Early on, we planed for you to explore the factory floor and solve a puzzle in each room to move forward, but once everything was in, the pacing felt off (and too linear). We never implemented (or fully designed the puzzles), so nothing was “cut”, just “not implemented”. But we felt we needed to keep the rooms to help with the mood and feel of the factory.
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I’m picky about the ending, it was a bit disappointing,
I’m one of those that think the endings are very important. The ending here is not much of a surprise since similar stories have already been told (The Thirteenth Floor, or Matrix which may have taken the previous one as a base), what let me a bit down were the wireframe graphics of the ending, it looked to me as if that part of the game was done recycling graphics from early concepts of the game, instead of reaching a climax that was a fiasco for me. In my opinion that part could have reached a better climax if art goes in crescendo instead of going low. It would have been better IMO real wireframe paintings according to what wireframe is in the 3D world, but not CGA like graphis.
I also have the sensation that (be it luck or not) I have solved puzzles before I have found the need to solve them. For instance I have just talked to a friend that is stuck in the hallway with the robot arms. He can’t go through and I remember that when I reached that hallway they were stopped. Since I picked the hints book and read it, I knew there must be somewhere where you should need it (otherwise why loose time in creating the second item that allows you to read it) when I found the adventure in the computer I just followed the hints so when I reached the hallway the arms were already stopped. The same happened with the radio music and a couple more, I didn’t know what they were for but I already had the solution, when Willie asked for the music I knew what I had to do.
On the other hand there are some puzzles that I really liked, discovering how to hack the radio’s phone system to be able to be the first one to call was great, as well as getting the factory key, the fan at the end, and even the ones you solve before you need them, but that leaves you with the thought that you have missed something not having been stuck there 
Don’t get me wrong, I had real fun playing the game and I really enjoyed it, but as I said at the beginning the ending was a bit disappointing to me.
It actually was done (partly) recycling the graphics from the early concepts.
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I agree that they do add to the mood and feel of the factory, so I’m quite happy you guys left them in. I am not as happy about them being just big bitmap set-pieces, with no interactions such as LOOK AT comments or any reactions from the characters. To me, it diminishes the impact.
The same with the graveyard. I kept wanting to read tombstones, which I thought was a missed opportunity.
I don’t think every room should be a puzzle, but I think it is important to make every room feel like part of the world.
Nonetheless, like @ktzar said above, in spite of its flaws, I still think it’s one of the best adventure games in a very, very long time. 
dZ.
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Everybody has their own opinion. Here is mine: I think a better ending would have been by just pushing the tubes in for once. And thats it. Fading or flashing to the c64 screen. The wireframe scenes afterwards could have been left out completely. Some more puzzlefuzz in the factory would be great… i see update comin…
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I’ve been checking with a tool I built and Monkey Island 1 has the following rooms with 4 or less objects:
- middle level of boat in part 2
- jungle where you meet the monkey
- mast of the boat in part 2
- alley in Melée
- lookout in Melée
- church
- the swordmaster outdoors
Monkey Island 2:
- Kitchen in Mansion
- Cliff
- Treetop
- Galleon Overview
- Lechuck’s office
- Room with explosives
- Kate’s boat
So maybe there was lots of almost empty rooms, but the nostalgia blurs how we remember them.
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Those look like seven rooms per game. I’m not sure how many rooms it is in the pillow factory, but it is a series of several rooms in a row, each filled with unique looking things, that are lacking objects. This makes them stand out much more.
They forgot to make a Kickstarter reward named ‘Your personalized tombstone in-game!!’
It wasn’t planned at first but in hindsight they have to admit an adventure game is only complete when there is a cemetery!
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Yes, it would have been interesting to read some epitaphs or “look at” the machines in the factory. The absence of hot-spots made me wonder why the paths are so long in the factory and on the cemetery. Well, you don’t have to pass those rooms too often, but, some hot-spots would have compensated the emptiness a bit.
We already discussed long distances several months ago on the dev blog. Much as I appreciate Mark’s and Octavi’s room screens, it wouldn’t have needed such long distances between important locations.
Seeing that the sewer and the forest are mazes, it’s not an issue there, though.
Also, the streets are pretty long, but I understand that this was intended in order to pay homage to MM and Zak. However, at least we can walk faster in those rooms and later we have a map.
Having said that, in Fate of Atlantis, the long distances and empty rooms are still way more annoying!
Thanks for this elucidation! I didn’t know about it. That’s a very useful function indeed. But, originally, you weren’t able to walk faster. It was actually a flaw in the design of the game.
