Thimbleweed Park Podcast #6
“Number six in the exciting Thimbleweed Park podcasts!”
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/podcast6
Original airdate May 15, 2015
Transcribed by Sushi
[Music]
(Ron:) Hi, this is Ron Gilbert and welcome to another weekly Thimbleweed Park stand-up meeting podcast! I’m joined by Gary Winnick…
(Gary:) Hi there !
(Ron:) …and David Fox.
(David:) Heya!
(Ron:) Yeah, so with this little podcast as we quickly go around the three of us talk about what we worked on last week and what we’re going to be working on this week. And I think we’ll start with Gary.
(Gary:) OK, so this week we had another big brainstorming meeting -I think it might be the last one we do for a while- where we were sort of tying up a lot of the character-related individual storylines and bring that all together with their individual puzzles. So that went really well.
I have been continuing to work on rooms. I’ve been working on the sewer area which was one of the last areas we needed to define. We’re still working on a lot of other areas as well but I don’t want to talk about that, [I] don’t want to give away any spoilers.
And then the next thing I need to be doing now is moving on to some character animation. I’m going to create a couple of what we’re calling “Thimbleweed Park crash test dummies”, which are generic characters that David and Ron can use to do populate the world and create a bunch of other interactions with.
So that’s kind of what I’m doing right now, pretty much.
(Ron:) Great! And what are you doing next week?
(Gary:) [I’m] going to be working on more animation most likely after I do the crash test dummies. I’m gonna probably work on individual characters and actually go ahead and create some of the specific characters that are going to be in the game. I will still be checking back on the rooms but I think we have that sort of under control right [now].
(Ron:) Yeah, it’d be nice to get Delores and Ransome and Franklin as actual characters that can walk around so we can start switching between them.
(Gary:) That sounds reasonable.
(Ron:) David?
(David:) OK, well last week [I’ve been] mostly working on finishing up the inventory items so that we have the images for them that we could pick up and in some cases combine objects with other objects. Now that Ron put in scrolling of the inventory you can actually see more than 8 of them.
There was a really cool room that I got to do which you [Ron] do the wiring of, which had five layers of parallax 1 : so two in the foreground, the midground and two in the background and that looks great when you see that moving around.I can’t wait for you guys to see it.
Brainstorming yesterday, which was awesome. [I] needed to zone out when I got home after driving for three hours in each direction, so watched TV for a while.
Next week once Gary gives us the crash test actors the characters I’m really looking forward to putting some other characters in the game that you can interact with and wire up the puzzles more completely.
(Time=02:40)
(Ron:) Yeah it’s nice to see the puzzles actually come together with the inventory items. You can really start to solve actual puzzles in the game and that’s kind of neat.
(Gary:) I’ve never been so excited to use a key and a lock before. It’s kind of ridiculous, but hey, it’s cool!
(Ron:) Yeah, yeah it’s nice.
The brainstorm meeting was pretty great, we got a lot of stuff. Last week, I was gone for two days, so it was a slightly short week for me. I got a lot of bug fixes done and new commands in for the language. I’m dealing with a bug with the Squirrel bindings right now. For some reason Squirrel 2 is deleting objects that it thinks have no reference to them, but they actually do have a reference to them. And I’m not completely sure why that’s happening. I don’t think it’s a bug in Squirrel itself. I think it’s how I’m using the bindings and the reference counting, so I need to go in and figure out what that is. That could be a frustrating thing… not looking forward to that.
I got the inventory items working and I got about halfway through putting together the new puzzle dependency charts from our brainstorm yesterday and there’s a couple of loose ends. There were some things that I think we thought of as two different parts and we never really connected the parts together. I sent you guys both an email about that. But we need to figure out how those two things connect together.
Other than that, the puzzle chart looks good. This is probably the most complex puzzle dependency chart I’ve ever done.
(Gary:) Oh really?
(Time=04:06)
(Ron:) Yeah, it’s pretty complicated. I started color coding the different boxes so we understand what are the Ransome puzzles and what are the Delores puzzles and the Franklin puzzles and the main puzzles. Just because there’s just so many connections going on, I wanted to be able to separate those out so we could see the different parts of the puzzles and the different character stories but, yeah, now it’s really neat.
(Gary:) But it is making sense to you as you look at the entire thing, for the most part?
(Ron:) Yeah, it is. It is definitely making sense. It’s just big and it’s complicated, but as David and I were talking in the car on the way home yesterday, this is a really complicated story, you know? It’s not just a simple story. There are literally five different stories being told, all at the same time, that all weave in and out of each other and it’s complicated.
(Gary:) Unlike Maniac [Mansion], it is true that we actually have backstories for each character that matters and that you can interact with. Whereas in Maniac everybody just showed up and did what they did and they had special skills. All these characters have some of those traits, but they actually all have their own individual stories going on as well, which is pretty complicated.
(Ron:) yeah I was thinking about that with Maniac [Mansion] because in Maniac there are the five different endings but it’s all basically the same story with these five little branches and a couple of little puzzles. But this really is these five stories that just weave in and out of each other and it’s a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be initially. But it is fun, I have to admit that, it is fun.
(Gary:) Ron, you’re never one to bite off more than you can chew.
(Ron:) [laughs] No…
(David:) Mouth is pretty full though.
(Ron:) Yes, that’s true.
(David:) The other thing I’m doing today is taking all the notes that I took yesterday and trying to turn them into a coherent email to both of you so that I’m not contradicting myself, because we changed things during the brainstorming session. So I’ll get the [document] today.
(Ron:) OK that would be great. Anything else?
(Gary:) No, I think that’s it all.
(Ron:) Right. I’ll talk to you later.
(Gary:) OK, bye!
(David:) Bye-bye!
References
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_scrolling 
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel_(programming_language)