://half-life.fandom.com/wiki/Aperture_Science_Material_...
They need an editor who will go through and identify the puzzles that must be solved through brute force, and require alteration.
> They need an editor who will go through and identify the puzzles that must be solved through brute force
Barely any adventure game has a puzzle that requires brute-forcing. The problem is rather that sometimes players don't have the same kind of thinking as the developers.
This issue can be aggravated if the player comes from a different culture or is playing a translated version of the game; for a famous example: the "monkey wrench" puzzle only works if the player is used the the US-American English name of the respective tool.
"read the author's mind" is a puzzle type closely related to, and in practice often overlapping with brute force.
If the author has a solution in mind but it is not properly hinted, for most players brute force is the only option. In the case of point and click adventure games, if you don't think "I could stick the bubble gum to the mouse to run through the wall and grab the key" you are left trying every combination of item and action, which isn't fun.
Interestingly, with AI/LLMs now the large combinatorial state space problem could be somewhat fixed (alongside having much richer dialogue trees).
This style of game died because the median attention span across the population decreased over the last 2 decades and something. I don't see a problem in getting blocked and try to brute force your way out of it. Games should be fun but this trend to have perfect, non frustrating gameplay 100% of the time is also part of the problem, IMO.
And now, I'll go back yelling at some cloud.
I disagree. I write and play in long-form puzzle competitions, so for many people I know attention span isn't the issue. What is the issue is that writing fun puzzles is a skill. A totally different skill from designing or implementing video games.
Anyone can design a hard puzzle. Guess the number in my head. Unscramble this 200-character anagram.
The real magic is in the "Aha!" moments where the solver makes a connection and is able to proceed. Great puzzles are supposed to make the player feel like they are smart, not that the author is smart.
Many point and click games fall apart here. Brute force isn't fun. Games where you think you'll need something in the future but the game won't let you take it now just so you'll have to backtrack when the game wants you to do that aren't fun.
A lot of modern point and clicks are by people who don't understand that and think suffering and click mashing are the point. I don't remember much of playing Thimbleweed Park, but VirtuaVerse was very much that.
The canonical criticism is Old Man Murray's Death of Adventure Games describing one mad puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 (1999) with an improbable solution which admits no simpler or more logical solutions. Not to pick on it, because the adventure game market had been making more and more convoluted puzzles and reached peak idiocy some time ago.
https://oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html
> Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.
What I quite like in Joe Richardson's Death of the Reprobate is that Joe breaks the fourth wall and admonishes the player character for feeling sad that Joe told him the puzzle solution and robbed him of a "Eureka moment". "IF THE PUZZLE DIFFICULTY IS PITCHED JUST RIGHT, THAT'S MY TRIUMPH, NOT YOURS" says Joe.
Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
But the rest of your point stands. I keep reading young gamers complaining about adventures and role-playing games being “too difficult” whenever they don't put big flashing arrows on the next character or place to interact with. I cannot understand that: if one can solve a puzzle without grit, what pleasure does that bring? It's the same as watching TV.
Very much agree.
I'd also observe that "brute force" here is an O(source * target) problem, where a source/target pair is some expressible command. e.g., you can't usually combine two locations on the screen, but you can try to combine any item with any screen location, and in some games, any item with any item. Some games add a term for "verb" to that as well, though most games nowadays wisely realize that's not really helpful.
You can see the core reason why people complain about "moon logic" isn't really that the logic is weird. I don't think that specifically bothers too many people. Often it's part of the fun in a way. The problem with "moon logic" is that it means I can't cut down on that search space with common sense or clever-but-grounded logic. In reality rubbing my cat with a piece of tape to pull some hair off of it so that I can wear that tape as a fake mustache is not a sensible option to consider, which is a real part of a real puzzle [1], not just something I made up. A game that consider that a solution to a problem is a game I have to rub everything on everything and it is not just "gamers being lazy" that they don't want to perform hundreds or thousands of possible actions, where all but one of them will result in failure, and depending on the game, some of them may even result in "game over". That's terrible design and that's not the player's fault.
