Ron Gilbert started production on Thimbleweed Park 2

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 4th wall breaking was lame though, especially the ending.

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.

And, honestly, I liked the art of the last Monkey Island. I thought the "ugly" art fit the pirate theme really well. The writing and puzzles--not so much.

My guess is that the stuff I like best about Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island is probably the result of Tim Schafer rather than Ron Gilbert.

I won't buy into another Ron Gilbert thing unless I've got people I trust raving about it first.

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.

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 game so intensely unfunny (and there are few things I am selfishly rooting more for in life than another great point and click adventure)

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."

IMO Ron Gilbert's biggest weakness as a writer is mainly that he has a tendency to use fourth wall breaking for everything, including the final plot twist in most of his games. It was there in his originally planned ending for The Secret of Monkey Island. That ending sort of came back as the actual ending of Monkey Island 2. Then Monkey Island 3, which didn't involve Gilbert, soft-retconned the previous game's ending, then three games later Ron Gilbert came back for Return to Monkey Island and basically retconned everything to use the original ending he planned for the first game!

And I think the main problem with it is that it tends to make the writing feel like the author doesn't dare to admit that they love the world that they created. It's kind of like how some teenagers discover sarcasm and use it everywhere because it makes them feel more "mature" than younger kids who don't understand it yet, without realizing it actually makes it very obvious to everyone else that they are masking their insecurities by acting "edgy".

To me, Gilbert's tendency for 4th wall breaking often ends up feeling similar, like the story is trying to be self-deprecating to mask insecurities about its own writing (and also, it just feels like a total cop-out to avoid writing a ending that ties all the absurd plot threads together into a satisfying pay-off).

Thimbleweed Park had that problem for me, and it kind of soured me on the ending.

Now, I don't want to suggest that the meta stuff is inherently bad. In fact, the ending of Return to Monkey Island actually was pretty satisfying to me. Mainly because of Elaine. At some point there is a very blatantly fourth-wall breaking dialogue you have with her, but unlike other times it feels more like an honest reflection on nostalgia for old adventure series, its stale tropes, how that represents growing older and having to accept that things change or be stunted forever. And it comes back at the ending in a way that makes it very clear that the implied message is "yeah it's all make-belief nonsense, it has flaws, and it's also fine to admit that you love it anyway". You're Guybrush Threepwood with a loving wife who keeps you grounded despite yourself, and the fourth wall breaking doesn't take that away. It's meta but it's sincere meta.

So I guess Gilbert's a fine writer as long as he manages to keep the fourth wall breaking grounded in sincerity. Return to Monkey Island came out five years after Thimbleweed Park, so maybe Thimbleweed Park 2 will have a similar nuance to it. I hope it does.

Agree that some moon logic is present/inevitable but I think the Gilbert games are friendlier than most in this respect.

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.

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.

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...

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

I think the time between the original and this will work out well for me to be excited to play a sequel.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.