I agree that if the environment is dull and every room is similar to the other ones, wandering around without nothing to do would become boring.
But if the rooms provide new beautiful visuals or if their unique contents give the player some food for thought, I think that taking your time to just observe them can be considered by some players a part of the experience. Interaction-less experience can still be an experience that deserves to be lived.
The real issue that I see in interaction-less environments is that most players don’t consider them part of the gaming experience, because if you remove actions you get at best a “passive art exhibition”. Most gamers need something to do instead of just something to observe. I understand their point of view, but personally I don’t need to do always something to get satisfaction.
If the developers would have put in the game dozens of interaction-less locations drawn by Mark Ferrari or Octavi, for example to further convey the feeling of a desolate and abandoned town, you can bet that it would have been a joy for me to explore every single pixel of them.
That doesn’t make sense if you think about how adventure games are designed. The first thing you design are puzzles, and the thing that costs more in terms of time is making art. So, if they were running out of time, they wouldn’t have had the art, not the puzzles, which - at the time you get the art done - have been already designed and implemented.
That’s the reason why you have the “wireframe”. You put down a stub for the art so you can implement the interactions, but the real art comes later.
See? The world is a strange place. The wireframe part was wonderful for me. It might be because I’m an aspiring adventure game developer, but seeing the game in its early stages, the game I’ve been waiting for so eagerly, was a moving experience. It felt like going back to the devblog days, like finding old pictures of you as a baby.
And it was also great on a story-wise point of view. Delores is, all hi-res and hi-color, in a world she didn’t know existed, everything’s silent and strange looking. Much like the 3D Homer Simpson in the streets at the ending of Treehouse of Horror VI. Or like some sort of Matrix’s Neo, walking through doors, with only SUICIDE as a goal. That was a WONDERFUL ending.
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[quote=“ktzar, post:26, topic:334”]
So maybe there was lots of almost empty rooms, but the nostalgia blurs how we remember them.
[/quote]Most of those in Monkey 1+2 have one significant difference to those of Thimbleweed Park, though: There are NPC’s you can interact with, so they obviously serve more purpose than just connecting rooms.
And your tools is able to only count interactive rooms and doesn’t count close-ups either?
Yeah, I was stuck at a point where I had to do something at the cemetery and I remember entering/leaving the location several times, and it took ages 
Fast-forward feature would definitely helped there 
Idk, I think they’re important to show the player that this really is Atlantis, a sunken city. With that in mind, the area felt rather small sometimes…
It does count closeups… But i didn’t count them as rooms for the purpose of comparing them with twp, since twp doesn’t have closeups.
@RonGilbert it sounds cool, isn’t it? Do you mind to start a contest where the winners will get their name on an unnamed gravestone in TWP’s cemetery? 
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I think that a convenient playability is even more important.
- Why not showing the player that the accessible area in Atlantis was only a small part of that city, for example because other parts of the ruins are collapsed or flooded? This would not be unusual in a ruined city.
- In MI 1 & 2 (and a lot of other games) long paths often take course along the z-axis. Just as the street on Mêlée Island in which the voodoo lady has her location. And, if you walk beyond the clock tower there, you see a bird’s eye view. Those methods do not only help to reduce the number and size of room screens, but they also help to reduce the duration of some paths.
It makes sense to me: They commissioned all the artwork from Mark and Octavi early on (they can’t be on the payroll for the entire project), most of the puzzles are designed, the artwork is now ready, they are working on voice recording… and running out of time. Some puzzles may get cut and some additional “nice to haves” like LOOK AT foreground objects in a completely inert screen will have to wait.
Then, there’s crunch time, fixing critical bugs, tightening up the story, cutting some puzzles to avoid bugs or improve the story pace, etc. Next thing you know, you never got around to adding any foreground object logic to your inert screens.
It’s a trade-off, and I personally rather have them cut things like that and getting a quality game out than having them burn through their budget, run out of money and time, and never release.
Still… It would have been nice to have a bit more interaction in the end screens.
Of course, this is just conjecture, I have no idea what happened. I know that Mr. Gilbert insists that “everything is done on purpose and for a reason.” Be that as it may, to me it still feels like an empty part of the game that was not finished.
-dZ.
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Like I’ve mentioned before. The plan was to have the factory floor (as we called it) to have puzzles, but the pacing felt wrong. We wanted to move the player to Chucks office quickly. We talked about cutting those 3 rooms (4 were drawn), but decide not to, so the factory felt larger. we opted to not have any look at lines so it wasn’t distracting. We wanted players to know there was nothing to do in there, and the best way is to have nothing to do.
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