HandmadeCon 2015 - Ron Gilbert

this is sort of a little bit of a personal session for me because I everyone out there probably you know some people are a lot younger than I am obviously and are kind of getting into the game industry but you know I can remember when I first started working on games when I was very little obviously there were a bunch of things that were kind of formative in like my experience of making games and you know being just a kid who is at home you know typing away on the home computer and whatever I kind of think back to like what inspired me to do stuff or what were the games I played there like I really want to make that and by far the one that like comes to mind for me the most was Secret of Monkey Island and there's this is true for a number of reasons one of the reasons obviously is just because at that time I mean I think there's many many people who consider that like one of the defining games of that time in gaming but there was also the fact that as somebody who sort of knew a little programming but was pretty bad at it looking at that game and looking at the other games that were in its category at that time I could actually see the difference in craftsmanship on that one like even at that time because I remember you know right out of the box these things would would ship and they would be like you know The Secret of Monkey Island game would be like this really fast fluid experience and everything seemed to work great and you would see like a year later or something you'd play a similar game there and you try to sing like click to walk and it would wait a while and then the guy would kind of do this really weird path that didn't look anything right and that's like even at that time I was kind of like well like this this is so much better than this and I don't even know why and I'm not sure I could do this but this is who I'd want to be right like I want to be the guy who makes Secret Monkey Island not the guy who makes this other game right and so when I was putting together the the people who I most wanted to have here my mind immediately went to that and I was thinking like if if Ron wants to come talk that would be like the coolest thing ever and I was kind of on the fence about it because I'm like well I don't know like maybe he doesn't want to talk about sort of stuff anymore maybe he's not that interested in engine program anymore and so I go look at what he's doing and he's actually writing he said because I thought that will be parked like oh maybe he's like managing that process he's like he's actually writing a new adventure games system from scratch himself now right and so I was like this is perfect so I can't wait to ask him the questions that I've got here and hear what he has to say so please join me in welcoming one of my gaming heroes so I have I have something just to prove that I'm not making this story up for crowd effect I have here in original secret of monkey island mouse pad that you gave me the first time I went to visit you like had it in your office yes I had a stack of those I have kept it and my actual secret of monkey island to box which for some reason I still kept this as well it even has the original DRM people right here a decoder we when was the last time you saw a game that easy to decoder wheeler right they don't make them like they used to so well back then DRM was fun wasn't it wasn't just something that was annoying it was something that actually had fun with they sort of thought about that process I guess a little bit more how can we make this something that's not so so onerous I guess where's now these are like look you're just going to deal with it there's nothing and you don't actually own it you're just licensed whom you read it yeah I would not be able to bring this today what anyway you'd be violating several trademarks well okay that's kind of scary I probably shouldn't ask myself question cuz I'll just get depressed but I want to start out by just saying can you take us back just a little bit to you know to sort of start things off I really want to know about so maniac mansion was not a game I ever had right I mean as a kid you know I didn't actually have all you know every game or anything like nowadays it's kind of crazy when you're adult you have money you can just get if you want to see what maniac can actually just get it but back then you know you only had certain games so I never actually got to play maniac mansion but that was kind of the start of the whole you know that's the whole adventure game sort of like I want to say the sort of the genre that you pioneered like that way of looking click games playing click games and so could you take us back to sort of like right before that how does this start happening like you know what what was your experience at that time why did you look at that and you know as say I want to start making something like this what you know and what was your sort of like skills at the time that made you think like I can you know I can do this better or I want to go do this thing so can you just give a center stage yeah well I was hired at Lucasfilm to to do porting I they they had built some games on the atari 800 and they needed someone to pour it into the commodore 64 that was primarily what I did which Commodore suit before programming so I was hired to do port work and I got there and I became friends with Gary Winnick who was an artist at for the only artist at the time it was just one yeah Gary he did all the art for all the games it was the only artist there and so he and I became really good friends and you eventually became roommates and we you know shared a place together and we you know did we wanted to make a game man and at the time I kind of felt like because I was a contractor at the time I wasn't an employee and and you know I felt like you know I want to get a full-time job here and yeah I was working at Lucasville right with Star Wars and George Lucas and I know all this stuff is like I don't want to leave here and so I thought well you know maybe if I actually you know pitch a game and the game gets done then I'll get hired out in full time and that would be good so Gary and I started talking about you know pitching a game and we had this idea for this strange kind of you know comedy horror game with this weird family and you know we talked about all sorts of ideas and we had like no idea what the game was right we just had we had a bunch of funny stuff we had funny ideas and that was all that we really had okay and and I think you know if I look back through my entire career I think the thing that drives me creatively the most is fear you know that's the second time submission today and and it's and it's like when I get like terrified of something it's like all these creative gears kick in and so I was I was