[1]: The classic Old Man Murray article, for today's 10,000: https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/78.html The rest of the puzzle isn't exactly a tour de force of logic either.
> Graphic adventures ceased to be popular before YouTube and smartphones started to damage the average capability to focus. The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding). But indeed being contrived and self-referential didn't help.
Or maybe adventure games were always a niche genre for a niche of people, it just happened that the niche of computer/console players in the early days coincided more.
> Partially agree, but I also think that they were victims of the graphic cards revolution where each year you could have shiny new GFX and visuals, and that drove new games development (and funding).
True as well; the race towards photorealism and natural immersion (mostly first-person 3D across various genres) had an almost suffocative, and sometimes obliterative, quality.
> The famous post https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html illustrates how the genre became too contrived and self-referential (even poking fun at those who blame “television-atrophied attention spans”).
That's a name I haven't heard in a long while. And the "Cat Stache Puzzle", once an infamous case-study of virtual insanity in game design, now nearly forgotten...
I reckon there's an important difference between a challenge being frustrating because it's hard, and a challenge being frustrating because there's no interesting way to approach it. Hard puzzles can be fun and satisfying to solve (albeit frustrating at some points along the way) when the process of solving them involves doing something clever or creative. But when the difficulty arises because the solution is basically arbitrary, and so I just have to do a brute force search, that's a tedious waste of time.
The boundaries can be blurry, and a puzzle can wrongly seem to fall into the tedious category because I'm missing something. But, in my opinion, classic adventure game puzzles too often really are arbitrary and boring.
I agree but IMO it's better to have a puzzle that's frustrating because, like you say, there is no interesting way to approach it rather than just have easy puzzles.
> (monkey wrench, anyone?)
Tell me about it. I played the French translated version, and the pun does not translate at all. "Monkey wrench" was translated as the french equivalent, "clé à molette", which does not reference monkeys at all. I remember being stuck for ages, and finally checking the solution online and concluding that the only way to find the solution is to systematically try all combinations as there is no way to apply logic. Only years later I realised that in english, "clé à molette" is "monkey wrench".
If you like the vibes but not the humor you might like The Dig. It's more serious, and has Orson Scott Card and Stephen Spielberg credited as writers. I last played as a kid it in the 90's, but still I have very vivid memories of it.
It's not that I dislike the humor, I just don't think it's as hilarious as it's often made out to be. Insult sword fighting, for example, is at best a sensible chuckle and gets pretty long in the tooth after the first two attempts or so.
I like Maniac Mansion the best. The sequel wasn't bad either.
It's an point and click adventure made by a renowned point and click designer for point and click adventure enthusiasts. Some moon logic is to be expected - I didn't find it to be particularly bad in this game. I think its OK to have games that are targeted at veterans of a certain genre.
The 4th wall breaking was lame though, especially the ending.
Moon logic - I've just got to the end and the solution to the very, very last puzzle to finish the game... is apparently to be found in the kickstarter video from more than fifteen years ago.
You're given a random balloon dog, there's no reason to be given it, there's no in game meaning behind it, and to finish the game you have to use it on a specific thing that you'd never think to try unless you were just trying random stuff.
That's not "moon logic". It's complete bs and a terrible puzzle to end the game on. When people talk about game developers disrespecting players, this is exactly the kind of thing they mean. Expecting the player to have watched their kickstarter video! Seriously...
> there's no logic to solving them so you'd have to resort to clicking everything and with 5 playable characters
Are multiple/simultaneous playable characters a common feature of adventure game design from LucasArts alum? I played Broken Age and thought the idea was novel, but recently played through Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated. So many people say that adventure games are nostalgic, but the ones I played growing up were Kings Quest 6 and Myst (games with only one playable character). These other multiple character adventure games are nowhere near enjoyable for me.
It's more Ron Gilbert's thing than anything else.
