I always knew it, negotiating with graphic artists is like negotiating with Canada!
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Could do it Sierra style where they outsourced the art for the Space Quest 1 remake to Korea on the cheapâŚ
Or Police Quest 4 style where you just take photos, scan them in, pixelate themâŚ
Woah! I come back from my holidays and see my thread is blooooowwwwwing up again!
What if⌠we may look at things from another point of view.
Instead of asking Ron to make a new game, and other people will be paid to use their talentsâŚ
âŚWE could fund a company, and hire our heroes (mr. Fox / Gilbert / Winnick / Megone) as programmers, graphic artists, tester masters or even only for technical advice.
During these three years, we have acquired a lot of information, knowledge, techniques.
Hypothetically speaking, do our heroes even want to be hired?
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If the graphics costs 1/2 of the total, does it mean that to make TWP as a text adventure would have cost 600,000 $?
(I guess not. Thereâs probably a lot of graphics-related code, like shaders, parallax, or A* pathfinding, or graphic editors, that is not strictly âgraphicsâ, but costed a lot).
The already existing engine would lower the programming costs for a new game, wouldnât it?
Iâm still hoping for it to be released 
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It would, but that saved time would get eaten up in new ambition. The one thing TWP is missing is close-ups, not of actors, but of interesting action and for story telling. We didnât have very much of it in Monkey Islands due to floppy limitations, but DotT and the Humongous games has quite a bit of it. It really helps and I miss it. I would be doing a lot more of that, and that would bump the art costs up. We didnât do it in TWP for cost and it wouldnât be true to Maniac Mansion, not that we didnât bend that rule a lot, but action closes-ups felt like a line.
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What I missed more than that were cutscenes in the original sense. Those of the âmeanwhile somewhere else in the worldâ like most of the old games had (âmeanwhile in the secret labâ, âmeanwhile in a secret roomâ, âmeanwhile on a ghost pirate shipâ, âmeanwhile in LeChuck´s fortressâ etc.) it added a sense of depth to that world. Now I don´t see how that would have fitted in the way the story of TwP was told(the surveillance camera sequences were different than that), but I sure would like to see that again in the future.
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While I cannot speak on behalf of the Thimbleweed Park team, it doesnât seem to me that itâs a viable solution. You see, they already have a company, and they did a pretty good job running this project. Letâs assume you just want to finance another game, e.g., come in as an investor. Looking at the Thimblweed Park numbers, you will need $2M to run another similar game and this time have everyone paid real income as TP had cost over $1M without Ron and Gary actually getting paid much for that.
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Interesting - so itâs more like a royalty structure. So guess my estimates could be way off. In any event, I still wonder if a higher price on launch could have moved the needle. I think a decent percentage of people would pay up and those who didnât buy at the higher price would come back when there was a price drop (which you could do concurrent with the IOS/Android/PS4 releases).
I do think your team was really smart to do a staggered release of extra platforms so you could keep people talking about the game well after its release. Would be interesting to see if you saw sales bumps on Steam/XBox when you did all the press around PS4/iOS/Android launches.
This would be fascinating - very much looking forward to it.
And one more thingâŚNext time make a uncrackable game as I saw that Thimbleweed Park was cracked and lots of people had downloaded it. It surely has led to huge loss. 
Thatâs no easy/cheap 
and even strong crack protections can lead to negative things. We discussed the topic here:
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KâŚBro.
What about the cartoon style from DotT? Someone mentioned that Tim Schafer and his team decided for the cartoon style in order to omit color gradients, which made the artworks cheaper - compared to the art from Monkey Island 2.
I understand that the DotT style was not interesting for TWP, as it wouldnât have looked like MM. But maybe it could be advantageous for a future point & click game, seeing that itâs cheaper - albeit the cartoon style from DotT has been a bit controversial.
I myself am okay with the cartoon style. Also, there are so many DotT fans that this style cannot be that unsavory.
Just do a cuphead style adventure where everything is possible!
I think itâs cheaper only if you scan to 256 colors, and then you need to retouch. Today itâs not cheaper (you are not limited to 256 colors, and probably donât scan either).
It might be still simple to create such artworks nowadays, if you use a vector graphics editor, such as PaintShop Pro, on a graphics tablet. In this case, you are even independent of any resolution - thanks to vector graphics.
If the graphics for the original DotT were done as vector graphics right from the start, the development of the Remastered edition might have been a lot cheaper.
If graphics is 1/2 of the total, supposing you can cut in half the cost with a different graphic style, you have removed ony 1/4 of the cost. And you might lose half the customers due to the change. So the revenue could drop more than the cost.
To avoid that, you need a graphic style that is both cheaper and more fashionable. Maybe something 3d, like DeathspankâŚ
Good 3D is not cheaper. Also, as you stated, the goal is to sell a bunch of copies, so if you reduce costs too much by reducing quality you hurt yourself in the end. There is no doubt TWP sales suffered due to the art style (too many people just discounted it without every trying the game). Itâs not a decision we regret in the least, but as soon as you start cutting quality to save money, youâre often doomed.
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