Millenials make “Bazinga”? Pffft. Sissies.
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I wouldn´t know, I keep all young people at a save distance with my broomstick.
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Okay, I’ll try again, it’s not a complex task, in the context of TWP it’s about creating 9 icons for actions with rather different meanings (if you don’t merge). It takes some dedication and talent but this is not rocket science. If the job is well done, this works for 99% of the audience. You don’t use your eyes for walking around on them.
And for the 1% of mankind who choose this terrible choice, for a more painful part of the evolution, you could still describe things by RMB -> rotating a three sided prism, 1:the eye, 2: the verb 3: space for more philosophical afterthoughts, ads, porn, a speck of dust … clever feedback …
The only perfect adventure game interface is Matrix-style, where you plug a *beep*ing jack on the back of your head and experience in actual first person everything.
You know, that’s the perfect interface for EVERY game. Those machines could have avoided the human revolution if they just let us constantly play videogames instead of a reality simulation.
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I would prefer the interface from “Being John Malkovich”, even if leaving the game would be a little bit -hm- stressful. 
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Apart from the unrealistic relevance for a next adventure kind of project, the Matrix style sounds scary and reminds me of the current gen of VR headsets. I don’t consider this to be a perfect interface/connection.
It seems to me that actually the biggest mistake was to think that for some magical reason Thimbleweed park would break through all mental berries and sell by hundreds of thousands. I loved the game but I think for the super hardcore pixel fans, many of whom don’t have very developed sense of esthetics but wank off to stuff like pixel-perfect scaling, the game was not retro enough and while Monkey Island has plenty of fans, Maniac Mansion has definitely less and the pixelly massive heads as well as verb ui were probably deterring to others.
I think if the approach was more suited to a small team of indie developers rather than like a “professional” game studio. The game could have had about the same amount of sales but could have made much more money for Terrible Toybox. Maybe if less money was spend on marketing, on a producer etc. there wouldn’t be need for investors outside the crowd source campaign.
But then again my impression is based on my vague memories and knowledge of the development and I might be talking out of my ass, so if so please forgive me.
I’d bet that they would have the same amount of sales if the game were half as long. Though that would not have cut the development time in half, it would have saved some money.
Thankfully for us, they went above and beyond what was promised to be a forgotten LucasArts adventure game found in a drawer, and made it better than we remembered…
And now that it’s been out for almost a year, it’s hard to find something else good enough to replace the obsession I have with this game.
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Cheers to that 
Can’t agree more, this is how I feel as well.
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Well, I didn’t mean cutting corners with the game itself, rather just not wasting money on marketing and stuff that wasn’t absolutely necessary to make it. E.g. maybe if they didn’t have to put up with the MS BS before release, they could have spent that time and money more efficiently and deal with consoles later.
AFAIR they haven’t invested time and money for the XBox port: Microsoft paid that port and an external developer ported the game.
I had the same thought. The money spent on marketing could have paid out, but it seemingly didn’t. Ron wrote: “Build it and they will come” is naive and not our plan.
I understand this point of view, but, as far as I know, their marketing campaign was very expensive for an indie game (half a million, as far as I can remember). Furthermore, I hardly noticed any adverts for TWP, so it seems to me that it was not quite an efficient investment. I only remember a few interviews with Ron by some bloggers and several articles. But, I guess that journalists and bloggers whose target audience are adventure gamers would have reported about TWP anyway, because it was done by the creators of some legendary games: MM, MI and Zak - and also because of their successful crowd-funding campaign. By the way, I assume that the Kickstarter didn’t need such an expensive marketing effort either.
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It seems like this was sort of the original plan…
From the Kickstarter it seemed like it was just going to be mostly Ron and Gary, with Gary doing all the art Maniac Mansion style…
And I seem to remember initially Ron said there wasn’t going to be dialog (like Maniac Mansion), and that it was going to be a smaller game to some extent.
That would mean they would have not had to pay extra artists, dialog/programming people, and all the recording fees and voice actor fees, and maybe wouldn’t have needed a producer as it would have been a smaller project.
Yes - it seems that they went away from the initial plan (a simpler game more along the lines of Maniac Mansion, from the people who made Maniac Mansion) because backer feedback immediately suggested that people wanted a game much more like Monkey Island, so they brought on MI artist Mark Ferrari, added dialog trees, speech, etc.
(but they were still left with a bit of Maniac Mansion with the bobbleheads and multiple characters, which I think wasn’t ideal for MI fans, and MM fans probably didn’t want MI graphics, so it was kinda stuck in between).
The switch from a simpler, cheaper Maniac Mansion style game to a more expensive Monkey Island style game seems to have caused some problems.
Maybe a core issue was that they didn’t fully realize the size difference in audience between Monkey Island fans and Maniac Mansion fans.
One fix for all this, and what I thought they were doing initially, was to make a game for a small audience of hardcore PnC adventure game fans, who would be able to raise quite a lot of money on Kickstarter each time, and then stay well within that budget to pay themselves and make a profit. Kind of like how WadjetEye Games caters to the same audience.
Though from what I’ve read, it seems that Ron has no interest in this model, in fact the opposite seems true, where he would ideally be spending more than they did on TWP.
Yeah, that wasn’t a particularly good example, although I remember there was a short time period that they themselves had to dedicate to dealing with the port. Also it seems to me if they didn’t do that deal, MS wouldn’t get such a big cut and they could have made the ports after first releases, under less pressure.
That’s right, I had a vague memory that it was a big chunk of money. Frankly I never understood that at all. There is shit-ton of bloggers podcasters and gaming websites that would happily make an interview with Ron or review the game for free. I don’t believe for instance that Dave Gilbert spends much money on marketing and Ron is much more famous in the industry.
Frankly, i can understand that it sounds a little like a nightmare, being imprisoned in a small kickstarter carousel repeating the same thing until it runs out of fans.
Still its hard to believe that with just the crowd sourced budget they wouldn’t be able to hire the main crew and make more money for themselves instead of publishers, perhaps enough to keep them running or at least keep them motivated enough to go back and ask backers.
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Maniac Mansion has not that much fans - but DOTT has. I know that Ron didn’t make DOTT - but a lot of people (who aren’t regular players) know the brand “Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle” and the characters.
This depends on how you do this, how big the adventures are, how many developers you have to pay and how many fans you have.
Ron, Gary and the old Lucasfilm crew have a lot of fans. Have a look how much money the Kickstarter (with the “crappy” graphics and without a big marketing campaign) made. And a lot of people have missed the Kickstarter. In addition, Ron has set himself under “stress”: They have made the (time consuming) development blog, an expensive “big box” with a lot of goodies, T-Shirts and trade cards, they switched to the new graphics, made a big (and time consuming) marketing campaign … A lot of these things were never promised in the Kickstarter and not necessary.
If they take a step back, cut the development blog and other things, I’m confident that @Paul’s “development style” could work for Ron: A Kickstarter could collect the money for producing the next game, while the sales from the older games brings some additional money.
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Sounds all good!
And to think I was this close to throw “male prostitution” into the ring…
In an ideal world I would win the lottery, give a couple mil to Ron and the boys, and let them make whatever game they want to next; the only stipulation being that they make me an apprentice programmer.
And then of course monkeys might fly out of my butt…
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I have no idea what $500,000 will buy you in advertising, but in relation to the money raised during the Kickstarter it feels quite excessive.
Me neither. Hope those weren’t just online ads that were mostly “viewed” by bots.
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I guess that most of the money went into PR agencies and Ron’s flights around the world. So most money went into the attempt to inform the press, influencer and let’s players. (PR agencies could be very expensive.)
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