Manic Mansion, MM2, The Cave, Thimbleweed Park, and now TWP2: Gilbert's. Possibly also some of the many kid's games he did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Gilbert#Games
Broken Age is the only one of the many, many games Tim Schaefer lead that does it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Schafer#Ludography
I have generally found it to be some tedious bullshit that stretches out the length of the game far, far too much, and I grew up playing a lot of these point and click adventures.
Seems to be a tradition rooted in the original Maniac Mansion. In Thimbleweed Park the multiple characters became tedious due to having to walk multiple people all over and pass items between them, though I enjoyed being able to see the world through the different lenses of how Ray and Reyes vs. Ransome vs. Delores react to things.
Day of the Tentacle (which coincidentally I've replayed in the past week) executed the multiple characters mechanic the best I've seen, since each character was confined to their own area (past/present/future) and you could instantly pass items between them.
> Day of the Tentacle for the first time and thought the mechanic made things too complicated.
I've not played that in decades, but I remember liking the mechanic. For the most part it wasn't much different from one character with more freedom to move between areas (timezones in that case), but the need to pass objects through time added some variety and humour (send hamster via freezer, but then how do you warm it up again?).
A strange take, as the Lucasarts multi-character games, like Dott and Maniac Mansion at least try to push you forward and have reasonable hints. KQ6 has fewer nonsensical dead-man-walking situations (you should see how much worse earlier installments were), but it still has them. Oops, the game is unfinishable now, because of an item you don't have, and it's not even hinted that you need, or you could have obtained earlier!
Thimbleweed park is, if anything, on the easy side of the genre. Not quite as easy as Loom, but it's still on the easy side, and with a built in hint system. Day of the Tentacle's main problem is dependence of US culture. Just like the old "monkey wrench" thing in Monkey Island 2, using an actual monkey as a wrench. Still, in DoTT, you get in-game dialogue that will basically teach you some of it, although it doesn't work quite as well.
The complaint would make more sense if it was limited to Zak McCraken, as that one really s quite tough and random.
I heard Charles Cecil make the same comment about "monkey wrench" in a recent podcast interview, and I must say it was not my experience at all. In my world (45+ years in Western Europe), monkey wrench and pipe wrench have always been synonymous. An adjustable spanner is another tool entirely.
And honestly the Lucas Arts puzzles were serviceable (their philosophy was always "you can't go wrong" (with very obvious but little exceptions), the Sierra "logic" of fucking you silently in the middle of the game was just tiring. Nobody got time for that
I gave up half way through. There was a lack of direction (for me) and too many permutations of clicks, characters, items and locations. The humour was ok, the story I was willing to give a chance. But I didn't want to resort to a walk through so I just kind of petered out.
> Only about 20% of the jokes land for me
I found the game so intensely unfunny (and there are few things I am selfishly rooting more for in life than another great point and click adventure)
I agree Thimbleweed Park was a little rough, a bit like Maniac Mansion if you like. What gives me hope is that Monkey Island 5 was really really good, so I feel he's back in his grove.
Agreed. I don’t mind having to use a hint book or look things up on GameFAQs, but if, even after that, the solution to a puzzle still makes me go, “How the hell would I ever have figured that out?”, then that’s profoundly unsatisfying for me.
This is my biggest problem with adventure games in general, and I'm a huge King's Quest fan, but sometimes the number of cryptic "What you didn't realize you needed to kneel in front of a cliff with a red crystal to summon the tornado Uber? so obvious" stuff definitely can put off newcomers from the genre.
I found the puzzles fair enough, but my impressions about writing and characters match yours.
I suspect that while Ron Gilbert is great at what he does, Tim Schafer was always the funnier writer of the Monkey Island trio...
Looking back I do wonder if Monkey Island etc would appeal to me at all fresh, only one I think would still land is maybe Loom but I think the jokes in it would be the worst part.
These games definitely felt magical as a kid but I think the feeling of it being this whole rich interactive little world full of characters carried a lot of weak jokes and writing.
