Well it’s been just over a year since my first post here, and I have no progress to show.  Eek!

 

Since my last post, I’ve kind of been waiting for Nintendo to post their Switch SDK on their developer portal, but they have yet to do so.  I was planning on starting dev work in Unity since I know that is a supported engine and is multi-platform. However, I emailed Nintendo’s indie team and they replied back that in order to be considered for access to Nintendo Switch development resources, they require an overview of my planned project as well as my development experience history.

 

Since I do not have a planned project yet, I decided to hold off on responding back to them.  I had done some Unity tutorials in the meantime and for whatever reason, I just don’t like using it.  Yes it is easy, and yes you can create something fast.  However, I don’t like the lack of control.  I feel like it’s not programming.  As I’ve stated here before, it’s like cheating.

 

So this past weekend I purchased Thimbleweed Park for the Nintendo Switch (available for most other platforms too). https://thimbleweedpark.com  I soon realized this game was made by the same people that created the old Lucas Arts games like Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island.  I never played Monkey Island, but I loved Maniac Mansion as a kid!  I played Thimbleweed Park for 10 hours straight and beat it on casual mode.  I’ll have to go back and play it on advanced mode to see the harder puzzles.

 

After I beat it, I decided to go back and look into the game more, and found out that it was a Kickstarter project.  Ron Gilbert, the main developer behind Thimbleweed and Maniac Mansion, documented the whole process on the game’s website and it is super fascinating.  I was hooked.  I watched Youtube interviews with him and started listening to his podcasts which detailed his processes.

 

He recreated the SCUMM engine which he used to create the old Lucas Arts games.  From what I can find, the new version of his engine is in C++ using SDL to create the game window, he used his own renderer, and used a modified version of Squirrel for an imbedded scripting language.  Apparently he really needed it to be multithreaded, so he modified it to support that.

 

I always wanted to make an adventure game which was point and click.  I have fond memories of both Maniac Mansion and some of the Sierra games like Police Quest, Hero’s Quest, and King’s Quest.  So this game, Thimbleweed Park has reignited my passion to create an adventure point and click game.  Now that I have a genre, I’m doing research on what I’ll need to do to create an engine.  I’m leaning toward using C++ and SDL.  I know nothing about rendering so I’m hoping that it will work on console ports.  There is little info out on the web due to NDA’s on console dev.  I’m not entirely sure if I need an embedded scripting language as I’ve never used one before.  I’m not entirely sure what I’d use it for, but they seem like they are all the rage and people love them.  I’ll need to play around with it and see what I can do with one!

 

My goal is to be able to make a simple prototype of a couple rooms so that I can prove to myself that I can make this sort of game from scratch.  If I can pull this off, I’m diving in with both feet.  I don’t have a story yet or anything but I just want to know if it’s possible first.

 

Wish me luck!