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Source code of “Delores: A Thimbleweed Park mini-adventure” released
- niqmk 6y agoWhy steam is free, and you gave a source code? How would you planning to make a buck and make a living?
- chrisseaton 6y agoExplained in the blog post https://grumpygamer.com/delores_dev https://grumpygamer.com/delores_dev
- senko 6y agoHe has been making a living out of computer games for decades. He shared more context about the release here: https://grumpygamer.com/delores_dev https://grumpygamer.com/delores_dev
- slightwinder 6y agoIt's just a little sequel and good advertisement for the main-game. Even if they would sold it, I doubt it would make much money anyway considering it's size and very specific content.
- omegabravo 6y agobecause it took me too long to find it I think it is this: https://thimbleweedpark.com/ https://thimbleweedpark.com/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y agoIt amazes me how much is available today to anyone even remotely interested. I still remember cousins having to record radio signal on cassette to later use on their computer.
- andretti1977 6y agoI did it!!! Can you believe in the 80s you could "download" a game simply recording a public radio broadcast?! Amazing times!
- abiogenesis 6y agoUnidirectional wi-fi?
- uhoh-itsmaciek 6y agoFor anyone else who may not have heard about it before like me, here's a link reviewing this bit of computer history: https://www.kotaku.co.uk/2014/10/13/people-used-download-games-radio https://www.kotaku.co.uk/2014/10/13/people-used-download-gam...
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoIt's a little sad he isn't interested in taking PRs to improve the game, even if I appreciate why: He actually believes in real testing. One would hope a PR might at least be considered for inclusion when/if he does another update release of his own in the future.
- leetrout 6y agoThimbleweed Park is the first game of this type I’ve ever played. It was so good and the story was fantastic. I recommended it so some friends and they didn’t care for the story or the art style so I’m not sure why my recommendation fell flat but I felt like I was playing a game version of Twin Peaks. Quirky but captivating! I’ll have to give Delores an ol play-a-reno!
- martin_bech 6y agoThen you should absolutely play Monkey Island. Its available in a good "remastered" edition. https://store.steampowered.com/app/32360/The_Secret_of_Monkey_Island_Special_Edition/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/32360/The_Secret_of_Monke...
- dividuum 6y agoAnd Monkey Island II as well as Day of the Tentacle. Both also remastered: https://store.steampowered.com/app/388210/Day_of_the_Tentacle_Remastered/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/388210/Day_of_the_Tentacl... https://store.steampowered.com/app/32460/Monkey_Island_2_Special_Edition_LeChucks_Revenge/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/32460/Monkey_Island_2_Spe...
- pengaru 6y agoDOTT is particularly special for being a sequel to Maniac Mansion, a Gilbert game I had briefly played somewhere on the original NES. The entire Maniac Mansion game is also included in playable form within DOTT, on a virtual computer found within the game's environment. I remember first playing DOTT on the PC and discovering the embedded Maniac Mansion. Up until that point I hadn't realized I was playing a sequel to that NES game I'd long forgotten about. They're fun games, quirky with a great sense of humor and playful innocence about them.
- unixhero 6y agoWhat's strange is that it is unclear to me which build the Maniac Mansion embedded version is. It is not the PC one. As a kid I tried to replace the lfl files from the maniacm subdir in DOTT om the Maniac Mansion root folder. It didn't work. :)
- lb1lf 6y agoFrom the GrumpyGamer post referenced on the GitHub page - «The other downside is these really are the dev tools we used to make the game, and like most in-house dev tools, they are poorly documented and very crude around the edges.» What the man said. Sigh.
- lb1lf 6y agoJust to make it clear - I did not in any way intend to comment on the quality of Ron Gilbert’s dev tools - however, his observation holds true for a number of tools I’ve been hacking together myself - not to mention a few others which I’ve had the mixed blessing of being handed in a ‘finished’ state...
- butz 6y agoNote, that actual game engine source is not available. That's a bit sad for users who want to run this game natively on Linux and other unsupported platforms.
- deckarep 6y agoThat never stopped the gracious folks on the ScummVM team ;)
- zzo38computer 6y agoMaybe someone else who want to do, can figure out how Dinky and the other stuff involved (including TexturePacker; its JSON format seems to be not too difficult) is working, in order to reimplement a FOSS version of the game engine. And then, you will be able to implement these things, I suppose.
- butz 6y agoOne of engge (open source engine to run Thimbleweed Park) issues is already open to implement Dinky support https://github.com/scemino/engge/issues/132 https://github.com/scemino/engge/issues/132 . Help wanted!
- re 6y ago"Grumpy Gamer" is Ron Gilbert, responsible for SCUMM, Monkey Island, Humongous Entertainment, and more: https://grumpygamer.com/about https://grumpygamer.com/about
- pansa2 6y agoInteresting, it’s written in “a custom language called Dinky that is based on and inspired by Squirrel”. Is it common for games to use custom scripting languages? I thought it would be more efficient to use an off-the-shelf language - Lua seems to be the most popular?
- 7thaccount 6y agoOne well known one was called "GOAL" I think and was a scheme based scripting language from Naughty Dog games. I think it was used on one or two games 10-15 years ago.
- sshumaker 6y agoGOAL wasn’t a scripting language - the entire Jak and Daxter series, including renderer, physics etc was written in it. It compiled to native PS2 code for the EE and VU processors.
- cumcastsucks 6y agorekt!
- schnable 6y agoThe author has been writing his own game engines and scripting languages for decades, so he has a lot to go on, and sounds like he enjoys.
- gpderetta 6y agoAnd Dinky is of course one of the islands in Monkey Island 2.