MI1 was nice IMO. Not too hard, the insult game was innovative. It established a lot of characters. MI2 was way way too hard for me. And when I played it first on Amiga a lot of transitions took one minute to load from floppy which made it incredibly tedious. So I never finished that without a walkthrough.
Man if your example of weak video game writing is Monkey Island I think you're going to be disappointed a lot.
Was my favorite game for a long period as a kid and I loved it then, I'm saying if it looked at the same thing today without that nostalgia without what felt magic about it.
Difficulty is on par with 90's adventure games (and actually easier than Sierra games).
Story: Without any spoilers, I'll just say the ending isn't satisfying in the least. He does the equivalent of "I woke up and it was all a dream."
Of course so does Twin Peaks, and there's clearly a Twin Peaks/X Files vibe to this game.
One recent game I really liked was VirtuaVerse. Not incredibly hard, really good music and art design. It really felt like it took the lucasarts game style into the next century.
Broken sword is definitely a different style of game. I stopped playing broken sword when I had to solve a 15 puzzle to enter a sewer.
Did you like the King's Quest games?
I wonder did you enjoy the Monkey Island games. I really loved Delores and Ransome particularly in TWP.
Meh to each their own - I haven't played it for a while but I quite like TP's style/music/atmosphere, and the surrealness/metaness was a feature not a bug for me. I played SoMI2 with my friends telling me that the ending was super weird, so I didn't feel completely cheated when I got to that one and I think TP's ending is very Ron Gilbert.
Agree that some moon logic is present/inevitable but I think the Gilbert games are friendlier than most in this respect.
Worse than the Babel fish dispenser?
I didn't play on hard, but that wasn't my experience with the puzzles. I thought they were all pretty good. I didn't use a guide at all.
It's been a while, but I think I pretty much agree about the writing and story. I pretty much don't even remember it.
I would have preferred the same team working on a new IP. Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever. Just an endless series of being told that I am a big dummy for having suspended my disbelief. I see no way of believably returning to that world without the retcon of a lifetime.
I'm guessing, given they're relying on private financing, the ability to reuse assets from TP1 is the major reason to make it a sequel instead of a new IP.
Personally I liked TP1 a lot for the most part, but I agree that the ending was a horrible misstep. I'm not adverse to metafiction, and this is Gilbert after all, that's kind of his jam, but the sheer nihilism of it all left a horrible taste in the mouth. Ironically, for someone who cares so deeply about game design, it felt like an ending entirely borne of Gilbert and his fellow designers pleasing themselves, instead of thinking about how it would feel for the player.
That said, I'm still glad there's going to be a sequel. Hopefully it has more of what I liked and less of what I didn't.
Yes, the ending was kind of lame. Worse, it has been done before, again by Ron Gilbert. It is practically a rehash of the Monkey Island 2 ending, which got us nowhere in the long run.
He repeated the same trope in Return to Monkey Island. At this point, I expect all of his endings to be abstract and meta. I don't like it...
I thought it was particularly amusing because it was such a callback to MI2.
If you feel like trying a hail Mary to perhaps improve the ending I have two theories that I couldn't muster enough strength to check. Also, spoilers from here on.
First, there's a fridge that you can't open close to the ending of the game and that I understand as containing the body of the ghost character. I imagine there must be a way to open it, if only to give him closure.
Second, and related: given that the ending shows you a Basic prompt I imagine there has to be a way to use it for something other than restarting the game. I believe there was (for instance) a part of the game about getting a videotape but, once you had the right equipment, was no longer available to get. Perhaps those parts of the game can be unlocked if you know how to use the console to set the proper variables.
I've long hoped that we've all been getting the bad ending while there's a second one hidden somewhere (which has been hinted at [1]), but since I was fairly down after the ending I got I couldn't muster the energy to replay it all again.
> Thimbleweed Park 1 has possibly the worst ending of a game, ever.
I see that someone hasn't played the latest Monkey Island.
[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/maniac_the_cave_thimbleweed...
