Grumpy Gamer

Speaking with a friend the other day and I was talking about how being confided to my house doesn’t really change my life or my work too much. I suppose that a sad reflection on my life. I just don’t go out much. I’m a life-long introvert, so I don’t crave the company of groups or a wild social life. I have a few very close friends and we continue to talk.

There is a bi-weekly game prototype group I would meet up with and I do miss that.

A few weeks ago I decided to completely rebuild the Thimbleweed Park engine, and I guess the timing was very auspicious given that it’s great at keeping me distracted and from reading the news non-stop.

It all started from having this idea about how to do a better point-and-click interface. As long-time readers will know, I’m not a big fan of the “poke” interface where you just “use” every object until something works. I’ve always felt there was a better way and I had an epiphany the other which lead to rewriting the TWP engine.

I started to hack my new UI in but my OCD quickly took over and I just had to start over.

There is a lot of good code in the TWP engine and the goal was to sort that out and only take the good. I started with a new project and then slowly moved pieces of the old engine over rewriting it as I went.

At this point the engine is 100% working and it feels a lot better. It can’t run TWP dues to a complete removal of the UI code from the engine.

About a year ago I removed squirrel from my code base and wrote a new custom scripting language called Dinky. It’s 90% squirrel compatible but has a cleaner interface into the backend and the compiler generates much better code due to an optimizer.

Due to Dinky, I felt a lot more comfortable moving 100% of the UI code into script and out of the c++ engine. This follows the pattern of SCUMM where all the the UI was written in 6502 and slowly moved to SCUMM code as the projects went by. By the time of MI2, most of the UI was done in script.

So anyway…

Most of the TWP engine is now back up and running and my new experiments with UI are 100% in script and so far I’m quite please with it.

One of the changes I made to the engine was severing it from pixel art. It can still do pixel art, but it’s better at doing higher res formats and I implemented Spine for character animations.

One of the problems with Spine is it’s a lot harder to do “programmer art”. I’ve been looking for some humanoid Spine animations in 4 or 8 directions. If anyone knows where to find something like this, please let me know.

I help everyone out there is doing OK and this doesn’t turn in to a full-scale Stephen King novel. I’m not sure how long I will last if the only thing I have to barter for food with is designing adventure games.

But so far, I’m healthy and safe, I hope you all are as well.

Camera code is really hard. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Writing camera code that is technically correct is easy. Writing camera code that feels right is really hard. You will spend the entire duration of your project tweaking your camera code to make it feel right. You will never be happy with it.

I’m petty sure I’m going to CppCon 2020 in sept.

I first met Clayton Kauzlaric when he was hired at Cavedog to be the lead artist on Total Annihilation. We quickly because good friends and over years have collaborated on countless games (if you can’t count higher than 9). We made casual games for Real Networks, co-created DeathSpank, and made iOS games like The Big Big Castle and Scurvy Scallywags.

Clayton just announced his latest game, Bartlow’s Dread Machine. Unfortunately I didn’t work on the game, but I have seen it and it’s amazing. It’s basically a video game built in 1900. Everything is mechanical and it’s a wonder to watch everything unfold and run on wires and gears.

Take a gander.

“A glowing purple meteorite makes life, uh, difficult and gross for an isolated farm family after it crashes in their yard.”

I think i’ve heard this before…

A fascinating series of posts on Disassembling Link’s Awakening

I never programmed the Gameboy (or any Nintendo system) but so much of this brings back strong C64 memories.

Seems like there is always a story about how the Apple Watch saved someone’s life by alerting them to some irregular heart problem. Being the cynical person I am, I always wonder how many false positive have there been? How many people were alerted to a “problem” only to visit their doctor and be told is was nothing, or worse, visit the emergency room and be billed thousands of dollars (US citizens only).

I’d love to get a smart watch and the Apple Watch suits my needs due to me having a iPhone, but I refuse to wear a silly square watch. I haven’t worn a watch since 2002. I dug out my old watch and I’m tempted to start wearing it again. It’s pretty cool because it has an analog flight computer built in. I’m going to be the center of attention at the next party.

My Wow classic guild fell apart. Not sure what happened, no big drama. Everything seemed good and then I went on Hollidays and when I got back it was a ghost town. Guild officers are still in the guild, but none have logged on in close to a month. Maybe I was the secret glue that held it all together (joke).

So, now I start looking for a new guild. I want a guild that actively runs 5 player dungeons and is raiding at 60 or pushing towards it. But I don’t want to be in a guild that takes it all too seriously. All guilds say they want to help players get geared and learns dungeons and raids, but what I’ve often found is that they turn into cliques where the cool kids raid and the rest… well I’m not sure.

There are a few guilds on my server where you have to “apply” and give them logs of your runs. Yeah… that sounds !fun.

I don’t want to start my own guild. When it comes to Wow, I’m a follower not a leader. I think that’s why I love healing. The only decisions I want to make in a dungeon is who lives and who dies.

If your guild meets the above criteria and wants an amazing undead priest healer named Delores… hit me up.

Now, back to my pile of adventure games I’m speed running.

I was chatting with a friend the other day and the conversation turned to modern point-and-click adventure games and there was much lamenting on how the UI (the way you interact with the game) hasn’t changed that much.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t play a lot of adventure games these days. It’s an occupational hazard. I usually rage quit or eye-roll quit within 20 minutes. I spend too much time analyzing puzzle structure.

While I love making adventure games, I love playing RPGs (I use this term loosely). If I have free time I’ll go slaughter enemies in some dungeon or log onto Wow Classic and… go slaughter enemies in some dungeon.

I do quickly look at new adventure games but as soon as I realize they aren’t doing anything new or interesting I’ll bounce off. Occupational hazard.

Thimbleweed Park used the maniac mansion/monkey island style verb interface mostly because of nostalgia reasons (see Kickstarter), but I’d never use that for a new game. It’s a very functional interface and there is a lot I like about it, but it looks old and dated and a simple screenshot can turn off a lot of people. It’s a problem we had with Thimbleweed Park. I don’t regret using it, it was there for a purpose and it served that purpose brilliantly.

It seems like most new point-and-click games op for the “use verb” interface. Maybe you have “Look” and “Pick-up”, but after that everything can be done with just a “Use” verb. “Push?” “Pull?” just use “Use”. It’s probably better called the “Poke” verb. Just poke at everything and see what it does.

Much of the puzzle solving then falls to what is in your inventory. How do I “use” this thing I’m carrying with something in the world? Now the game becomes an exercise in dragging everything in your inventory to everything on a screen to see if it does anything. The only friction is how tedious that is. The “verbs” interface didn’t make this any better, so I’m not trying to defend it with regard to using everything with everything in desperate frustration.

So I turn to my esteemed readers and ask the following:

Name a point-and-click adventure game that has come out in the last few years and had a novel and interesting way to interact with the world, your inventory and solve puzzles. Something that really felt new and fresh. Something that made you say “Yeah, that’s the way I wish all adventure games worked.”

I have a small list of my own, but I’m curious what you’ve found.