ThimbleWeed park in 640x480 on a Commodore 1942 CRT

I don’t think continued work would be a good idea for Thimbleweed Park, since it was never designed for that, but I could see making an adventure game that every few weeks or months got some new content, creating a ever expanding narrative and world. Kind of like episodic, but without a rigid episodes. It’s just a world that continues to grow over time.

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Most–not all–of his past work. He’s formed more than one company in his past, so it’s not like he’s new to running the show. Even when he’s worked for others, he’s still had a great deal of creative freedom. Whether his boss is George Lucas or a crowd of Kickstarter backers, he’s always had a need to focus on the big picture. That hasn’t really changed with Thimbleweed Park. That’s why most of us have already completed Thimbleweed Park even though the Arcade still isn’t open yet. Even though it’s a feature he really wants to implement, he already stated it wasn’t worth holding up the release of Thimbleweed Park for.

Also, the vast majority of burnout cases I’ve seen/heard about are people who work for someone else’s company, so it’s not like being one someone else’s payroll would have automatically made life easy for Ron. Burnout is burnout, whether its sacrificing health and personal life for someone else’s vision, or your own. I’d say the former is a lot more common than the latter. At least when it’s your own project you don’t have someone telling you that you can’t walk away from it for a little while. And unless a trip to France was a necessary part of Thimbleweed Park development, it seems like Ron does in fact know how to take a break from a project.

The important thing to remember is that the icons aren’t final.

Would you prefer a continuing narrative in such an arrangement, introducing new playable characters, or a combination of both? It seems like a continuing narrative would probably be the safest approach from a development standpoint, especially if new characters are introduced. Bringing in new characters without necessarily advancing the story first could be quite tricky from a game mechanics standpoint, though it would be interesting to see a world get progressively more populated as development progresses.

Ah, yeah. That sounds very interesting. I thought you meant Thimbleweed Park itself.

An evolving, episodic adventure game sounds exciting, and if anybody could pull it off in an interesting way, it would be you and your team. :slight_smile:

I know that it was just a throwaway idea right now, but perhaps it’s something you should seriously consider. :wink:

My point is that Mr. Gilbert is not some magical, immortal wizard with superpowers of perfect vision and omniscience. He is a human that may make mistakes.

Well, at least I think so… please don’t smite me if I’m wrong. :innocent:

This sounds like a reasonable concept for indie developers and might allow to create a new game without having to spend the total budget till the release.
I would support such a project - as well as I would support any new Kickstarter campaign of Terrible Toybox!
Though, I think that such a project would be feasible only if the start price of that game was comparatively low at the beginning (because the game would be small at the beginning) and subsequent upgrades of the content would cost extra money (-> DLC). There could also be a Season Pass.

Oh, I agree he’s only human and that he’s perfectly capable of mistakes. I just believe his track record has proven that he’s capable of learning from his mistakes, and that he’s well past the point of making the sort of mistake that sours him on game development. During development, he talked about budgets and scheduling enough that it never sounded to me like he was falling into the trap of getting too invested in a passion project. He didn’t let any of this extra stuff interfere with getting the game out the door in the first place.

I’m more concerned about people being way too quick to point at things they perceive to be mistakes, which is why I mentioned “the icon’s aren’t final”. Placeholder art–a very common feature of game development–was often being used as evidence of how crude the art was going to be, despite explicit warnings that the art wasn’t final. Some of these “mistakes” Ron is making may in fact be why his past adventure games turned out as well as they did. The difference is that the development process wasn’t laid bare back then, whereas this time around Ron is letting us follow along in unprecedented detail. Right now I’m imagining people following the development of the Secret of Monkey Island, and freaking out because Ron wants to waste time adding a joke to insert a non-existent Disk 22 to a random tree stump in a game that’s supposed to be about pirates.

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Well said. If Monkey Island was released today, the internet would be full of people bitching about it. I’m sure people bitched about it back then, but it didn’t go beyond a small group of friends. Today, it’s easy for a small glowing ember to turn into a raging fire. That wasn’t the case 25 years ago. That’s important to keep in mind when you compare games today with games back then. It was a different world.

Yes, I read late that you apologized, you talked each other and clarified. Sorry, If I had read it I wouldn’t have written anything.
I’m glad everything is solved.

World Of Adventurecraft™

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Let’s be clear, I wasn’t pointing out any mistakes. I was just reacting to the typical fanboy response of “but, but, but, it’s Ron Gilbert… RON GILBERT!!! *swoon*” that typically follows comments suggesting that something may not work out as intended.

Other than that, yep, you are right. His track record is very good, which is why I backed the project from the beginning and why I look forward to his future work.

And yes, with the Internet, people nowadays will bitch about every little thing.

dZ.

Or removing the Sierra reference because it´s an annoying in joke.:rolling_eyes:

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Commodore PCs can utilize an external drive as the second drive, though. Those are exactly the same as on Amigas.
AfaIk, PC BIOSes had support for two floppy disk drives all the time. Also, it’s up to the floppy controller, which was an ISA card on early PCs. In fact, on-board periphery other than the keyboard controller was rather rare on early PCs, so you needed an ISA card for pretty much everything.

That’d be so cool. More achievements with the old story line or even side quests! It would be maybe difficult to not interfere with the main story line but for example opening the bar, adding some little optional puzzles there.

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Riding the bull minigame!

We added the in-joke option to poke fun at people who objected, not because we really cared.

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Well I can´t really be the judge of that, but I hope it worked.

I don’t know how much impact the specs of dust had on PR or marketing, but just two days ago I stumbled upon the following “let’s play” video. What happens at 7:20 is quite remarkable:

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Exactly!!!

Once these ports are done (maybe a month or so), I’ll do a live Twitch programming steam of adding the floppy disk sounds. You’ll see how easy it is… or it will crash and burn in complete and total embarrassment.

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