If you every played the first two Monkey Island games, and understand the lore behind that, then the ending is pretty good. Thimbleweed park, in many way, was a spiritual successor to Monkey Island 2 that Gilbert couldn't make for IP reasons back in the day. With at in mind, I enjoyed the ending. That said, Monkey Island 2 got a lot of criticism for its ending too...
Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.
And that's why Curse of Monkey Island is and will always remain the best MI game.
> Oh and if you really love that dumb, sophomoric ending, you can also get Return to Monkey Island, which is yet another game Gilbert ruined with this tired trope.
Isn't it a bit different with Return to Monkey Island? The story is told to kids by Guybrush and Guybrush being an unreliable narrator, it's uncertain how much of the story was real or an imagination by him.
The last scene though shows that something real somewhat similar to what Guybrush told did happen.
Also it completely retcons the ending of Monkey Island 2.
Can't say i disliked Return to Monkey Island much. I liked the art style and the characters. The story wasn't amazing.
MI1 will always be the top for me i guess, but i still remember almost every scene after all these years, so it's not really fun to play again and again. You can play it on almost anything by now [1]
[1]: https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/
I found Thimbleweed Park 1 very difficult. The puzzles were too hard. I didn't complete it. I tried to play it with my girlfriend, I thought it would be a nice game to work together to play/solve. It stumped both of us. No fun.
> P.P.P.S There will be a GOG version.
Very good news. GOG provides offline installers so you can always backup, install, and play your games forever.
Steam has a CLI that installs games. I’ve been meaning to use it to install each of my games and archive their installation for future offline use.
That’s not as convenient as an easy-to-download offline installer, certainly, but seems workable in theory. Maybe I’m unaware of limitation(s) to this approach?
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD
SteamCMD doesn't strip Steam DRM - even with files backed up (which the Steam GUI will do, no need for SteamCMD), you wont be able to use them without an internet connection and authenticating with Steam every now and then.
GOG's bundles are offline and DRM free. You could store them on a disk, and 30 years from now reinstall and play on an airgapped computer with no authentication required.
I had a weird relationship with the first game.
The final scene of TP1; the one where they show the rising sun over a hill, that felt so at home for me. It was the only reason I played the game, to see that scene. Something about the colors reminded me of my childhood.
Of course I could just see it on youtube or a screenshot but I wanted it to feel natural, I wanted the story and characters to take me to that hill scene. That’s all I cared about.
Great news! Thimbleweed Park is a lovely game. I played it with my children and manage to recreate the atmosphere of those evenings in 1990, spent in front of a Commodore Amiga 500 running Zak McKraken and Maniac Mansion.
Yeah, I loved it, too. Not quite on the level of the first two Monkey Island games, but still a great experience. One of the few games I actually finished in the last bunch of years.
I think the time between the original and this will work out well for me to be excited to play a sequel.
I enjoyed Thimbleweed Park personally, however for all those old Monkey Island fans like myself I'd encourage you to read this[0] analysis of the game series and lore to uncover the secret of Monkey Island by DM81
I found it a really enjoyable read and a plausible take, so I thought it was worth sharing here
It's relevant as it's posted in the Thimbleweed Park forums ;)
-[0]: https://forums.thimbleweedpark.com/t/return-to-monkey-island...
That link was amazing.
I felt that Return to Monkey Island was a bit of a cop-out.
But the multi-layer, Mulholland Drive-esq, storytelling is a real eye-opener.
It appears that his multi-layered storytelling found its way into Thimbleweed Park and surface-level understanding probably won't get you far.
As someone who didn’t play many of the point and click adventures growing up, thimbleweed park was a lot of fun. I also like the genre more than visual novels. I kind of felt like the dialogue was supposed to be cheesy so I just rolled with it. Were some of the things a little frustrating? Yea, but I think there is a lot of life left in this genre and I’m sure Ron will make some improvements. I can’t wait to play the next one.
<not asking in a mean way>
Not enmeshed in game development and have only done it very lightly: what takes a game like this 1.5 - 2 years to finish?
