Grumpy Gamer

I just wanted to clarify what I wrote in point Twelve because a lot of people have misunderstood it, probably because I did a crappy job of writing it.

Twelve - It would be called Monkey Island 3a. All the games after Monkey Island 2 don’t exist in my Monkey Island universe. My apologies to the all talented people who worked on them and the people who loved them, but I’d want to pick up where I left off. Free of baggage. In a carnival. That doesn’t mean I won’t steal some good ideas or characters from other games. I’m not above that.

I loved Curse of Monkey Island. Jonathan Ackley and Larry Ahern did a masterful job on the game, which is quite a feat given the ending I left them with. They - and the game - showed nothing but pure respect for the world, and they created some new characters that are just as memorable as the ones in Monkey Island 1 and 2.

When I said “but I’d want to pick up where I left off. Free of baggage. In a carnival.”, I meant the very literally. My story for Monkey Island 3a takes places 2 minutes after the end of Monkey Island 2. Free of baggage was not meant to imply that I felt Curse of Monkey Island was “baggage”, but rather, as I (hypothetically) designed and (hypothetically) wrote Monkey Island 3a, I’d want to be free to take the story where I wanted it to go and not feel compelled to adhere to the games that followed. If I end up being able to make this game at some point, we all might find that it fits nicely in between Monkey Island 2 and Curse of Monkey Island.

The only thing I objected to in the games that followed was Guybrush and Elaine getting married. She is too smart for that.

I hope this clarifies what I wrote.

NOTE: Now that Return To Monkey Island has been announced it’s important to note that a lot of my views (but not all) in this post have changed. Don’t take anything in here as more than a historical moment. Quoting anything in here as canon will just led to tears.

Yeah, I know, that sounds like the title of the O.J. Simpson book. I realized that after I typed it, but I’m not going to change it.

So, before I get into this fanciful post, I want to make one thing perfectly clear… actually, I’m just going to make it my first point. It’s probably the most important one. Actually, I’ll make it the first two points.

One - I am not making another Monkey Island. I have no plans to make another Monkey Island. I am not formulating plans to make another Monkey Island.

Two - Let me say that again. There is no new Monkey Island in works and I have no plans to make one. I’m just thinking and dreaming and inviting you come along with me. Please your keep your hands inside the boat at all times. No standing or you might get wet.

But, If I made another Monkey Island…

Three - It would be a retro game that harkened back to Monkey Island 1 and 2. I’d do it as “enhanced low-res”. Nice crisp retro art, but augmented by the hardware we have today: parallaxing, depth of field, warm glows, etc. All the stuff we wanted to do back in 1990 but couldn’t. Monkey Island deserves that. It’s authentic. It doesn’t need 3D. Yes, I’ve seen the video, it’s very cool, but Monkey Island wants to be what it is. I would want the game to be how we all remember Monkey Island.

Four - It would be a hardcore adventure game driven by what made that era so great. No tutorials or hint systems or pansy-assed puzzles or catering to the mass-market or modernizing. It would be an adventure game for the hardcore. You’re going to get stuck. You’re going to be frustrated. Some puzzles will be hard, but all the puzzles will be fair. It’s one aspect of Monkey Island I am very proud of. Read this.

Five - I would lose the verbs. I love the verbs, I really do, and they would be hard to lose, but they are cruft. It’s not as scary as it sounds. I haven’t fully worked it out (not that I am working it out, but if I was working it out, which I’m not, I wouldn’t have it fully worked out). I might change my mind, but probably not. Mmmmm… verbs.

Six - Full-on inventory. Nice big juicy icons full of pixels. The first version of Monkey Island 1 had text for inventory, a later release and Monkey Island 2 had huge inventory icons and it was nirvana. They will be so nice you’ll want to lick them. That’s a bullet-point for the box.

Seven - There would be a box. I imagine most copies would be sold digitally, but sometimes you just want to roll around in all your adventure game boxes. I know I do. Besides, where would you store the code wheel?

Eight - There would be dialog puzzles. They weren’t really puzzles, but that’s what we called them. Being able to tell four jokes at once and meander and getting lost in the humor of a conversation is the staple of Monkey Island. No one has done it better since. Just my opinion.

Nine - I would rebuild SCUMM. Not SCUMM as in the exact same language, but what SCUMM brought to those games. It was a language built around making adventure games and rapid iteration. It did things Lua could never dream of. When Lua was in High School, SCUMM beat it up for lunch money. True story. SCUMM lived and breathed adventure games. I’d build an engine and a language where funny ideas can be laughed about at lunch and be in the game that afternoon. SCUMM did that. It’s something that is getting lost today.

