Some marking people just don’t understand that people hate ads not because they aren’t targeted, they hate them because they are fucking ads.
The only time I’ve ever enjoyed ads are when I would read Byte magazine as a kid. That didn’t mean everywhere I went I wanted to see ads for 16K of memory being as low as $795.
We’ve started doing some open alpha/beta testing for Linux Delores. If you run Linux and are interested in helping out, visit the Thimbleweed Park Forums Linux Test Topic
Thanks!
I went and looked through my old design notebooks and found these. I don’t know if they are related to Time Fly or not. Some of the dates I used for “present” are 1990? That would have put it right before or during Monkey Island 1. I wish I would have put dates on my old design docs.
Noah recently sent me a photo of an old Lucasfilm Games design doc of mine. I don’t know when I wrote this. After Maniac Mansion but probably before Monkey Island.
Dear Facebook:
I am not on Facebook. Anyone on Facebook claiming to be Ron Gilbert and a game developer is impersonating me. It’s frustrating because my friends think they are following me. They are not.
Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island.
Some notes about these.
These are the final source backups I made when the game left test and the gold masters were sent off.
They are labeled 1.1 because the game got bounced out of test during the final two weeks and so the version got bumped when it went back in.
For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can’t text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
UPDATE:
The day has come and gone and I didn’t get a happy birthday card from Disney with the Monkey Island IP tucked inside. There is always next year. Fingers crossed. Maybe it because I don’t subscribe to Disney+.
“The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don’t wait for her. Start alone.” - Roger Ebert
One of my favorite quotes and one I keep needing to remind myself of. No matter how blocked or stuck I am, if I just force myself to start writing or designing, it’s not long before the ideas start flowing.
After posting the Delores code, I read a comment from someone who lambasted me for not using compliant JSON for the .wimpy and other data files.
They are 100% right, I did not use compliant JSON for those or any of my JSON-like files.
JSON was created by Doug Crockford, whom I worked with at Lucasfilm. Doug is a super smart guy and JSON is one of the best formats I’ve ever seen. Fully compliant JSON is also a pain in the ass.
Given that this was my engine, I decided to change it. For the record, my JSON reader can read compliant JSON just fine. With the right flags, it can also write fully compliant JSON.
Here is how my JSON differs and the reason for those changes.
- Keys in a dictionary don’t have the be quoted if they are simple alphanumerics.
a-zA-Z0-9_
{
foo: 100
}
- Values that are simple alphanumerics don’t need to be quoted.
{
name: Delores
}
- If a file doesn’t start with a
{or[then it is assumed to be a dictionary.
foo: 100
The main reason for this change was for the Prefs.json file. I expect these to be edited by consumers and { } is hard to understand if you’re not a techie person. I was seeing people add new keys after the closing }
{
foo: 100
}
bar: 1
99% of my JSON files are dictionaries, so it seem fine to drop this requirement.
- Commas are optional and ignored.
{
foo: 100
bar: 200
list: [ 1 2 3 "four" 5 6 ]
}
There is no syntactical reason for commas. If you need multiple items on one line, then you use them.
{
foo: 100, bar: 200
}
This is also OK. Commas don’t matter
foo:100,,,,,bar: 200
The only thing I don’t like about my custom format (and the reason for the initial complaint) is they can’t be loaded into any of the excellent JSON editors.
That is true.
I guess everyone needs to come around to my JSON format.