looking at all these great ideas that Gary and I had and I had no idea what this game was and I was just it was it I was afraid you know it's like this fear was kicking in and we Christmas break came when we took we we went on break and I went down the to LA where my aunt and uncle live and my eight-year-old cousin was there and he had just gotten a you know candy computer okay and he was playing King's Quest okay I had never seen King's Quest before right I played text adventures you know and all that but I never seen kinks was before and I watched him play this thing and it's just everything just fell into place it's like this is what maniac manager needs to be it's it's an adventure game so I came back after Christmas just all energized and that's when we just turned the whole thing into an adventure game and so King's Quest obviously looks quite a bit different than maniac mansion because it's kind of you drive the character around it's got a text parser you know you type in kind of the old infocomm style so it's quite a different game so when you came back having seen King's Quest it didn't go like oh we'll just mix King's Quest and we'll swap in our funny ideas and that's the game we're going to make so how do we get from I saw King's Quest which is actually pretty different to Jimmy to maniac mansion like what did that cost to start looking like what was it did you start making a king of quest clone right away and then start deviating if I might or did you iterate on it and sort of like as a discussion first before you start make anything of what how did that happen the big thing was that I had played a lot of text adventures and I liked text adventures but I really did hate the parsers because I felt like I was always playing this game which I called second-guess the parser okay is that I knew what this thing was right but but did the game call it a bush was right plant or a tree I guess since we're talking about trees yeah you know what what was this thing and you know maybe the designer had put in a bunch of synonyms or something but maybe they didn't get the synonyms I wanted and so I said you know it's like I can see this stuff I just want to touch it I just want to click it I want to say that's the thing I wanna I want interact with and so that's kind of where getting rid of the parser came from you know it's like you know what we should just get rid of the parser the fact is that you know even sophisticated adventure games probably only use like five or six verbs anyway yeah right there are all the synonyms for stuff so we kind of went through we picked out the verbs that we thought would be useful in those we just put them right on the screen and so you just click on the verb and you click on the object and that was kind of where the whole you know point-and-click thing came from well so how did you sort of do that process though because you know was that something that you thought of before you started programming the game or is that something that you sort of like did you start making a parser and then go wait a minute we could do this or did you was this just like you came back from King's Quest and we're talking to Gary and you guys just kind of figured this out before you even like started really like what was that we knew we were dumping the parser and we knew we were going to the verb verb etre before I start approach so that was just already in your head from infocomm days it just kind of clicked were you talking about like we don't want to do that and and Lucasfilm had done a game previously called a base on the movie labyrinth and they had done kind of a verb interface it was like the spinning wheel thing okay you know it was it was it was very clunky and it was cumbersome but you know that was that was a leaping off point for us okay so we didn't come from absolutely nothing it kind of came a little bit from the labyrinth stuff and so it was clear enough from that it's like yes could work if we just do it a little bit let's just refine it and simplify it and and this will just be a much better way for people to interact with adventure games so now you've got this sort of idea you're like okay we've got the idea sort of for the story and the sort of things that we want to have happen and we kind of know that we're gonna do like this verb interface sort of thing where you click on stuff but there's still a tremendous amount of like you know what is how do we build a game like this right because you're my understanding there is you're coming at it never having a look you didn't work on King's Quest you don't know what the internals of King's Quest look like hand unlike nowadays you know a game like King's Quest or something would be trivial to write or something like this back then you're talking about like you know it's cutting but things are cutting edge just having sprites move on a screen it's like a whole thing so hip pixels are cutting yeah pixels are cutting-edge right and so what's your process now how do you sit down and set apart in this problem I guess we can maybe also ask a little bit like how did you get the game prove it you work on a spare time what happened there like like I guess we should say before we start out you know Lucasfilm back then look at some games it was a very magical place in some ways right there was there were but by the time that we had pitched maniac mansion they were like 15 people okay so it was very very small and you know I think we we were very lucky because I don't think George Lucas knew he had a games division and so right we had all this amazing autonomy to do you know whatever we really wanted to do and there was really no official approval process the way it work was you wrote you know little you know one two three play to design documents and we just passed him around on paper and everybody took notes and then things just kind of bubbled up until everybody said hey this is really interesting and then they kind of became projects at that point so it's sort of like an elaborate of buy-in sort of a thing which like if everyone sort of starts to think that this this paper is one we should go with then we will yeah exactly so there was no there was no real pitch to the whole thing and so did you start making the game before that or did you did you start by making that document go like you and Gary go okay we're gonna start trying to pitch it internally was that the first step then yeah I was floating that design document around and getting support for it which is you know where the the verb interface came from was kind of you making that da service yeah but that was I mean that was probably like maybe a two-month of Tomb of the process of pitching that around and then you know in in typical fashion from a couple of guys that have no idea what they're doing we just jumped right into