Ten - It would be made with a very small team. Not 30 or 20, but 10 or less. It means the game would take longer, but it would be more personal and crafted with love. Monkey love. Wait… that’s not what I meant…

Eleven - The only way I would or could make another Monkey Island is if I owned the IP. I’ve spent too much of my life creating and making things other people own. Not only would I allow you to make Monkey Island fan games, but I would encourage it. Label them as such, respect the world and the characters and don’t claim they are canon. Of course, once the lawyers get ahold of that last sentence it will be seven pages long.

Twelve - It would be called Monkey Island 3a. All the games after Monkey Island 2 don’t exist in my Monkey Island universe. My apologies to the all talented people who worked on them and the people who loved them, but I’d want to pick up where I left off. Free of baggage. In a carnival. That doesn’t mean I won’t steal some good ideas or characters from other games. I’m not above that.

Thirteen - It won’t be the Monkey Island 3 I was going to make in 1992. I’m not the same person I was back then. I could never make that game now. It is lost to time. Hopefully this one would be better.

Fourteen - The press won’t get advanced copies. I know all the reasons they want to get a game in advance, and they are all valid, but I feel they should play it at the same time you do. I hope they won’t be mad at me. My Metacritic score hopes they won’t be mad it me.

Fifteen - It would have full voice. It’s something we dreamed of back then and we can do it now.

Sixteen - If I used Kickstarter, there would be no fancy videos of me trying to look charming (as if I could). No concept art or lofty promises or crazy stretch goals or ridiculous reward tiers. It would be raw and honest. It would be free of hype and distractions that keep me from making the best game I could. True, I wouldn’t raise huge sums of money or break any records, but that’s not what I want to do. I want to make a game.

Seventeen - The game would be the game I wanted to make. I don’t want the pressure of trying to make the game you want me to make. I would vanish for long periods of time. I would not constantly keep you up-to-date or be feeding the hype-machine. I’d show stuff that excited me or amused me. If you let me do those things, you will love the game. That, I promise.

I hope you’ve had as much fun reading this as I had writing it.

I first learned to program on a TI-59 programmable calculator. My dad “the physicist” would bring it home on weekends and I would monopolize it for the next two days. I’d make games and type in programs from Byte magazine. It was a magical device. I don’t know what it was about programming that enthralled me, but I was obsessed with it. It was an odd skill to have back then, even at the level of programmable calculators. Computers were still the stuff of science fiction or only owned by huge companies or universities and housed large noisy air conditioned rooms with punch-card machines.

One summer the college got two Commodore Pet computers that were destine for the local High School. My friend, Tom McFarlane and I spent that entire summer in the computer lab programming those Commodore Pet computers.

It was my first experience with BASIC and it blew the socks off of the TI-59. Tom and I devoured everything about those Commodore Pet computers. We wrote every game we would could think of from Space Invaders to Astroids to Space Wars to little platformers (although we didn’t know that’s what they were called). We challenged and pushed each other and became masters of the PEEK and the POKE.

I do blame the Commodore Pet from one nasty habit that’s followed me for over 30 years. Tom and I realized that if we removed all the comments (the REM statements) from our BASIC code, the game would run significantly faster. To this day, I find myself deleting comments or whitespace under some misguided pavlovian notion that my code will run faster.

The summer ended and the Commodore Pets made their way to the High School, were I was starting as a freshmen.

As I continued to read about programming and computers (mostly in Byte magazine) this odd and strange concept kept coming up: Assembly Language. What was it? How did it work? And more importantly, what could it do for me?

I started to realize that assembly language was real programming. BASIC was just an imitation of programming. A layer that sat on top of this thing called Assembly Language. You weren’t really programming the computer if you weren’t programming it in assembly language. That was getting right down to the metal and I had to know what it was.

Lore said it was fast. Faster than BASIC and this was very appealing to me. We were pushing the limits of BASIC, removing features from our games just to speed them up. If assembly language could help with that, even a little, then it was something I had to learn.

Armed with the knowledge that the Commodore Pet used a 6502, I spent the weekend hand writing this program that would fill the screen with @-signs. I wanted to see how fast this assembly language really was. I wrote the same program in BASIC. I needed a baseline.

After class on Monday, I headed to the computer room and found a free Pet computer and typed in the BASIC program. It filled the screen in a little over 1 second. Fast. Could assembly language top that?