Like at a minimum, it's art, sound, graphics, and programming. If they are re-using assets, that's one of them ~done. So what's taking them 2 years?
My background is in SaaS type stuff and if I went to who hired me and said it would take 2 years to build out a non-cutting edge product I am pretty sure I'd get fired. So can any game devs briefly/not-briefly explain why game dev like this takes so long? I am just curious to understand the dev cycle.
I'd assume that with investment, he'd have at least one person per team so all of these can largely be intertwined with each other but largely running at the same time.
</not asking in a mean way>
I think you’re underrating the sheer amount of iteration that occurs. SaaS has requirements and then implementation- it’s a product that has a target it hits. Yes, churn happens, but the point is you’re working to a specific goal.
Games and any creative work isn’t like that. There’s constant iteration as new ideas come up or developers learn in play testing that certain parts of the game work better than others, and so they realign things continually and keep refining. I’m not a game dev btw, but blogs from devs show a continual cycle of refinement and feature creep.
It's just a lot of work.
You need to build the engine/tech, need to support various platforms including building a rendering pipeline (so Vulkan, DirectX and Metal). You need to support animation (probably just 2D?), audio (including various effects and params), different types of input, a UI system, etc. To author the assets you need editors of some form for building the scenes, for cinematics, for the narrative, for the animations, a lot of these will be custom. Then to get the assets in the game you need a pipeline that coverts everything into platform specific formats. And all of this has to be performant, targeting 60fps ideally and cross platform.
That's just the tech side. Then you need all the other disciplines to be in sync. Can't start on animations until you have characters, can't start on those until you have concepts but can't have those until you have a narrative. And these will go via a lot of iterations as you try things out and figure out what works.
Then there's testing, the possibilities from a user perspective are really broad so the bug surface is massive. For a simple app the user is quite limited so it's simpler to enforce rules and unit tests. With a game a user can do a lot across many platforms and the issues can be on the low level graphics driver or just logic puzzle errors.
Then you have certification, platform holders have a book of tests they do to your game so you don't brick the console. Things like, does you game handle unplugging the console while you're saving to disk?
I can imagine they'll reuse a ton of tech from previous games, but there's always new things you need to do. Two years is actually pretty fast for the industry.
The best answer to that question is the development blog they made for the first game:
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html
At a quick glance: four months for the engine (which they wrote from scratch [1]) and, based on the budget [2], roughly nine months for crowdsourcing and pre-production (setting the overall story and puzzles, deciding on the look of the game, building small proofs-of-concept), seven months for production, three months for testing and bugfixing, and two months for release (which they overshot by three months).
[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/roadmap1.html
[2] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1.html
I'll add that, unlike what your parent wrote, asset reuse will be minimal, in adventure games, one of the reward for solving puzzles is unlocking access to new locations and thus new art.
In this case, they may reuse some of the sprites for the main characters (default animations). Most of the animations are custom and can't be reused.
Likewise for the voice acting (I'd expect them to start from scratch here, the mood of the games may be a bit different).
In my experience, business software has narrow and predictable use cases. Note taking: You need to add, delete and update notes and the real meat of the product is usually in the note organization. Even SAP has use cases simple in nature: Account for milk cartons sold. The use cases just grow complex once you work in 30 countries or more. "Pay the right taxes on milk cartons sold" becomes tricky.
However, this is parallelizable: You can work on all 30 countries at once and ship when ready. You can work on taking and organizing notes in parallel. You can work on scaling in parallel. You can streamline UX in parallel while introducing tagging, or trees, or groups, or anything.
A game, and especially a narrative game, has an intrinsic linear component, the plot. You can work on a certain amount in parallel, sure: Once the rough shape of the plot is laid out, you can start working on assets, necessary engine features, sounds, dialog in parallel.
But you still have a strong need that a player or play tester has a good progression from act one to act two to act three, and a good progression from puzzle one to puzzle two to puzzle three. This takes a lot of very slow iteration.
