Thimbleweed Park

Thimbleweed Park
Designer(s)	Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick
Programmer(s)	Ron Gilbert, David Fox
Artist(s)	Gary Winnick
Writer(s)	Ron Gilbert, Gary Winnick
Composer(s)	Steve Kirk^[1]
Platform(s)	Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS X, iOS, Android
Release date(s)	June 2016
Genre(s)	Point-and-click adventure game
Distribution	Download

Thimbleweed Park is an upcoming point-and-click adventure game being developed by Ron Gilbert and Gary Winnick for Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android. It was revealed on November 18, 2014 along with a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign with a goal of US$375,000, and is planned for release in June 2016.

The game is a spiritual successor to Gilbert and Winnick's previous games Maniac Mansion (1987) and The Secret of Monkey Island (1990), and is designed to be similar to graphic adventure games released in that time period, both visually and gameplay-wise.^[2]^[3]

Gameplay

Similarly to early graphic adventure games, the game features a list of verbs. The player characters are controlled by building sentences by clicking on verbs, characters and objects. In this case, the player has chosen to use the balloon animal in their inventory with a corpse.

The game is played similarly to early graphic adventure games; it is seen from a third person perspective, with a view of the area taking up the majority of the screen, while the bottom portion is taken up by the player's inventory and a list of verbs, such as "use", "pick up", and "talk to". By clicking on a verb followed by one or two items or characters, the player character will attempt to perform the action described. An example given in the reveal trailer was "Use balloon animal with corpse", performed by clicking on the verb "use", the "balloon animal" item in the player's inventory, and a corpse found in an area in the game.

The game has five different player characters which the player can switch between in the middle of gameplay, similarly to Maniac Mansion.^[3]

Plot

The game starts off with a murder in the town of Thimbleweed Park, which two detectives are charged with investigating.^[3] Outside of town, Delores and her siblings are gathered at the reading of her rich uncle's will. Meanwhile, a clown named Ransome has been cursed and cannot remove his clown makeup, and on the 13th floor of the Edmund Hotel, Franklin wakes up to learn that he is dead, but doesn't know how he got there.^[4]

Development

On November 18, 2014, Gilbert posted an update to his blog, in which he revealed that talks about the game had begun "several months ago" while he and Winnick had been discussing how fun their time developing Maniac Mansion at LucasArts (Lucasfilm Games at the time) had been, and how they liked the "charm, simplicity and innocence" of the adventure games of that era.^[5] Winnick proposed that they should make a new game in the style of their old ones; as such, it is designed as if it had been made in 1987 and as if it were "an undiscovered LucasArts adventure game you've never played before". Gilbert agreed, and suggested that they should crowdfund it on Kickstarter.^[5]

Development started with Gilbert and Winnick building the game's world and story, designing puzzles using puzzle dependency charts, and creating characters around the puzzles.^[5] From the start, Gilbert says, they knew that they wanted to make the game a satire of Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and True Detective.^[5] The game's production is planned to last for 18 months, during which Gilbert will be doing programming, Winnick will be doing the art, and the two of them will co-write and co-design the game.^[4] Six months into development, an additional artist and programmer are planned to be hired along with a part-time musician.^[4]

Crowdfunding and budgeting

A month-long crowdfunding campaign for the game was launched on Kickstarter on November 18, 2014, with a goal of US$375,000; people who pledged at least $20 are to get a copy of the game once it comes out.^[3] At the end of the campaign, on December 18, 2014, they had managed to raise US$626,250 from 15,623 people; they had also managed to reach a number of "stretch goals", which would allow German, Spanish, French, and Italian localizations of the game, full English voice acting, and ports to iOS and Android. The German localization is planned to be done by Boris Schneider-Johne, who was the person responsible for the German localization of Monkey Island.^[4]

After the end of the campaign, there was a 14-day period of waiting for credit cards to clear; Gilbert and Winnick finally got access to the money on January 5, 2015. Kickstarter took a 5% cut, and Amazon, who handled the payments, took a 3–5% cut; this added up to $57,198 of fees. Additionally, another $4,890 were substracted from the raised amount due to failed transactions; in the end, they had $564,162, plus around $8,000 from people who had pledged via PayPal.^[6]

According to Gilbert, a lot of the failed transactions were from people who had problems with Amazon, and who then went on to pledge money via PayPal instead; because of this, he suggested that perhaps only half of the $4,890 had been lost. Budgeting was done around the money they got from Kickstarter, while the PayPal money was to be a safety net, or for potential added improvements to the game.^[6]

Development history

Development of the game began on January 2, 2015.^[7]

Game engine and tools

Gilbert had already started to look for point and click adventure game engines in August 2014,^[8] but because of his experience of always wanting to modify engines to do exactly what he wants from them, he eventually decided that it would be easier and less stressful to create his own engine.^[9] He already had a 2D graphics engine written in C/C++ that he had used for his non-adventure games The Big Big Castle! and Scurvy Scallywags, that he decided to use for Thimbleweed Park; SDL was used for handling window creation and input, while Gilbert's own code was used for rendering the graphics. The only other thing that was needed for the engine was a scripting language; Gilbert had looked at Lua, and while he considered it "easy to integrate and highly optimized", he disliked its syntax. He considered making his own scripting language, but due to time concerns, he ended up choosing the language Squirrel instead.^[9]

As for tools used when creating the game's art, Winnick cited the program Adobe PhotoShop as the most obvious one; according to Winnick, the style they were aiming for would lend itself very well to being drawn entirely digitally from the start. He would still be doing the initial concepts and layouts as sketches, however.^[10]