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

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Codex 2014 Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy
Played and finished this.

I could share my thoughts on this game with you, but it's pretty much all been said already. With one notable exception: The game lying to you.

I'm not talking about the plot here, I'm talking game design.

The game actually has a dead-end scenario where your only hope is to Restore or Restart: When you need to cool down a certain computer before you can interact with it fully.

"Pfft, no problem", most of you think, just call that number you called a minute ago to turn the fan back on. Except you would be amazed what kind of stupid shit can come up in your life that makes you forget a 4-digit number in less than a minute. Really. If you think your memory is solid, I can guarantee you that it isn't. Stop fooling yourselves.

So if you don't happen to have that number (it's random each game BTW) you find that you're trapped in a room because you can't go back (because *reasons*) because none of the other characters can get to the room with the fan service number, and you can't open the trap door to allow the other characters to get in and advance the game.

But here's where it gets even worse. The game has an Autosave feature... and if you're the type of player that relies on your Autosave instead of making manual saves, well guess what last dick move the game has in store for you: It autosaves the minute you enter the room past the fan. That you can't get out of. And you won't like how far back your last manual save was.

To paraphrase one of Thimbleweed Park's protagonists: *Beep* you, Ron Gilbert.

Some of you might think that I'm being harsh on Gilbert here. especially since it's my fault I got stuck there. No. The super-duper easy way to overcome this deathtrap is to make the fan a two-way doorway, not one-way. Then this becomes a non-issue. But I get the feeling this was designed like this purposefully because to some sad losers Adventure Game Puzzles need to have Meaning, and if you can just waltz back and forth past that fan, then the whole "Disable the Fan"-puzzle becomes irrelevant.

So yeah, a game that makes a promise right at the start that it's designed NEVER to have a dead end, that you can ALWAYS find a way out, that you NEVER should need to restore (unless the game tells you to save first) throws a walking dead-scenario at you right towards the end if you aren't careful.

I want to say I'm done here, but there's one further thing: Note how I don't mention the Thimbleweed Park character by name? That's intentional.

Ron Gilbert is a household name in Adventure Gaming circles because he created good adventure games with memorable characters. Because their efforts, and your involvement, felt like it had meaning to the story. Even The Cave leaves you with good and memorable impressions of the protagonists, despite other shortcomings of the game. Thimbleweed Park does the exact opposite. It creates two-dimensional character archetypes with potential that could grow and become memorable as the game progressed, but then throws it all away because stupid meta-plot twist and bullshit reasons. None of it goes anywhere. I see no reason to even mention the characters of Thimbleweed Park by name because of this.

Was Gilbert trying to prove that Adventure Games were not dead and were still relevant? If so, he failed abysmally, because Thimbleweed Park proves the exact opposite: Adventure Games are dead. Again. Thanks, Ron. :decline:
 

MRY

Wormwood Studios
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It's funny -- that's exactly the kind of dead end that wouldn't come up in testing. Because his main dead-end tester was that automated bot thing, but a bot could overcome that with brute force. And then beta testers would be less likely to get distracted in the interim, and the sample size might be too small. If .1% of players have the problem and you have 500 testers, there's a 50% chance the problem would go unmentioned. Thus, I think it's highly unlikely that it was an intentional flaw, or a disregarded one, and more an example of how even Homer nods.
 

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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I just tried this and I could totally go back when the fan is off. So maybe you just encountered a bug?

Were you playing Casual or Hard? I was on Hard.

Anyway it's the latest build (as of a few days ago on GOG) so while there is a possibility that this is a bug, the odds of that are mightly slim as I spent 5 minutes exhausting every option in that room.

Regardless of bug or not, this needs to be looked into.
 

Tramboi

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The game actually has a dead-end scenario where your only hope is to Restore or Restart: When you need to cool down a certain computer before you can interact with it fully.

"Pfft, no problem", most of you think, just call that number you called a minute ago to turn the fan back on. Except you would be amazed what kind of stupid shit can come up in your life that makes you forget a 4-digit number in less than a minute. Really. If you think your memory is solid, I can guarantee you that it isn't. Stop fooling yourselves.

So if you don't happen to have that number (it's random each game BTW) you find that you're trapped in a room because you can't go back (because *reasons*) because none of the other characters can get to the room with the fan service number, and you can't open the trap door to allow the other characters to get in and advance the game.

I noticed this one while playing it, when I had to refer to my written note, but I was too lazy to report it (or complain about it :) ).
I think this is a real bug and should have been noticed by QA.
 