This involves human testing by nature. You get a playtest every few months, if you have the money. You can easily throw more CI hardware to run your integration tests more often for more countries. Playtesters, especially those who don't know the game, are very, very limited.
Then you also want characters and settings to be consistent across the plot. If done well, this takes a lot of adjustments and refinement both back and forth. Sometimes the setting of Act three requires a character to have a certain trait, and that trait should be developed, so you now go back to Acts one and two to see if you can build up the character -- without knocking down the entire house of cards already in place.
And once you get to polish and atmosphere, it becomes even harder and more time consuming, because then you need new playtesters even more.
From a past job and working on some features, I spent a day or two presenting like 6-8 different options, and then spent half a day in different testing groups to figure out which procedural generation option "feels the best" for what the game designer wants. With a better spec, that could've been an hour. This made players more excited. Probably.
Don't really have the context, but I'd trust the expert that it will get done on the schedule they want. I'd say people on the outside of things often ask these kinds of questions due to lacking any context on production schedules. See: the last time your PM said "can't we just..."
He's also a small shop and perhaps they intentionally move slower. I suspect he doesn't need to urgently get paid for this.
Story writing is probably non linear in time it takes, and I imagine there's a fair amount of waterfall. E.g you can't schedule voice actors until the story and dialogue is done. Oh wait, the voice actors have other commitments so they'll be by in 3 months. Etc.
Loved the first part. Can't wait to play it. Didn't know there was an iOS Version for the first one, time to replay that on my phone on a plane :D
Please let it not be meta. Please oh please oh please.
Thimbleweek Park 1 was nothing but meta.
Return to Monkey Island was corpo art and meta. "The real treasure was the friends you made along the way, computer game player". Thanks Ron.
I've forgotten the ending of The Cave, it was probably meta too, but at least it had some good slapstick.
I gave up the belief he could abstain from that after he ruined Return.
Yeah, me too. He did it once on MI2, fine. But again and again? I just wish he could tell a complete story for once.
It was fun at the beginning but I got bored of it 2/3rds of the way in. The puzzles were an absolute chore to figure out and solve and the story kinda run out of steam.
This is great news! That was such a fun game.
Hmm I don't remember completing the first and other than finding the phone amusing I don't remember much else about it. Will await reviews once done but if anyone hasn't played The drifter yet that is worth checking out
The Drifter is a great example of a slightly more modernized take on the classic adventure genre. Had a slow start and some grating voice acting, but gosh it ended up being a great experience.
After how he basically gave the middle finger to fans waiting 100 years for the "real" ending to Monkey Island 2, my reaction is
meh -_-
Though Thimbleweed Park 1 was awesome in every way
I wish/hope someone else would take up the mantle of continuing the -spirit- of Monkey Island and make a new franchise with a similar rename: call it Ape Archipelago or something :)
Even though Monkey Island now has a real (i.e. canonical) ending, it sucks. I prefer the original continuation of MI3 to the 25-years-late official, canonical sequel
I pretty much saw the ending an effort to put the story to end and move on after all the years of speculation.
it's clearly in that direction (and that's fine), but I would debate the "effort" part
The link given elsewhere here about the multi-layered aspect of the stories from 1, 2 and RMI gives it a bit more depth. Obviously if you take it on the surface level only it's low effort.
> We'll surely avoid scurvy if we all eat an orange.
> My skills with a sword are highly venerated!
> Too bad they're all fabricated.
Ughh... door hinge? Guess the song's over.
It's not just the ending, but the flat humor, the lazy puzzles (like clicking multiple times on multiple objects to open the porthole) and the meagre number of interactions on each of the islands after the first one..
It's like his heart just wasn't in it anymore
It felt like a "ehh let's get this over with" at best
or a medium-effort nostalgia-pandering money grab at worst.
What takes it so long to release this kind of game early 2028 ?
Hint: The tech is not the hard part. The puzzles, stories, voice acting and animations take considerable time.
After the endings of Thimbleweed Park and Return To Monkey Island, I lost a lot of respect for Ron Gilbert.