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KickStarter Thimbleweed Park: A New Ron Gilbert Classic Point & Click Adventure

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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Yeah, I don't know what to make of that assertion. I've always thought there was a large and meaningful gap between the kind of narratives that support a point and click and the kind of narratives that can be told in the absence of puzzles. You see that in interactive fiction, too. I don't think you could have, say, Photopia in a puzzle heavy game or Lost Pig without puzzles. And the divide between the types of game was only semi-permeable, in the same way the divide between jRPGs and cRPGs is. I'm not saying people can't like both, I just think that for the most part their liking of both happens not by direct passage from one to the other but by a more circuitous route. One shouldn't enjoy The Walking Dead because he likes Monkey Island or vice versa; in fact, someone who said such a thing would trouble my weary mind.
 

tuluse

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Serpent in the Staglands Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Shadorwun: Hong Kong
The Walking Dead season 1 (only part I've played) has puzzles. So it's not a great example for a story that needs an absence of puzzles.
 

MRY

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The interactions in the part I played did not particularly feel like puzzles (at least not as I remember it), but it's been a while. My recollection was being in areas that were about two or three rooms in size with just a couple hotspots and couple obvious items to use on them that served to give the player some non-QTE engagement with the game. But it has been a while, I could be all wrong.

EDIT: Looking at this walkthrough, it really doesn't seem at all like what I would consider an adventure game. I'm not saying it's a bad game, just something different -- it's basically a series of set pieces with minimal exploration, items, etc., etc. It could just as easily be a simplified Resident Evil type game as a simplified point-and-click. Indeed, if anything that seems a more apt comparison (though perhaps I'm being clouded by the presence of zombies and consumable items).
 
Last edited:

tuluse

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The interactions in the part I played did not particularly feel like puzzles (at least not as I remember it), but it's been a while. My recollection was being in areas that were about two or three rooms in size with just a couple hotspots and couple obvious items to use on them that served to give the player some non-QTE engagement with the game. But it has been a while, I could be all wrong.
They were bad boring puzzles, but they were there.

EDIT: Looking at this walkthrough, it really doesn't seem at all like what I would consider an adventure game. I'm not saying it's a bad game, just something different -- it's basically a series of set pieces with minimal exploration, items, etc., etc.
Well sure, but that's what you said at first. Meanwhile, Firewatch and Gone Home are exploration based narrative games, so you could see how maybe a classic pnc adventure game could possibly appeal to people who like them.

It could just as easily be a simplified Resident Evil type game as a simplified point-and-click. Indeed, if anything that seems a more apt comparison (though perhaps I'm being clouded by the presence of zombies and consumable items).
Well the pre-4 Resident Evil games had puzzles too. Walking Dead doesn't have any of the survival aspects iirc, which is about the defining aspect of Resident Evil (that and maybe the bosses which again Walking Dead doesn't have).

Walking Dead is a visual novel with some crappy puzzles thrown in the way occasionally. Of course Ron didn't mention Walking Dead.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...new-classic-point-and-click-adv/posts/1780393

Happy New Year! Or, as we like to call it, Happy Thimbleweed Park Release Year!

"We're overjoyed you'll be telling us what to do soon." - Ransome, Franklin, Ray, Reyes, Delores


That’s right! We’re going to be releasing Thimbleweed Park to all you lovely backers & the rest of the world in just a few months! So it must be time for a Kickstarter update or something!

We’re polishing, we’re prepping for distribution, we’re translating into German, French, Spanish AND Italian, we’re reading library books and listening to voicemails, we're applying for ratings, we’re crossing our “i”s and dotting our “t”s… What do you mean you don’t cross “i”s? I just spent an hour on that! Ugh! Back to the drawing board it is.

In December we finished recording all the voice actors and put them into the game. It makes such a difference! The hard part has been working out exactly how to *beep* all of those Ransome the Clown swear words so that you don’t end up with ringing ears.

Speaking of swearing…. Only Ransome is allowed to swear in the game, any others who swear have to pay him by putting some money in his swear jar. Via PledgeMaster, we gave all of you rad backers the opportunity to pay up and get your name in Ransome’s swear jar list.

We stopped allowing any changes to your pledges a while back, but some of you haven’t fully completed your orders or paid up properly. This will be your last chance to get in the swear jar.

(Warning… overly dramatic font about to be used)

COMPLETE YOUR SWEAR JAR ORDER BY 15TH JANUARY TO BE IN THE SWEAR JAR.
If you haven’t already added the swear jar to your cart, it is sadly too late for you to add it. But if you added it to your cart, but didn’t click all the buttons or some error happened, then your order won’t show up as “complete” and your name will not get into the swear jar. To check your status, you should be able to log into your PledgeManager account here:https://terribletoybox.pledgemanager.com/projects/thimbleweed-park-ks/

If you have any issues, feel free to get in touch with Jenn who’s on support email duty: support@thimbleweedpark.com

After release, we’ll put all our energy into getting those schweeeeeet physical rewards. So you’ll get more and more annoying reminder emails about letting us know the information we need (like your T-shirt size, if you haven’t already told us).

