Thimbleweed Park Podcast #1
“Very first podcast for Thimbleweed Park featuring Gary Winnick and Ron Gilbert.”
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/podcast1
Original airdate April 13, 2015
Transcribed by Sushi
[The first 10 seconds of the TWP theme song]
(Ron): Hi, I’m Ron Gilbert…
(Gary): I’m Gary Winnick…
(Ron): … and this is our first Standup Meeting Podcast. A standup meeting is a thing a project usually has in the mornings, where everybody on the team gets together and talks very very briefly about what’s going on in the project - what’s gonna happen today and what happened yesterday.
Usually the meetings are standup just so they’re quick and they don’t drag on. So we’re gonna do these Standup Meeting Podcasts, they’re probably gonna last less than 5 minutes and we’ll probably do them once a week. If things go well, we might do them more than once a week, but we’ll certainly start with once a week, doing them Friday mornings and getting them up on the website by Friday afternoon.
So, let’s start!
(Gary): OK, so let’s see… Right now, I continued working on the wireframe for the game… so right now I am working on the rooms - mainly interior rooms at the moment, because there is a lot more of those than there are of exteriors. However, the exteriors are setting the scene, so I am doing a number of those. Right now, I am working on the Edmund House area, which is going to be familiar to a lot of people. I think it’s coming out well and we’re still working on figuring out some puzzles but it’s all coming together, certainly from a standpoint of a prototyping demo build, which Ron has been putting up and I have been playing. So that’s been really cool!
(Ron): Yeah, it’s neat to walk around the world! That’s one of the things that is really exciting to me in getting all these rooms wired up: just walking. Just walking around and kinda seeing how everything hooks together.
(Gary): Yeah, it’s actually amazing how quickly these rooms can go in, because of the versatility of the engine and the scripting language you are developing.
(Ron): Yeah, it takes maybe 10 minutes for me to go from the raw art to actually being able to walk around the room. Which is kinda nice.
(Time=02:00)
(Gary): [It] certainly doesn’t take me 10 minutes to draw a room, yet! [Ron laughs] Maybe we’ll get there… that’ll be really… I am not sure what predates 8-bit in my mind, but it will be like Atari 2600 1 stuff or something like that.
(Ron): yeah, programming is easy. Programming is really easy!
(Gary): Yeah, any monkey can do it, probably.
Let’s see… Other thing I’ve been working on: talking with Ken Macklin, he’s doing some more detailed character development, he’s going to be doing the cover painting. So I’ve been sort of going a bit back and forth with him, first we’re just working on making sure the designs of the characters make sense to the overall story and look like they fit into…, you know, being able to tell the story. So that stuff is starting to look really good.
(Ron): Yes, that was nice. That was nice, the stuff he did. When was he supposed to be done with the cover designs?
(Time=03:00)
(Gary): Well, it should take him about a month to do everything from start to finish. He really just started last week and the first thing he has to do is give us a number of layouts for composition. And one of the things we probably want to do with those, is actually post those on the blog so people can see the progression of that. It might take a little while to get to that, because I want to make sure all that stuff is on the right track.
(Ron): Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.
(Gary): So, what the hell have you been doing?
(Time=03:21)
(Ron): Let’s see… Last week, I’ve got the first pass at playing sound effects in, so the clock inside the Mansion actually does a little “tick”. You’ll see that, I’ll do a wireframe build for you as soon as we get off this call. [Gary: Oh cool]. So you can see that working.
(Ron): Let’s see… I’ve been adding a bunch of commands to the debugger 'cause I spent yesterday with David Fox and he was getting him all set up and there was a lot of things with the debugger that I needed to get working before he came on, because I have essentially been developing out just directly in Xcode up until now. And I don’t want him to have to run Xcode, I want him to be able to run the engine standalone. So there was a lot of debugger functions that I needed to get working before I went up and talk to him.
(Gary): You know, I really enjoy being an artist, because I understand completely everything you’re saying. [Ron chuckles] I’ve had a dream about X-code the other day, so… I’m not sure, maybe Z-code or Y-code or …
(Ron): You know, the sad thing is I actually do dream about Xcode. 2
(Gary): Oh, man!
(Ron): [laughing] That’s probably the sad thing!
(Ron): So anyway, I spent the day with David and he is up and running and he has wired in his first three rooms. So that’s pretty good…
That was my week, last week. Next week, my goal is to get the game running on Windows. I think I am almost there, it’s probably just another day I would say to get it all running on Windows…
(Time=04:50)
(Gary): So you feel that we are making pretty good progress, overall?
(Ron): Yeah, I think the engine has come together a lot faster than I thought.
(Gary): That’s great.
(Ron): Probably… at least a couple of months ahead of where I thought I would be…
(Gary): Oh, man, don’t say stuff like that!
(Ron): Yeah, well that is a dangerous thing to say, 'cause those two months are gonna go away at some point in the project. But I figured that it would be June before I would be where I am right now with the engine, so I think that’s good.
And also next week, I need to send out a couple of Kickstarter mails to people. There were the people who got to name objects and characters and I need to send out an email to them since we are getting the design ready, we should actually get those objects so they can be an integral part. So, I’ll send out a Kickstarter survey to some people next week and then we’re doing a brainstorm with you and David and I finalizing Act 3.
(Gary): Yeah, I mean overall just in terms of my feel for the story and everything, it is coming together pretty concisely in my head. It actually make sense unlike where we were with Maniac [Mansion] at this point in time.
(Time=06:00)
(Ron): Yeah… the only part about it to me is just the Act 3. It’s like we know all the major puzzles, we know all the “beats” that happen in Act 3, but there is just a lot of details in Act 3 that I just don’t have straight in my head.
(Ron): So I’m hoping that [after] a day with you and David and I, we’ll have all the details figured out and then I can do the Puzzle Dependency Chart 3 for it. And then I’ll feel a lot better.
(Gary): Yeah, I mean the [game] box can have like a circle with a slash through it that says “No dead ends” and then an asterisk (*) that says “*: with puzzle dependency charts”.
(Ron): Yeah, we’ll just ship a bunch of puzzle dependency charts of the box. We don’t need an actual game.
(Gary): Don’t promise anything like that! [Both laugh] I mean, the people can see that stuff on the blog.
(Ron): Yeah I know.
(Ron): OK, I think that’s it. That’s really it for me.
(Gary): Yeah, I mean, just “forward and more of the same”
(Ron): OK.
(Gary): All right, talk to you later.
(Ron): All right. Bye!
(Gary): Bye!
References
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_2600 
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcode: "Xcode is an integrated development environment for macOS
containing a suite of software development tools developed by Apple for developing software for
macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS."
3: http://grumpygamer.com/puzzle_dependency_charts