I typed in my little assembly language program and entered the SYS command to start it executing… and… nothing. The machine locked up. No error message, it just locked up. Odd. I power cycled the Commodore Pet, started over and soon found my mistake. Program entered.

My finger poised above the ENTER key. I was trying to remember how fast the BASIC program filled the screen. I need to be able to tell if assembly language was faster. I might need to run several tests, maybe add a timer, just to be sure.

I hit the ENTER key.

The screen instantly filled with @-signs. Instantly. So fast that I could not even begin to see them being drawn on the screen. One moment the screen was blank, then next instant it was full of @-signs. Instantly.

I just stood there. “Holy shit” I said to myself. My heart was pounding.

This truly was a religious experience. Someone had pulled back the curtain to heaven and given me a glimpse of God. The speed was staggering. Stunning. I had no words for it.

That was the last day I ever programmed in BASIC. Assembly language was my savior. I gave into it completely.

I was changed forever.

It will always be Lucasfilm Games(tm) to me, never LucasArts. They changed the name a year or so before I left when they rolled a bunch of divisions into this new company called LucasArts and the games group was one of them. Many years later, all that was left in LucasArts was the old games group, so the name became synonymous with games.

It’s hard for me not to be sad. I haven’t worked there since 1992, but it was still home to me. I grew up there. I learned just about everything I know about designing games there. I became a real programmer there. I made lifelong friends there. Eight of the most memorable and influential years of my life were spent there. I would not be who I am today without Lucasfilm Games.

I was hired at Lucasfilm Games by Noah Falstein as a Commodore 64 programmer porting his game Koronis Rift from the Atari 800.

I had just been laid off from a company called Human Engineered Software (my first job) and had moved back to Oregon and was about ready to start college again when the phone rang.

It was someone (I don’t remember who) from Lucasfilm Games and they were looking for a Commodore 64 programmer and wanted to know if I was interesting in coming in for an interview. Holy Crap I said/thought/shouted to myself. I didn’t even know Lucasfilm made games. Lucasfilm as Star Wars and the foundation of my childhood. I idealized George Lucas and ILM. I said I could come in for an interview that week and immediately packed my car and moved back to California. I just moved back. There was no way I wasn’t going to get that job.

I vividly remember interviewing in an office with Noah and Aric Wilmunder explaining the way you wrote pixels to the C64 screen using their screwed up memory mapping. They seemed impressed. Or confused. Either way as long as I got the job.

My first week at Lucasfilm Games was mind blowing. I had never met a smarter group of people in my life. From Noah to Aric to Gary Winnick to David Fox to Chip Morningstar to Doug Crockford. I had so much to learn.

The first time I met George Lucas was kind of a disappointment. It was the 10 year anniversary of Star Wars and he and Steven Spielberg and shaved their beards to sneak into a show. I wanted to met the iconic George Lucas with a beard.

When that person from Lucasfilm first called I almost didn’t answer the phone. I was on my way out to met a friend for lunch and had just locked the front door and was halfway to my car. I don’t know what caused me to go back inside and answer the phone. If I hadn’t, I would have had a very very very different life.

I still have hope that I might get the rights to Monkey Island back someday. LucasArts shutting down doesn’t change anything since Disney bought them back in Oct. Maybe there will be less of an emotional attachment to it for them. Who knows. Not me.

I’m the opposite of a Pack Rat. I don’t know if there is a catchy word for that, but that’s what I am. I get antsy if I can’t move from one place to another by throwing everything I own into the back of my car. Gee, I wonder why?

This is the sum-total of my collection of the games I have worked on over the past 20+ years. So many missing ones. Nothing from the years at Humongous Entertainment. No Monkey Island 2. At least they are all still in shrink wrap.

Goodbye Lucasfilm Games.

Here are some screen shots from Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG or SSITVTDTUSS:AMMTPRPG for short. It will be coming out for the iPhone and iPad in a couple of months. I might have found a way to get xcode to build objective-c for Android, if so, we’ll port it there.

I’ve always loved match-3 games, there is something zen-like about playing them. Seems like whenever I’m testing out a new engine or code base, I always create a quick match-3 game.

A few years back, Clayton and I made a match-3 game called Realms of Gold that had a interesting way the board collapsed.

In traditional match-3 games like Bejeweled, when you match three shapes they disappear and the gap is filled by pieces falling in from the top. In Realms of Gold, the piece could come in from the sides or even the bottom depending on the type of match you did.