Before we ship out the physical rewards, you’ll get a reminder email from PledgeManager to update your postal address. Note: you can go into your order at any time and update your address.

That’s it from us right now. We’re so close to pushing those little release buttons it’s agonising. But we will get there and it will be worth the wait, we guarantee*!

Don’t forget… If you think our Kickstarter updates are few & far between and you want more information, you can follow any or all of these to get more up to date news:
*Not a guarantee
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/stateofthegame4

State Of The Game #4

It's time for another action packed State of the Game post! Gather around the radio, turn up the volume, get grandma in the rocking chair, and let's begin.

A lot has changed since Gary and I sat across from each other at lunch and joking said "Let's do a Kickstarter", followed by an awkward moment of silence where we both realized it wasn't a joke.

twp_change.png


Would anyone want to play a point-and-click adventure? Would they appreciate the classic nine-verb SCUMM interface? Could we build a game that was how you remember those old game, not how they actually were? Could we grab a new generation of gamers and shed them of their misgivings about what a point-and-click adventure is?

Well, we were a mere months away from finding out. It's been a long journey, one that you have shared with us, encouraged us, and held us honest throughout. I can honestly say, Thimbleweed Park is a better game for having you all here. And I'm not just blowing smoke up your *beep*. I'm not that kind of person.

Since our last State of the Game post, we've gone into content lock, meaning all the art is done, all the sound and music is done, and all the puzzles wired up.

We still continue to test and an occasional bug is found where we have to tweak one of the above, but we're not making any more changes or adding any new content.

We've set a date of January 27 as an engine lock for Mac, Windows, Linux and Xbox. At that point the engine is done and we're adding no new engine code. We will continue to test and if showstopper bugs are found, they will be fixed, but we're done with the engine.

That is also the version we will submit to Microsoft for Xbox cert, which can take a month.

We're in the process of getting our coming soon Steam page set up, so hopefully that will go live in the near future.

Thimbleweed Park runs on iOS and Android, but we're not actively working on them, there is just too much to do to get the game done on the core platforms. They will probably come out a few months later.

We haven't announced anything with PS4, but our intentions are to release there was well. As I've mentioned in the past, Microsoft has a three month exclusive, so it will be at least three months after the core platforms. Our Microsoft deal also specifies that we can't release on any other platform before the Xbox, so Mac, Windows, Linux and Xbox will all release at the same time. It's not really holding anything back, it's actually giving us breathing room on for getting the Steam builds tight.

vo_recording_1.jpg


The big news over the past few months is the voice acting. I could write a whole book about the the voice acting (henceforth known as Clusterfuck #1). It has nothing to do with the voice actors, they were all marvelous. As much as I'd love to shift blame to someone else (I'm taking volunteers), it rests solely on my shoulders.

I contemplated writing about this earlier, but decided to wait and see how it all panned out. Writing about clusterfucks while they are happening invites too much second-guessing (on everyone's part).

We did our first casting back in March, when we did the trailer for Ray. It's important to remember that Thimbleweed Park has 47 speaking roles, and that is a lot to cast for. My goal was to cast here in Seattle and use local actors.

We did the casting for Ray and then I planned on doing a full casting in June and the first recording session in time to have voice in for the demo we showed at Seattle PAX. June came and I was overwhelmed with work, and June became July, we did a first pass at casting, but just weren't finding the talent, then I became overwhelmed with everything else and pretended none of this was happening. Oh yeah, and a shit-bag was elected president and that didn't help (note to self: get the Russian translations done ASAP).

vo_recording_2.jpg


So now June has become late October and we still don't have the game cast. Panic is at DEFCON 1.

We eventually decided to cast in Vancouver Canada (also known as TV America) and within a few weeks had the game cast and were ready to roll. The actor who plays Delores is in Seattle, so we recorded her at Bad Animals in Seattle (fun fact: after casting her, she became the Thimbleweed Park sound designer and so is basically the real life Delores).

There is a character in the game who is German and no one we auditioned could do a German accent that didn't sound like something out of Hogan's Heroes. I contacted Tom Kerstin at Daedalic to see if he could help, and he got in touch with an actor and studio in Germany. Many thanks for that.

In Vancouver we recorded at Studio X Labs, which coincidentally is the same place we recorded DeathSpank. I went up to Vancouver for a week and we record everyday for 8 hours. Union actors work in 4 hour stints, so we couldn't record (for example) Reyes for 8 hours each day, we had to split it with other actors and the other roles.

Only the five keys roles needed more than 4 hours, we got everyone else in one 4 hour session.

To record, we'd run though the script and the actor would read each line twice and I'd mark the take I liked, or marked it for pickup. We'd go through around 30 lines, then go back and grab anything anything I'd mark. Ransome's voice was hard on the actor who played him, so after the first session we had him do each line once, rather than twice. He was amazing, so I rarely needed a retake.

vo_script.png


That's the thing about working with pro-actors. They are really good at reading a script and can do 95% of their lines in one take.