Last edited:

trustno1code

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0p5iaPd.png

:love:
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Interview with a younger designer/programmer of the team: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news...oving_beyond_nostalgia_in_adventure_games.php

Thimbleweed's Jenn Sandercock on moving beyond nostalgia in adventure games

Terrible Toybox’s pixellated paranormal point-and-click adventure game Thimbleweed Park, released earlier this year, unfolds like a comedic X-Files; as always, it begins with a dead body.

The game has the look at feel of a classic Lucasarts adventure, and it also has the pedigree: among its creators are Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick, who brought us classics like Maniac Mansion and Zack McKracken and the Monkey Island series. But Terrible Toybox also features indie devs like Jenn Sandercock. "Our team isn’t just Lucasfilm alumni, there’s people like me on the team who are relatively newer to the industry," she says.

I talked to Sandercock about what made Thimbleweed stand out from the crowd in an indie field saturated by nostalgia.

Nostalgia is such a critical—some might say overwhelming—theme in so many contemporary indie games. They’re always harkening back to something in gaming’s history and that seems to be the case here at least in the game’s pixel aesthetic, and its classic adventure game style mechanics. How does Thimbleweed Park go beyond that, however? What’s there for people who are looking forward rather than back?

What makes us different to many games that are “inspired by” or “in homage” to classic games is that our core team is made up of people who actually created those classic games. So they know all the things that they learnt previously and have had time to think about ways to fix any issues they perceived in the way they used to make games. Also, I’m sure having fans come up to them over the years saying things like: “I loved X, but that one puzzle was so frustrating” helps a lot.

Thimble5.jpg


So you believe this widens the potential audience for the game then?

It can be slightly frustrating to me sometimes when Thimbleweed Park is dismissed as simply a throwback game that only hard-core point-and-click adventure gamers will love. First person shooters have tweaked their gameplay quite a lot over the years, but a lot of the core gameplay is pretty much the same. It feels frustrating that for adventure games people don’t separate out content or implementation issues from the core gameplay mechanics.

Many of the old games were frustrating, but in my opinion that wasn’t because of the actual core gameplay mechanics, it was because of game design mistakes. So if we use our knowledge from over the years, we can make a new adventure game using the old mechanics, but that doesn’t feel frustrating.

Thimble1.jpg


I suppose this is why I feel frustrated with the rather outdated idea that a game critic or reviewer has to say “who is this game for?” Often I’d rather describe what the game does and let people decide for themselves. What are some other ways you and the team have modified the concept of the adventure game?

For us, Thimbleweed Park was somewhat an experiment to try and work out what it was that made those games charming since we weren’t sure what component it was.

So we kept many of the same mechanics, modernized where we thought it was necessary or improved the game. Of course, I’m a little biased, but I think we really did manage to capture a bit of the charm. I feel that we’ve made point-and-click adventure games accessible to people who’ve never played them before as well as people who never stopped playing them.

Developing a game is difficult, and it’s hard to find time to put in all the features we want. For example, I really wanted to put in some sort of hint system, since I don’t like walkthroughs that spoil the game. However, during development we ran out of time to work out how to integrate a hint system into the fiction of the game and not make it too jarring to players.

After release, Meghann O’Neill wrote an incremental hint system that reminded me of the old UHS (Universal Hint System) style hints. We liked it so much that I worked with Meghann to put it into the game as a phone number that you can call within the game, a hint line. In hindsight, it feels like an obvious way to implement hints, since the game is set in 1987 when adventure games did have hint lines where you could call and talk to a real person to find out what to do next. But during development, we just couldn’t have taken the time to work on this. So it feels great that now anyone who’s downloaded it can get this update for free. You couldn’t do that for games on physical disks back in the day.

Thimble8.jpg


What do you think the role of puzzles and problem solving is in contemporary games? I find them fascinating not only as callbacks to the early says of RPGs and adventure games, but they also serve an interesting mechanical purpose that pushes the game beyond raw combat. What does this add to Thimbleweed? Or, indeed, any game that uses such mechanics?

When we were designing puzzles, we always came at it from a story perspective first. We knew what we wanted to accomplish and then we’d work out how someone in the real world might solve that puzzle and try to see if that makes sense within our game world. By integrating the puzzle solving with the narrative, it means that players themselves progress the story. It’s kind of like the show, don’t tell method, but is “do, don’t tell” instead. Players feel a lot more ownership when they get to play a real part in the story themselves.

