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- Hacker News
- 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.by drooopy
- 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 :)
by Razengan - 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 sequelby dark-star
- 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.
by amiga386 - I gave up the belief he could abstain from that after he ruined Return.
- 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 :Dby willyyr
- <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>
by madamelic - 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.
by dbalatero - It's just like when during development the client/the users realize the system can do more and better, so the specs are changed because it makes a lot of sense to do that. Game dev is always like that: you won't realize what works and what doesn't until you can actually playtest the game... then you'll think of fixes and you'll have to go back implementing them.by RobM71
- 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.
by lentil_soup - 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.
by tetha - 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).
- 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.
by melozo - 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.by Decabytes
- 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...
by Folcon - 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.
by tarkin2 - 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.by zedr
- 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.
- > 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?
by WalterGR - 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.by dandersch
- 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.by jaffa2
- 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...by tarkin2
- 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.by m000
- 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...
- 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.
by nayroclade - 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.
by esperent - > 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)
by jstummbillig - 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.
by vunderba