Trumpy gamer
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It’s not me either, but I love this. This is one of the things what I would do if I had the “spare cash” for it. If I was really rich, The Expanse season 7-9, Shenmue IV and a remake of Ultima Underworld would be in production right now, hehe..
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Chat with Ron shall go live in just under an hour or 6pm BST (sorry for the spam but I do include some of your guys questions in it too!) - you can remind yourself here:
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It seems that Cressup’s post was automatically flagged by the anti-spam, but here is the URL of the new Ron’s interview.
It’s a “premiere”, which means it will start in a few minutes:
Video description:
Ron Gilbert joins me to discuss Thimbleweed Park 2, including its murder-mystery story, returning characters, new locations and changes to the classic point-and-click interface.
We also talk about how the game unexpectedly came together, the private investor helping to fund it, reuniting the original development team and why the project was announced so early in production.
Ron also shares his thoughts on the divisive ending of the original Thimbleweed Park, adventure game difficulty, in-game hints, physical editions and whether he would ever like to remake Maniac Mansion.
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Ron is a fan of Agatha Christie! 
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Great interview!
Interesting discussion about the UI (and that he hates the Coin interface)… so he’s saying the UI will be like Delores, but with some of the expressiveness of RtMI.
I can’t really imagine it at the moment, I guess we’ll have to wait to see exactly how this is implemented.
It seems her whole account was silenced…by AI 
Reason: User silenced automatically by Discourse AI
To be fair the account is only a week or two old. But can we somehow tell it that we think it’s fine?
Which fortunately he answered when asked about living down under 
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I think we have to summon the moderators using some kind of incantation, like @moderators or @Calypso to help unban Cressup
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Hey @discourse_ai_spam: @Cressup is OK, please unsilence her account
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In the video, Ron explains that a crucial point for him is that there shouldn’t be any generic error messages. Okay. Now, on paper, this doesn’t necessarily mean that when dragging an item around you have to see whether it’s combinable before releasing the mouse. But I’m really afraid that, to him, these two things are synonymous. In theory, he could have made it so that releasing the mouse triggers the success line, while an unhandled interaction would just show a ‘no-entry’ icon or something similar. But at this point it’s very likely that won’t be the case, so this part will basically be just like RtMI. Or did you get a different impression?
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Does he though? I assumed he did initially, but listening again it seems like he’s actually defending generic error messages:
Ron: “Point and clicks sometimes get criticism for the whole, “That doesn’t seem to work”… but that actually has a real purpose, because saying “That doesn’t seem to work” tells the player that is the wrong path. If you had ten different creative ways to say “That doesn’t seem to work,” it really just confuses people because then they’re like, “Wait, that didn’t work, but is it a puzzle I should solve?”. I think you want to be very clear.”
And with RtMI he didn’t get rid of generic error messages, because the no-entry symbol now IS the generic error message. He’s just found a generic error message you can read faster and a faster way to make it pop up by hovering. He removed all unique error messages.
Yeah, I don’t think he realises the drawback he’s introduced by being able to scan every combination’s validity quickly by hovering. It makes it so easy to bruteforce, because there is no longer the time cost of having to try every combination individually.
Both the Delores and RtMI UIs have the hovering-gives-the-game-away thing, so it looks like that’s going to be the case with TWP2.
Though Ron also says:
Ron: “you want to reduce this kind of drag‑everything‑on‑everything approach because there is no feedback to tell you. But you also want to make it fun in that you don’t want only the exact 100% right things to show up and tell you exactly what to do, right? So it’s a balance of kind of dealing with those two different things.”
The only thing I can imagine by “you don’t want only the exact 100% right things to show up and tell you exactly what to do” is that he’ll add in some combinations you can try, but will give a jokey unique response that says you can’t do that thing.
But then we’ll have an odd mix where some incorrect combinations have a no-entry sign, and some incorrect can be tried and will look correct because you can try them - that would also look confusing I think, if people are still able to hover-scan them all.
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Dunno, this feels contradictory to me. With his system you increase the tendency to drag everything on everything, just because there’s that instant feedback as you drag. So the user is encouraged to do so.
The following sentence, like you said, is encouraging. 
Edit: Ah, maybe I get what he means. For Ron, even if you drag an item onto another, as long as you don’t release the mouse, that doesn’t count as combining everything with everything.
Meaning, what he wants to reduce is dragging an item onto another and then releasing the mouse.
But why on earth would he want to reduce that? Beats me. What I think we should reduce is dragging an item onto another without having a clear idea of what you’re trying to do. (whether you release the mouse or not).
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Exactly…
Ron: “[when you] drag items out of your inventory onto the screen, you don’t want it to pop up text for every single thing in the room if you really just cannot use it on that thing, because that’s a real red herring to players. Because all they really do at that point is they just drag everything on everything because they get no feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.”
Ok, so if I have this straight, he’s saying normally in the past, when you hovered over things it didn’t give you any feedback about what you can and can’t do… so then you’re forced to start actually trying things on other things because you haven’t got any feedback from the hovering.
Back in my day we called that part “the game”, because it meant you had to figure out what to do with your mind.
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Yeah, you put it perfectly. He seems to completely rule out the possibility that someone, not getting any feedback from dragging, might actually start thinking :). And that’s a bit unsettling.
At this point, I’d ask the opposite question: is there a way to salvage Ron’s interface? To make it work? Two ways come to mind: 1) Make a game with 200 items in the inventory. That way, the very fact that you picked an item to drag out of 200 is proof that you know what you’re doing. 2) Make a game where background hotspots don’t highlight until you drag. That way, the very fact that you dragged an item to that exact spot on the screen is proof that you know what you’re doing.
(disclaimer: these are two crazy ideas, don’t try this at home)
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But, more seriously, Ron’s interface can work well enough if 1) there are many items in the inventory 2) a good number of puzzles are not of pure item combination. For example, you have to combine items at the right moment; or, there are objects or characters that have various ‘states’, and you first have to bring them to the right state, with dialogue or clicks, and then use an item on them.
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I think the RtMI interface works well as a “Casual Mode” UI, as it basically reduces options and you can see the solutions faster.
The main effect of it is that it makes the game easier, so I’d be fine if it’s just for Casual Mode for “modern people” as Ron calls them, if we then got a fuller UI for “Hard Mode”.
Or puzzles that can be solved in more than one way.
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Once you add timed events to the engine, the number of new puzzle mechanics increases a lot.
I’m working on a puzzle where there’s some wooden debris blocking the path, and some malfunctioning electronics nearby. When the player chooses a voice in a distant terminal, the electronics short-circuit and start producing a sparkle fountain, but it only lasts for a few seconds. During this time, you need to move near the sparkles and throw a bottle of alcohol, which will create a fire that consumes the debris and opens the path.
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