Thimbleweed Park is the first game of this type I’ve ever played. It was so good and the story was fantastic.
I recommended it so some friends and they didn’t care for the story or the art style so I’m not sure why my recommendation fell flat but I felt like I was playing a game version of Twin Peaks. Quirky but captivating!
A cyberpunk-themed adventure in pixel-art style was released very recently in May 2020. I mention this since I can imagine that some people in the HN audience might love it:
Even thoughit looks like I would like the story setting of Gemini Rue, I am not sure whether I would like this game or not. The reviews mention action sequences; these are rather not my cup of tea.
There are a few, mostly when you're being attacked by Boryokudan on the streets of the initial world, but also when you're playing the second character and training your shooting skills.
DOTT is particularly special for being a sequel to Maniac Mansion, a Gilbert game I had briefly played somewhere on the original NES.
The entire Maniac Mansion game is also included in playable form within DOTT, on a virtual computer found within the game's environment.
I remember first playing DOTT on the PC and discovering the embedded Maniac Mansion. Up until that point I hadn't realized I was playing a sequel to that NES game I'd long forgotten about.
They're fun games, quirky with a great sense of humor and playful innocence about them.
What's strange is that it is unclear to me which build the Maniac Mansion embedded version is. It is not the PC one. As a kid I tried to replace the lfl files from the maniacm subdir in DOTT om the Maniac Mansion root folder. It didn't work. :)
Even though the first two entries in the Monkey Island series are classics, my personal favourite is the 3rd, The Curse of Monkey Island. Gorgeous artwork, beautiful music, and hilarious writing and voice acting.
Though take the time to revisit the original art because some of it is a master class in early pixel art, and Monkey Island II was a master class in early MIDI work that stands nearly unbeaten in what it did dynamically and adroitly (search keyword for technical tales: iMUSE), and the lone full collaboration between all three of LucasArts' composers. One of the great things that both Monkey Island remasters did was make it a one button push to switch between original and remastered art and music (including the ability to do it mid-scene).
I really wish HN had spoiler tags so I could give a warning about why lots of people will find the story disappointing compared to classic adventure games. I guess maybe I can say that if you were ever annoyed by the ending of Monkey Island 2, stay far away from this one.
In this case it’s not even that modern, since Gilbert was responsible for the MI2 ending. So in the last 30 years he still hasn’t realised that ending with “it was all a dream” isn’t really that clever!
That's part of it, but there's also the part that values shout-outs or references for their own sake. There's much more of that now than there was in MI2's time.
You might like Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis too. That is an awesome game. I like it as much as any of the films. (Or even more. There are at least 3 different ways to play it through.)
Happy to see there are at least some new players introduced to the adventure genre by Thimbleweed Park - I honestly wasn't sure it would be enjoyable without the "nostalgia factor". I can only agree with the other posters: if you enjoyed Thimbleweed Park, you'll probably enjoy the original LucasArts games even more! My personal favourites are Monkey Island 1/2 and the Indiana Jones adventures (Last Crusade & The Fate of Atlantis). As for Thimbleweed Park, I'm sorry to say I never finished it - at some point, it seems to lose focus with lots of locations you can go to, several characters to play and not really a clear sense of what you should do next...
Welcome to a new style of gaming! There's a lot of hidden gems out there. Since you're into quirky I highly recommend Dropsy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/274350/Dropsy/ ... Really unique and excellent character development.
I think it is a must to play the monkey island adventures then! If you want to compare this to a movie or show, Pirates of the Caribbean would probably be mentioned, but monkey island was first.
I grew up with this kind of games and the Lucas arts games were the ones I liked the best. Zak McKracken, Day of the Tentacle and lots of other adventures was what I like to play in the 90s.
I always thought the jailhouse dog was an homage to the part of the Disney ride where a dog is holding a key in its mouth in front of a bunch of prisoners. I've never played any of the Monkey Island games to know if that's significant in them though.
The Monkey Island game was heavily influenced by the Disney ride and (as sibling comment noted) Tim Powers' book On Stranger Tides. The Venn Diagram of who influenced who is nearly a circle, as the game was influenced by the Disney ride and the book and the movies were influenced by the ride and the games and the book and now the updates to the ride are influenced from the movies and the book. Disney even owns the Monkey Island games now in buying Lucasfilm, so all your pirate fictions are belong to Disney. (Yarr.)
Fun fact: The true inspiration for most of Monkey Island was, in fact, the 1987 novel On Stranger Tides¹ by Tim Powers (no, not the 2011 Jack Sparrow movie).
Something you may want to check out is Backbone (https://store.steampowered.com/app/865610/Backbone/). While not true point-and-click, it is the same style of gameplay. There's only a demo available right now.
> I've always skewed away from visual programming and dialogue engines. While they are great for beginners, getting real work done is problematic.
