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).
Thimbleweed Park was a great game. Lots of great in-jokes, a useful help/hint system, and the classic old-school adventure game look/feel that I played as a kid and since longed for.
I’ve long awaited more stuff from Ron Gilbert since then.
I'm going to avoid spoilers because I don't know how welcome they would be, but I kinda hated the ending. It felt like a lazy cliche which made me feel more distant from the characters who I had become friends with.
MI1 was one of the first adventure games I've played (real first one was Leisure Suit Larry 1) and I have very fond memories of it (and, of course MI2). Really awesome to see Ron Gilbert involved in this and hoping to get a huge dose of nostalgia out of it.
Hoping this would trigger a bigger franchise, I would really love to play an open world game of based on the Monkey Island universe (and humor).
The unique news here is that the director of the first two games in a popular series is returning to it. This may be a GenX/early Millenial nostalgia thing given that these two games are from 1990/1991; the "point and click adventure" genre has fallen from favor over the intervening decades.
The Curse of Monkey Island was my first contact with the series and I really enjoyed it at that time! I remember vividly the challenge, as a child, of playing it in English while only having the game’s guide on my native language (Portuguese).
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.
Ron likes to use engines he built himself. I'd guess its likely to use the successor to the same engine he built for Thimbleweed Park [1]. That engine has some interesting design/development docs in both the Kickstarter backer updates and the Thimbleweed Park blog.
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.)
If you were to create a point and click today with off-the-shelf engines, what would you use? AGS? Adventure Creator? Game Maker? Visionaire? Unity w/ an adventure game package (forget what this was called)?
Sounds like you know your Adventure game engines thus the question
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.)
Thanks for the in depth response! I mainly toy around with Twine (interactive fiction) but have been wanting to branch off and learn some game creation. I have Unity w/ Adventure Creator and RPG Maker 4. I'm not an artist by any means so being able to import assets like with the Unity marketplace is great.
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.
Godot isn't quite as ready for off-the-shelf usage in a high end game, mostly because of rendering performance. The architecture isn't performance-centric since the core team is focused on features and UX. It's fixable - everything is when the source is available - just a question of whether your project can justify the trade-offs and investment involved. To match what Unreal is doing right now essentially means writing a software renderer that executes on the GPU, along with various layers of streaming and caching to prepare assets for this pipeline; right now Godot is still aiming for lower-hanging fruit.
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.
Looking at the teaser video, Godot (or any other generic engine) wouldn't really struggle with this. It's like few hundred sprites with light scene hierarchy. What Unreal is doing right now is insanely-detailed 3D geometry and lightning, which is aimed at film industry and AAA 3D action games.
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.
I've only skimmed Godot's documentation. I think at least in a few respects, I'm still waiting for Godot. (I cannot avoid the literary pun that they created for themselves in their naming, I'm sorry.) One of those respects that is particularly relevant here is in "point-and-click adventure"-specific tooling. To my understanding all of the packages for doing "point-and-click adventures" on Godot are still much more nascent/under-developed to their Unity counterparts. But again, I've not been keeping up with Godot that well. In part, because, as I admitted I like C# (even as [ab]used by Unity), Unity seems good enough, and Unity has a lot of experience under its belt that Godot doesn't have yet.
Likely on the new engine they used for Thimbleweed Park. If you want to make something similar, there's a number of point and click game engines (and game engine layers, such as for Godot and Unreal) around. Heck, even SCUMM is still (somewhat) usable.
I have no idea why there is so much derision for CoMI on various forums, it was a good game, and the objections to it are never spelled out. Keeping my expectations in check for this new one, too-- why are we assuming it will necessarily be great, again?
the derision of MI3 stems from the fact that it's not Ron Gilbert "endorsed" (or made from him). My personal opinion is that it's stylistically above everything else but I recently played 3 and 4 again and I have to say: The jokes in 4 are way better. Considering that part 4 is "universally" derided, this just means that it's best to make up your own mind (but for new players who are short on time: just play 1+2 :D).
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).
What's so special about the Ron Gilbert imprimatur? I think the first two games were good, but considering them as "auteur" works is wrong, since so much of what went into them comes from the contributions of many people (the art, small details and minor jokes, etc.). The overall plot and destiny of the characters is totally unimportant, not least because of its status as a farce.
These games (e.g. Monkey 1+2) weren't made by many people, they were made by a handful of people. Like 3 people for dialogues and story, so the impact of a single person is way higher than in AAA games. And as I said the great thing is that other "legends" return as well, like Dave Grossman (design), the voice actor of Guybrush and the musician Michael Land. So, this game appears to be a return of the old guard who made the originals. And let's be honest: As fans of the originals, who else would we want to be working on a new iteration?
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.
this is so awesome. It was speculated that now that Disney owns this IP by their purchase of LucasArts that this would never see the light of day out of concerns for it competing with Pirates of the Caribbean IP.
I had some hope for something like it when visiting the Monkey Island easter egg section of the Pirates of the Caribbean-inspired Tall Tales in Sea of Thieves.
Curse of Monkey Island acknowledged it and gave an explanation in its endgame exposition if you got deep into dialog trees during the LeChuck Does a Major Villain Monologue part. It was a satisfactory enough follow up for me.
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.
That tweet is interesting because it specifically mentions CMI (but as MI3 rather than CMI which may be a tell, but also not saying anything about EMI or Tales), so the canon may still "break". But also it's a series whose canon is kind of loose anyway, so the tweet doesn't entirely answer the question of how it is keeping MI3 in "canon" given his statements years ago that he didn't think it possible. (But he's had two years of development on this project, so it sounds like there was time to solve it, while getting paid to solve it.)
But very interesting Ron is claiming it is not a hard-fork (anymore), at least.
Never got into Monkey Island series. I didn't find the dialogues particularly funny and puzzles were a bit too hard for me to figure out. I wish there was a sequel to Indiana Jones: Fate of Atlantis however. That one I still revisit every few years.
„Fate of Atlantis“ was awesome indeed, especially as it had more earnest overtones closer the end. IIRC contemporary game critics agreed on Indiana Jones being the slightly better game. So I’d love more Indiana Jones adventure games.
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.
