Development tools

Development/Design
1

One of the things that I love hearing about LucasFilm Games and later LucasArts is how some of the dev tools/game engines were engineered specifically for the game, and then used again, most notably SCUMM. I believe Ron has said that he developed a new engine (or just a scripting language?) for Thimbleweed Park. As someone who’s into building things and programming, I have to ask: has there been any reference to possibly open-sourcing or releasing in some way the Thimbleweed park dev tools?

2

Yes, they answered to this question and put it in their FAQ page:

Q: Are you going to open source the game engine?
A: We don’t know. If we do, it won’t be for several months after the game is released. Open sourcing is not as simple and just releasing a bunch of code, and you’d get to see what a crappy programmer I am.

The developer blog has a lot of posts explaining how the engine was built. It’s really a good source if you are interested in the technical details.

3

Yeah, I should have been reading the blog more, really going deep on it now that the game’s released. Thanks.

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4

The Dev team used Squirrel as primary programming language.
Then they developed a new SCUMM engine, to program Thimbleweed Park.

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5

In case anyone else was curious, here’s some of the stuff I found so far:

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/engine
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/debugger
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/roadmap1
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/scripting_test

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6

As far as I know, Squirrel is used as the scripting language for the game logic, which is then built on top a bespoke game engine based on the one created by Mr. Gilbert for Scurvy Scallywags.

-dZ.

7

Anyways I hope that the team choose to release it as open source in the future.
It would be great for all programming fans, and i think will contribute to exist more adv games.

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8

I remember Ron indicated or thought about using the stable base engine he’d built for some other games (i.e. Scurvy Scallywags) for TWP, and I think he most likely did, but added to it. I’m curious how much he ended up adding to it (and/or if he ended up largely starting a new engine). I don’t know that he ever indicated that in the blog or podcasts - I mostly heard about the occasional features or bug fixes to support all the scripting work.

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