It was fun, but it was also a little confusing. The game was a RPG, but we were told by the publisher that no one wanted to play a match-3 RPG, so that part of the game was watered down. Of course, a year later Puzzle Quests comes out and sells a billion copies.

A little over a year ago I pulled a match-3 prototype out of the closest and started working on it. There was something about the way the board collapsed in Realms of Gold that I really liked. Clayton and I screwed around with it for a bit, then he hit upon a way to make the collapsing work a lot better. Rather than the type of match you made dictating the direction the board collapsed, have the board collapse in the direction you swiped. I made this change and it felt fantastic and very intuitive.

An odd side effect of doing this was you could move pieces around the board. So unlike Puzzle Quest - and just about every other match-3 RPG that sprang up after it - in Scurvy Scallywags you actually move your hero/pirate around the board and position her/him next to enemies to do battle. It creates this new layer to the matching that is a lot of fun.

We have close to one hundred different hats, shirts, heads, swords, etc you find and use to dress up your pirate. There are also ten different ships to build, plus a sea shanty you collect that is sung by real life pirate singers (they work for grog, quite inexpensive).

With any luck, it will be out in the next month or so.

You can also follow @ScurvyGit on twitter to see my live git commit messages.

Here are some behind the scenes photos taken during The Cave’s early development.

Each of our design weeks would focus on one area of the game. The first day was just to talk about overarching ideas, the character’s backstory, the purpose of the area and what the main goal of the player/character was. During that first day we’d just throw out wild ideas and see what stuck.

The next day we’d take all those crazy ideas and try to arrive on the core puzzles. We’d also start to sketch out what the area looked like and where the puzzles might go.

On the third day we’d look at what we had and make refinements. It was common to have most everything figure out by the end of the second day, with just one or two issues remaining. On day three we’d resolve those and have a day four if needed. We tried to design for only three days a week to let our minds rest (as well as get everything else done that needed doing).

This is Dave Gardner mapping out The Scientist area during one of our design meetings.

This is a shot of the whiteboard for The Miner’s area during day two.

Once the area had been designed, a quick grey-box was made using Maya. At this point we could run around using the game’s engine and see how it felt. This is a picture taken during one of our team walk-throughs of The Scientist’s area.

The camera is pulled all the way out so we can see the whole thing. You’ll notice the red text that calling out objects and the locations of puzzles. At this point, none of the logic for the puzzles is working, we’re just running around.

This is a picture of the beginning of The Island with The Hillbilly.

As promised, here are some behind the scene images from designing The Cave. J.P. LeBreton, Dave Gardner and I spent several months in a back room designing all the area and puzzles of the game. I have to say, it was the most fun I’ve had designing in a long time. J.P and Dave where amazing to work with.

This is an early layout for the Intro section. It’s much bigger than we ended up with and you will notice we had areas where players would be required to use each character’s special ability. This was also back when The CIA agent and The Mobster were still in the game. This didn’t make it past the greybox stage. After running around, it was clear it was way too big. We also felt requiring the training of the special abilities was not really needed.

This was an entire section that we cut. The original game was about twice the size of what we ended up with and this was one of the sections that didn’t make the cut. It never made it out of the paper stage.

Now that The Cave is done and unleashed on an unsuspecting world (ok, we did do a bunch of PR, so it wasn’t exactly unsuspecting), it’s time for me to move on from Double Fine and plot my next move.

So many games left to be designed.

I want to thank all the amazing people at Double Fine for all their hard work on The Cave. It was a true pleasure to work with every one of them over the past two years. So much fun. I will miss them all. And of course to Tim for creating the opportunity to come there and make The Cave.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to post some behind the scenes pictures we took during the game’s development and stuff like this…

That’s a complete map of The Cave exported from Maya by designer J.P. LeBreton. Bonus points if you can figure out what the pink dots are.

For the short term, Clayton Kauzlaric and I have been toiling away on another iOS side project that I’m going to focus on over the next few months. It’s called Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG. I’ll post some screen shots in the next few days.

I also have that PAX Australia keynote to write. How did I ever let them talk me into doing that. So much fun. So much pain. Maybe I’ll just do a 45 minute Q and A session.

I try and keep this site kid safe… but…

I can’t believe The Cave is out and people are actually playing it. You thought I was joking and it was all an elaborate prank that involved making all these fake trailers and a big fake European press tour, but you were wrong.

• Steam (Mac and PC right now, with Linux coming next week)
• PlayStation Network for PS3
• Xbox Live Arcade for Xbox 360
• Nintendo eShop for Wii U
• Commodore 64

…or were you.