- tus88 6y agoYou're confusing general purpose scripting languages with adventure game engine scripts. The latter will literally have commands for moving characters, starting animations, dialog, etc. They are intended to be usable by non-programmers, and might be implemented in something like Lua.
- flashgordon 6y agoI was always curious if there was a "first-class" port of the scummvm for canvas/webgl? I know there were efforts using emscripteen and all that but they all died because of discrepancies in architectures etc. Anybody aware efforts in this area to write scummvm groundup for the web? I am really really really hoping the answer is no so then my next question would be - anybody interested in building one? :)
- dang 6y agoWe changed the URL from https://github.com/grumpygamer/DeloresDev https://github.com/grumpygamer/DeloresDev, which has the code, to the blog post that gives a bit more background.
- phendrenad2 6y agoThis isn't F/OSS, IANAL but the blog post seems to indicate that making a game with it is prohibited.
- Nursie 6y agoThe license is here https://github.com/grumpygamer/DeloresDev/blob/master/LICENSE.md https://github.com/grumpygamer/DeloresDev/blob/master/LICENS... And yeah, it's not FOSS, it's a limited source license for the game code (not the engine) with some non-commercial redistribution allowed.
- talideon 6y agoTBF, it was never announced as such. But I can at least appreciate opening the code up for people to see.
- phendrenad2 6y agoDelores: A Thimbleweed Park mini-adventure is a point-and-click adventure game for PC from the developer of Thimbleweed Park, a higher-budget kickstartered point-and-click adventure. Here's the into blog post: https://grumpygamer.com/what_i_did_during_the_pandemic https://grumpygamer.com/what_i_did_during_the_pandemic
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago> Don't believe the myth that programmers can test their own code. They can't. Interesting take that I’m not sure I can agree with. Good programmers write good tests because, well, that’s one of the things that makes a “good” programmer. If you take a dedicated test writer out of the picture you must still have a good program with good tests. The whole “blind spot” conundrum posited by the author can simply be solved by having at least 2 people on a project. Each one will look at the code differently and write tests differently.
- egypturnash 6y agoI think the rest of the paragraph you’re reacting from goes into why he believes this, after a long career of writing video games: Programmers will test for all the conditions they can imagine, but a good tester will imagine many many more and players will try things programmers never even considered. Knowledge of their code is the achilles heel of programmers. I've had code I was 100% sure was rock solid, only to have one of our testers reduce me to tears. A good tester excels at poking your code in places you never considered. I'm not talking about your unit tested sort routine, I'm talking about complex puzzle logic and odd UI uses. It's the stuff unit tests will never catch, but a good tester will. Testers are the unsung heroes of your team, treat them very well.
- zzo38computer 6y agoProgrammers can partially test their own code, but may miss stuff, I think. Same probably applies to other testers too. Programmers should test their own code, but other people should probably also test it. (My own projects I pretty much write it by myself, and test it by myself. Although, I would like other people who are also interested to also test it, but currently it isn't.)
- bdefore 6y agoFor those interested in a more modern take on SCUMM, there's a new tool built for Unity: PowerQuest https://powerhoof.itch.io/powerquest https://powerhoof.itch.io/powerquest
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI like how the DeloresDev/Prefs.json you have to update isn't JSON but a simple "key: value\n" file.
- rmetzler 6y agoI don't like this at all. None of the .json files is valid JSON and the .wimpy files are similar to YAML/JSON but not quite. A custom format like this doesn't help tooling, it hinders it.
- kelvin0 6y agoIf you like this, please have a look at some of it's ancestors, all gems: Maniac Mansion Zac McKraken and the Alien mind benders Day of the tentacle Loom Monkey Island ... a whole other bunch I wish I had played too .. ... Enjoy!
- pengaru 6y agoThe author, Ron Gilbert, did a great fireside chat style talk at Handmade Con 2015 where he discusses developing games at Lucas Arts, and his indie work in progress at the time, Thimbleweed Park. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cktmhqXMsGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cktmhqXMsGI
- dwd 6y agoThe code is only half the game. Ron and crew had a wicked, warped sense of humour which played out in the puzzles. Dinky was the name of an island in Monkey Island 2, assuming some in-joke there.
- badsectoracula 6y agoInteresting but one bit i disagree with: > I've always skewed away from visual programming and dialogue engines. While they are great for beginners, getting real work done is problematic. Having visual tools is certainly not just for beginners, i guarantee you that most AAA and many AA and even smaller projects use dedicated visual tools for things like dialogue. As an example see Obsidian's conversation editor described here [0] that they have used for several of their projects. For other examples see the dialog editor used in Witcher 2 (REDkit) or the editors used in Bethesda's games (the engine might be a bit clunky at times but the tools are largely visual, outside of quest-specific scripting of course). Witcher 2's tools also include visual quest and FSM ("steering") editors. These are all tools that are used to do real work. Personally i have worked professionally in game tools for many years and visual tools are always an improvement over something basic. It is usually programmers that seem to want to ignore them, but i'm 100% sure that is because they can do most of the stuff with pure text (though rarely at the same speed as a good visual tool would allow, even if they think otherwise - note that i'm not talking about scripting here, this is often better done via a scripting langauge) and they do not like working with GUIs and such (i am one of the apparently rare programmers who likes working with GUIs) so they come up with excuses why their way is better. Many things in games, including conversations (and perhaps high level quest flow, depending on the game), are better done with visual tools than text - especially if these tasks are to be done by non-programmers. [0] https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/175082312536/im-curious-as-to-what-the-conversation-editor https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/175082312536/im-curious-as-...