DESIGN | ADVENTURE GAMES
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EVERYONE’S A WRITER
Ron Gilbert’s new adventure, Thimbleweed Park, aims to recapture the charm of old school point and click adventures using ‘improv game design’. Jem Alexander investigates MARCH 2017
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e are witnessing an adventure game renaissance. Recent years have seen the genre make a big return, after what felt like decades of point-and-clicks falling out of vogue. With games like Firewatch and Gone Home, adventure games are looking quite different to the late 20th century Lucasarts and Sierra classics, but with Thimbleweed Park Ron Gilbert is hoping to bring some of that original magic back to the modern era. “Gary Winnick (he and I did Maniac Mansion together) and I were having lunch and talking about the charm of those old adventure games that we did at Lucasfilm,” Gilbert says. “There was a certain feeling that those old pointand-click games had. Gary and I were talking about what that was, and I don’t think either of us knew. It was just a weird feeling. So we decided to do another one and figure out what that charm is. “Adventure games today, I think they’re more what you’d call ‘narrative games’ than they are puzzle solving games. There’s probably five puzzles to solve in Firewatch, but it is a narrative game and I think that’s one of the neat things about point and click adventures, at least for me as a designer. It was about telling really interesting stories, and I think that has had a resurgence with people who really enjoy good narrative in games.” So what makes an adventure game an adventure game? What links games like Gone Home and Monkey Island? “It’s a big fat grey line, right? To me there’s got to be narrative,” Gilbert says. “There’s got to be exploring some kind of world. I think those things are important. There’s got to be some kind of activity that you need to be doing. Some little thing that you’re having to work out. It doesn’t have to be a puzzle in the classic sense of a puzzle. “Gone Home is a great example of that. It’s an environment, it’s a narrative, but you’re kind of more puzzling your way through what’s going on in this house, so it’s a different kind of puzzle. But it’s something that gets those gears turning inside your head as you’re trying to figure your way through it.” In order to recapture the feeling of those original point-and-click adventures, Gilbert and Winnick are using the same development process DEVELOP-ONLINE.NET
06/03/2017 18:29