All the actors on Thimbleweed Park was a pleasure to work with.

After my week in Vancouver, I came home and we spent the next 3 weeks recording with me calling in on Skype. All in all, it took 5 weeks to record over 16,000 lines.

Which gets me to the other clusterfuck on my part. Lauren, David, Jenn and myself wrote way way too much. I was mentally keeping track of the lines in my head, and I completely misestimated by a factor of 2. When I first pulled the text and saw how many lines where were, I was shocked and mortified.

Initially, there were more than 16,000 lines (with a third of them needing to be recorded 5 times), so we went through the whole game and blocked characters from going into specific areas they didn't need to go, mostly to save recording. I don't think players will really notice it. We always gave charaters a good reason for not going somewhere and made sure it wouldn't make a puzzle frustrating.

An example is keeping Ransome out of the Cemetery. There is no puzzle reason for him to go there and we gave him a plausible excuse for not wanting to go in there, so it seems natural.

So, lessons learned (that I already knew but didn't follow):

1 - Cast early and set a deadline and stick to it.
2 - Pull a script early and often so you have a real line count.

After recording was done, it's taken another two weeks to go through and cut, clip and process all the dialogue. It's in the game now and it's been transformational. It is so amazing to hear everyone speak.

W00T!

Boris has started the German translation a month ago and a few weeks later we hired the translators for French, Italian and Spanish. They are all on our Slack, so it's fun to chat about odd issues that come up. Each of them has a copy of the game they can debug jump to any room and hot load their translation as they write them. The translations are all scheduled to be done by the 27th.

diner_it.png


We are now fully into the final stages setting up all the marketing and PR. Do not underestimate the importance of these two things, they are just as important as building a great game. But those will have to wait for another post.

So, the bottom line is our evil plan is finally coming together to make a point-and-click adventure game that feels fresh and modern without running from anything that made those games so great.

Thanks for being a part of it.

- Ron
 

Bumvelcrow

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Looking forward to it, but those damned XBox exclusivity deals. How many XBox owners are actually going to play an early 90s style point-and-click adventure?

Also, note to Ron Gilbert - crowbarring your political agenda into unconnected development updates shows lack of respect for your readers' independently held opinions and reflects badly on you. Grow the fuck up.
 

Nope

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Feb 22, 2011
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Also, note to Ron Gilbert - crowbarring your political agenda into unconnected development updates shows lack of respect for your readers' independently held opinions and reflects badly on you. Grow the fuck up.
I was actually surprised at how childish he comes across when I read his twitter a while ago.
It was full of incredibly shrill liberal screeching over the imminent apocalypse that would 'obviously' occur since Hillary didn't win interspersed with retweets of "games ought to be politicized because of evil white men" rants disguised as articles.
It did temper my expectations of TP a fair bit.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Well, if one of you guys in Europe want real talk with Ron Gilbert: https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/twp_tour17

Germany and London Events

We're going to be do a little press tour in a few weeks through Germany and London and we're going to set up some fan events when you can hang out, chat about adventure games and play a little Thimbleweed Park and complain in person about <insert personal gripe about the game here>.

We looked into going to some other counties, but time and money was a limiting factor, so we apologize for that.

As we say in America: ROAD TRIP!

twp_tour17.png



The prefered way to sign up is with Facebook by going HERE.

Or you can sign up HERE if you don't have Facebook.

But please don't sign up on both or you will make us cry.

We're not announcing where the fan parties are going to be until we have a count of people.

- Ron
 

Tramboi

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Also, note to Ron Gilbert - crowbarring your political agenda into unconnected development updates shows lack of respect for your readers' independently held opinions and reflects badly on you. Grow the fuck up.
I was actually surprised at how childish he comes across when I read his twitter a while ago.
It was full of incredibly shrill liberal screeching over the imminent apocalypse that would 'obviously' occur since Hillary didn't win interspersed with retweets of "games ought to be politicized because of evil white men" rants disguised as articles.
It did temper my expectations of TP a fair bit.

I think:
a) he knows that
b) he doesn't give a fuck

(And I'm the maybe least political guy in the world)
 

Sizzle

Arcane
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Feb 17, 2012
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Haven't played his latest games (The Cave and DeathSpank), did those have any SJW-ication in them?
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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I can't see how a fictional game in which intrepid intelligence agents try to stop a "rich, narcissistic egomaniac" could possibly involve any political statements...
 
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Because San Francisco ?

edit : *sigh* ... backed ... but remember ...
20-bucks.jpg

That picture really needed to have an "*" at the end of the sentence, and then, in tiny writing at the bottom of the poster, 'plus inflation':)

Actually, when did that come out? Anyone feel up for doing the year by year inflation calculations (I'm sure there's "convert money from X year to Y year" calculators on the internet, but failing that, just get the inflation chart and go year by year)? Would be curious to see what the equivalent price would be today. I'm guessing around $35.
 

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