I feel that many contemporary adventure games have moved away from puzzle solving and have concentrated on the narrative/story part of the game. I was a little late to get around to “finishing” it, but I loved playing the Witness. Games like that and the Professor Layton series feel like their core puzzle solving mechanics are very separated from the underlying narrative that goes through the game. Although I love the puzzles, they’re what I solve to get a cutscene, rather than advancing the narrative by my puzzle solving. Other adventure games these days have very little in the way of traditional puzzles at all, such as Gone Home and Firewatch.

I think that this evolution of adventure games is great. It’s wonderful to see people taking the genre in different directions. However, I believe that rather than us deciding there is only one “good” way to do an adventure game, these different approaches are simply adding to the breadth of types of adventure games that are possible.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
Probably not the post he linked but relevant forum posts from Ron about the possibility of a new adventure game: https://forums.thimbleweedpark.com/...-ron-gilbert-and-team-in-near-future/1505/118

I guess it depends on your definition of “near”. We’re still working on TWP, that will continue until the end of Oct. TWP has broken even, and will probably due fine over time (it has a very strong tail), but it hasn’t made enough to fund a new game. Kickstarter is likely to fund (at most) half of a new game, and I can’t afford to work for free for another two years waiting for backend to pay me far less than I could get just getting a job. That’s the ugly reality of indie game dev.

Now of this is not to say a new adventure (or adventure-ish) game isn’t possible, but I need to look at a lot of different options before deciding what to do next.

It’s unlikely to be enough to change the picture. even an extra $100K doesn’t make this possible. I know $100K seems like a lot of money, but you can’t think about it as $100K being in your personal bank account. 1/3 of that is lost in taxes. plus remember TWP cost $1M to make. Making a new game isn’t likely to be much less. While we save money in not building the engine, that wasn’t a huge chuck of the budget. Also, I could go get a job and make 2x what I’ll ever make on TWP and any money from an new game is a risk, so it’s far from guaranteed. I’ve taken a lot of risks in my career, and while they have been creatively fun, most have broken even finally or not paid out.

Yes, I could skip and trim the budget and cut the quality and take even more risks but I don’t know if I want to do that anymore. I don’t mind taking risks, but they need to be correctly calculated. I don’t think spinning up another point-and-click adventure is the right risk to take. Maybe I’ll stumble on a idea that changes that equation, but maybe not, and certainly not in the “near term”.

To enthusiastically jump into another point-and-click adventure, TWP would have needed to make $750K in profit, meaning after taxes and investors payout. We are magnitudes from that and PS4, Switch and iOS won’t change that.

I don’t believe for 1 second I could fund a point-and-click Kickstarter asking for $1.5M, which is honestly what it would take to pay everyone normal industry (not even top) salaries and build a game to a quality level I would be proud of. There are too many people who have no concept of what it takes to make a game who would just shit all over the project and cause it to fail due to bad PR. I’ve seen this happen before.

The other problem with assuming you’ll make no profit and just cover dev is it never frees you. This is the same problem that a lot of devs get into wth publishers. They build games the publisher completely pays for, but there is no realistic backend, so they are caught back in the cycle.

Doing Kickstarters where it pays your cost, but there is little chance of upside is no better then working with a publisher. It might work a few times, but the one time your Kickstarter fails, and the whole thing comes crumbling down.

Companies don’t want portable games (just) because they are greedy, they need them to weather the failures.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
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Codex 2014
Actually is there any "good-old-days" developer who released the first Kickstarter game AND got a good second chance after that, unless they already had established company like Obsidian, Larian, and inXile.

Only developer I can think of right now is the mighty Julian Gollop, with Chaos Reborn and upcoming Phoenix Point.

Oh, also Peter Molenuex somehow got away with the Godus fiasco, and found success in mobile games.
 

Darth Roxor

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Actually is there any "good-old-days" developer who released the first Kickstarter game AND got a good second chance after that, unless they already had established company like Obsidian, Larian, and inXile.

Only developer I can think of right now is the mighty Julian Gollop, with Chaos Reborn and upcoming Phoenix Point.

Oh, also Peter Molenuex somehow got away with the Godus fiasco, and found success in mobile games.

Does Harebrained count?
 

Infinitron

I post news
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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
Actually is there any "good-old-days" developer who released the first Kickstarter game AND got a good second chance after that, unless they already had established company like Obsidian, Larian, and inXile.

Only developer I can think of right now is the mighty Julian Gollop, with Chaos Reborn and upcoming Phoenix Point.

Oh, also Peter Molenuex somehow got away with the Godus fiasco, and found success in mobile games.

Does Harebrained count?

Already established too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimson:_Steam_Pirates
 

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