Return to Monkey Island(grumpygamer.com) |
Return to Monkey Island(grumpygamer.com) |
https://grumpygamer.com/april_fools_2022
Ron is developer of the Monkey Island adventure games, while at lucas arts, now the IP is owned by Disney.
So he made another adventure game (similar but different) called "thimbleweed park". I played through. It was fun. He made a development blog, while making it (it was a kickstarter).
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com
but now I have no idea if this new thing is real or not...
I’ve long awaited more stuff from Ron Gilbert since then.
- After all these years?!
- Always.
This has happened before.
It has been a joke long in the making.
[1] https://gamerant.com/monkey-island-ron-gilbert-return-teaser...
Really playing the long game there!
1: https://twitter.com/grumpygamer/status/380819751208902656
Some parts of the translations where totally messed up, making it so hard to understand what I needed to do in the game that I stopped playing it for some years until I could figure out in English what was been said at some parts of the story.
Finishing it was some kind of a personal achievement for me when I was younger.
I wonder what game engine they are using ? I'd love to figure out how to make my own telltale or monkey island style game!
I actually liked Curse of Monkey Island (MI 3) but am very excited for this one.
Also check out the Special Editions for MI 1 and 2 which were very good: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/6588/Monkey_Island_Col...
We assume this one will be great because Ron Gilbert hasn't lost his humor and he recently delivered a good game with Thimbleweed Park. So he's most certainly capable (also other stars like the voice actor of guybrush and the musician Michael Land are back, too).
Can’t wait to play it
But yes, Ron has announced this will be his follow up to LeChuck's Revenge entirely ignoring the direction that Curse of Monkey Island took with it and directly forking the sequel paths.
https://twitter.com/grumpygamer/status/1511022135191384067
Not sure how that relates to this particular arc though.
However, MI2 is a cult hit, and rightfully so. It was the first adventure game I played on my first PC (a 286 @16 MHz with 2Mb of RAM but upgraded with SB Pro) and still have fond memories of the atmosphere and the excitement when I figured some other puzzle out.
Ron seems unlikely to release the engine itself directly as open source or anything like that, but: The Thimbleweed Park mini-adventure Delores was "source availabled" [2] under a custom, non-OSI approved, non-approved for commercial usage license along with "vanilla" engine EXEs to run the "source available" distribution. So far as I'm aware it's the only showcase/documentation of the Squirrel-successor scripting language Ron built called "Dinky". In theory, you can use the Dolores source to try to build your own hobbyist game in Dinky scripts. In practice you are likely better off finding one of the hobbyist engines built for such things like the somewhat creaking with age Adventure Game Studio [3]. (Or more general tools like Twine or Unity depending on what parts of the adventure game you are most excited to recreate.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thimbleweed_Park
I don't think it's best for the look particular character design shown in the trailer there. Actually, I think devolver has an open engine too, no?
Sounds like you know your Adventure game engines thus the question
I think Wadjet Eye uses AGS, IIRC.
Maybe there's a "good" ending, but no one has managed to find it yet. One can only hope...
But very interesting Ron is claiming it is not a hard-fork (anymore), at least.
Excellent. (Murray is the comedic talking skull from Curse of Monkey Island.)
Nonetheless, I'm with you insofar as other people (like Tim Schafer) could theoretically also make a great Monkey Island without Ron Gilbert. And also humor > story.
At my usual budget (side projects on own time) with no artists I mostly just tinker with dialog trees in Twine or Twine-like languages. (I've got my own finished YAML-based Twine-like and my own unfinished Inform-inspired Twine-like that maybe one day I'll push closer to completion.)
Given a small budget, I feel like you can go a long way with Löve 2D or Ren'Py. (Both were "compile" targets of my YAML-based Twine-like at various points. Which I mixed with some awful programmer art.) Ren'Py especially has a lot of the tools you need to do off-the-shelf Point-and-Click adventures well for a great price and relatively easy learning curve with a ton of examples and tutorials out there to learn. I think Ren'Py's focus on "Visual Novels" tends to get it overlooked for "point-and-click adventures", but even as "just" a prototyping tool on the way to a "proper Western viewpoint point-and-click" it shouldn't be dismissed so quickly.
Given a larger budget and a general desire to use off the shelf tools where I can I'd probably start with Unity as a base today. It has most platforms covered and I like C# as a language and a growing body of "indie" artists have good experience with it on their CVs. I haven't investigated the existing adventure game packages for Unity, but I've heard good things. I've also heard good things about Inkle's Twine-like engine for Unity.
I'm also sort of watching Unreal Engine 5 as a weird dark horse here given enough budget, and that might be a big budget. Some of the stuff that Unreal Engine 5 is doing wouldn't be directly useful in a "point-and-click" in the traditional sense, but has me curious if there's room to explore things like a modern take on the GRIMe engine with off-the-shelf tools. (GRIMe being Grim Fandango's engine for an attempt at 3D adventure gaming.)
I've been looking for something that would be akin to Wadjet Eye making games- I' assuming they have an entire template they use and mostly replace art assets although I could be completely wrong. Some of them have very different Stat/etc systems.
Anyway, I just want something fun to dabble on that won't frustrate me too much. I'm familiar with Renpy and have done some work with it but like you mentioned I've overlooked Visual Novels for P&Cs. I guess I could do the conversations/story in twine/renpy and worry about the mechanics of moving around/interacting with a world down the line.
I only know Golang and some python, so the c# for unity was intimidating. I was really hoping to find a decent go game engine but I haven't found anything relative. There is a golang game engine I forget its name.
But since Godot is getting some serious backing these days, give it a few more years and it'll probably be a juggernaut in the space like Blender.
You can test it and see how it works if it's adequate or not for your specific usecase.
I wouldn't use AGS either because its animation is frame-based, and this latest Ron's game seems to use skeletal animation heavily.
More important than the engine is the rest asset pipeline. A crucial part is the tool to author all the skeletal animation sequences. Some engine editors have this built in, and there are dedicated tools like Spine and Spriter. They already supply some 'runtimes' to play out animations in many different engines. Looking at supported engines (http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-runtimes) should help with choosing one.