I would like to ask/suggest/invite the Terrible Toybox™ team to replicate what they did on the development blog: creating every now and then a forum topic to invite people to post their questions to the team. The answers would be given in textual form, of course, simply replying to the posts.
The development of Thimbleweed Park is not entirely finished, yet, and even when it will reach its end, players and fans will still want to ask questions about game design or adventure games.
While it’s true that Ron™, David™ and Octavi™ have already joined some of the discussions in this forum, I think that a periodic “ask me anything” event would be fun and very appreciated.
I think that´s not a bad idea, because the community doesn´t seem to big for them not be able to manage to go through some of those, once a month. With too many people and having to do it too often it might get tiresome pretty quickly.
Did you notice that Gary Winnicks presence was greatly felt in all those other podcasts? I don´t know why, but it kind of felt like he became the inofficial hosts of those stand up meeting podcasts, asking all the interesting questions when the others felt kind of lost and weren´t sure what to talk about, giving the whole thing more direction and focus.
I’d like to listen to the voice of our beloved team.
Collecting questions and answer under one forum topic is OK, good idea, but far from a glorious podcast we have been used to.
I think that the podcast and a written Q&A session have two very different goals and target audiences.
The podcast is a form of entertainment thought for fans and consumed by fans, who enjoy taking their time to listen the voices of the development team and how they interact.
A textual Q&A is meant to be 1) quickly produced by the team and 2) easily accessed and consumed not just by the few fans but also by everyone on the web who will use a search engine now and in the following years.
So, for entertainment purposes I understand that the podcast has/had its charm, but the written form is a more direct and quick way to get a response and to make it accessible to everybody…
…and it doesn’t prevent Terrible Toybox™ to produce also podcasts in the future, if they want to. So I see the two different forms of communication as complementary, not mutually exclusive.
Personally I didn’t get this impression, but I’m sure I wasn’t a good listener: I have consumed many of the podcasts partly distracting myself with other stuff. Also, my attention was often focused on my preferred team member, David Fox.