Having visual tools is certainly not just for beginners, i guarantee you that most AAA and many AA and even smaller projects use dedicated visual tools for things like dialogue. As an example see Obsidian's conversation editor described here [0] that they have used for several of their projects. For other examples see the dialog editor used in Witcher 2 (REDkit) or the editors used in Bethesda's games (the engine might be a bit clunky at times but the tools are largely visual, outside of quest-specific scripting of course). Witcher 2's tools also include visual quest and FSM ("steering") editors. These are all tools that are used to do real work.
Personally i have worked professionally in game tools for many years and visual tools are always an improvement over something basic. It is usually programmers that seem to want to ignore them, but i'm 100% sure that is because they can do most of the stuff with pure text (though rarely at the same speed as a good visual tool would allow, even if they think otherwise - note that i'm not talking about scripting here, this is often better done via a scripting langauge) and they do not like working with GUIs and such (i am one of the apparently rare programmers who likes working with GUIs) so they come up with excuses why their way is better.
Many things in games, including conversations (and perhaps high level quest flow, depending on the game), are better done with visual tools than text - especially if these tasks are to be done by non-programmers.
It amazes me how much is available today to anyone even remotely interested. I still remember cousins having to record radio signal on cassette to later use on their computer.
I was always curious if there was a "first-class" port of the scummvm for canvas/webgl? I know there were efforts using emscripteen and all that but they all died because of discrepancies in architectures etc. Anybody aware efforts in this area to write scummvm groundup for the web?
I am really really really hoping the answer is no so then my next question would be - anybody interested in building one? :)
The author, Ron Gilbert, did a great fireside chat style talk at Handmade Con 2015 where he discusses developing games at Lucas Arts, and his indie work in progress at the time, Thimbleweed Park.
Note, that actual game engine source is not available. That's a bit sad for users who want to run this game natively on Linux and other unsupported platforms.
Maybe someone else who want to do, can figure out how Dinky and the other stuff involved (including TexturePacker; its JSON format seems to be not too difficult) is working, in order to reimplement a FOSS version of the game engine. And then, you will be able to implement these things, I suppose.
Interesting, it’s written in “a custom language called Dinky that is based on and inspired by Squirrel”.
Is it common for games to use custom scripting languages? I thought it would be more efficient to use an off-the-shelf language - Lua seems to be the most popular?
You're confusing general purpose scripting languages with adventure game engine scripts. The latter will literally have commands for moving characters, starting animations, dialog, etc. They are intended to be usable by non-programmers, and might be implemented in something like Lua.
One well known one was called "GOAL" I think and was a scheme based scripting language from Naughty Dog games. I think it was used on one or two games 10-15 years ago.
GOAL wasn’t a scripting language - the entire Jak and Daxter series, including renderer, physics etc was written in it. It compiled to native PS2 code for the EE and VU processors.
Delores: A Thimbleweed Park mini-adventure is a point-and-click adventure game for PC from the developer of Thimbleweed Park, a higher-budget kickstartered point-and-click adventure. Here's the into blog post: https://grumpygamer.com/what_i_did_during_the_pandemic
From the GrumpyGamer post referenced on the GitHub page -
«The other downside is these really are the dev tools we used to make the game, and like most in-house dev tools, they are poorly documented and very crude around the edges.»
Just to make it clear - I did not in any way intend to comment on the quality of Ron Gilbert’s dev tools - however, his observation holds true for a number of tools I’ve been hacking together myself - not to mention a few others which I’ve had the mixed blessing of being handed in a ‘finished’ state...
> Don't believe the myth that programmers can test their own code. They can't.
Interesting take that I’m not sure I can agree with. Good programmers write good tests because, well, that’s one of the things that makes a “good” programmer. If you take a dedicated test writer out of the picture you must still have a good program with good tests.
The whole “blind spot” conundrum posited by the author can simply be solved by having at least 2 people on a project. Each one will look at the code differently and write tests differently.
I think the rest of the paragraph you’re reacting from goes into why he believes this, after a long career of writing video games:
Programmers will test for all the conditions they can imagine, but a good tester will imagine many many more and players will try things programmers never even considered. Knowledge of their code is the achilles heel of programmers. I've had code I was 100% sure was rock solid, only to have one of our testers reduce me to tears. A good tester excels at poking your code in places you never considered. I'm not talking about your unit tested sort routine, I'm talking about complex puzzle logic and odd UI uses. It's the stuff unit tests will never catch, but a good tester will. Testers are the unsung heroes of your team, treat them very well.
Programmers can partially test their own code, but may miss stuff, I think. Same probably applies to other testers too. Programmers should test their own code, but other people should probably also test it.
(My own projects I pretty much write it by myself, and test it by myself. Although, I would like other people who are also interested to also test it, but currently it isn't.)
It's just a little sequel and good advertisement for the main-game. Even if they would sold it, I doubt it would make much money anyway considering it's size and very specific content.
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I recommended it so some friends and they didn’t care for the story or the art style so I’m not sure why my recommendation fell flat but I felt like I was playing a game version of Twin Peaks. Quirky but captivating!
I’ll have to give Delores an ol play-a-reno!