it Gary just started drawing art and I just started writing code and we had no idea where we were going with stuff and you know and and I think you know that's really kind of where the whole scum system came from the adventure game system because you know we took this path where I was just gonna write this whole game and 6502 assembly right I mean how hard can that be oh alright so I just I just started kind of doing that and you know again that that fear kicked in is I realize I've been just totally in over my head with this there's no way we're gonna be able to get this done which was we're doing you know a scripting language in an interpreted language you know kind of came from all of that okay so that actually sets up like perfectly the stuff I want to talk about a professional give you a nice segue so looking at that process right you sit down and you're kind of going like okay we've got to start with some basic stuff we got to put some sprites on the screen and presumably like LucasArts maybe already have some stuff you said here I could start drawing art for it immediately presumably there's some kind of pixel editing thing you can do or whatever so he's kind of making some assets and you maybe you're getting some stuff on the screen at what point so what it what started like how do you sit down and start that process again it's the part I'm kind of interested in is you know nowadays if I said I need to sit down and make a point click adventure game I know what that is and I know exactly how it's gonna run so I can sit down and debate a bunch of designers in my head or something that's or start typing or whatever and maybe follow John's approach and say I'll just write the simplest thing but in this case we don't even know what it is yet at all it's a new job so what literally like if you can remember I know this is kind of a weird part developing process I can't even remember stuff I wrote in stream last week so I realized her but what do you actually start sit down and start with like what was the thing that we just started doing can you give us any insight because I'm really clear well I knew that the structure of the game was gonna kind of be based on these rooms we call them rooms and objects ok those are the two things rooms objects and the actors those are the three things that made it out so I kind of knew that I had to do that I knew that objects had to appear in rooms I knew I needed some system to be able to tag objects so when you touch them with the cursor and you know all that kind of stuff I knew I knew that stuff you know in terms of the language itself you know I really didn't have idea what the language was gonna be I mean I've kind of heard about lists and I guess the people were using lists for AI stuff and okay I should probably use lists okay okay so you know my language would looked very Lisp like with lots of you know parentheses and all that stuff on it and I I just I very quickly just ditched all that okay and I went to something that was a little more see like okay for like curly braces and stuff that was I think a little more saner well how did you make the decision so because this is actually a mystery part too so when you start working and you start coding up the actors that sort of thing that's sort of part of it I guess you could start in 6502 right you could just start making the hard coded versions but I guess is what you're saying you you actually started hard coding them initially how did you first come to you said fear essentially how did you first make that leap of like you know what if I had an interpreted thing here this would work because that's not again now that might be an obvious issue because maybe you have awareness of all these things but at that time that is not an obvious thing to think of necessarily had you seen other games do this did you have some experience in the past that made you think this would be a good idea like how did that thought come in yeah that came from a guy named chip Morningstar and he works at Lucasfilm and he and another person of Lucas own name Randy farmer they they went on to create habitat which is probably the world's first graphical MMO I remember that and I mean chip was just like an uber smart guy okay and you know I was just kind of talking to him about the whole problem and he just kind of said a whining you do a scripting language okay just something you threaten why don't you do a scripting language so he just knew about it from some other situation yeah I mean you know at the time he infocomm had a script yes right I mean they didn't code their stuff and you know Sierra had one is yeah so I mean it wasn't something that was totally and right for but you know getting a whole you know compiled scripting language working on a Commodore 64 you know there's 64 K of memory FS machine right and so that was you know that that was something that went really on a Commodore you know that I think that was the leap I had to make was building a whole interpreted language that ran on this little 64 K machine you know I kind of had to convince myself a little bit that that was a good idea yeah well and so in deciding to take that step was really what you're thinking there's like okay if we had a scripting language it will be easier for me to script or was that more of a decision like if we had a scripting language other people could start tweaking a lot which because later on it probably that that thing changed but a tin maniac mansion what was that yeah in in maniac mansion you know I was very idealistic okay at the time and I you know I kind of thought you know I'm gonna build this scripting language that's so natural you don't even have to be a programmer right okay that I can hire like writers right and they can come and they can use my scripting language and they can build these games because this thing is just so brilliant you know that it's it's not even like programs they just describe the game so so I mean that was kind of my initial thing and and if you look at the scum language you know the commands in it are very verbose because I was trying to make things be very clear about about what was happening you kind of want to look very English like yeah exactly you know and so a lot of the commands in the language are kind of like that but I mean at some level you you just can't get over the fact that whoever is doing this needs to understand basic logic they have to understand you know if if then statements and all of this stuff that goes on and there's just no way around that yeah kind of stuff so you know the language could be kind of verbose and you know English like and very freeform in its structure you know you didn't you didn't pass a bunch of anonymous parameters to functions you know instead you said actor act and then you could just put costume this and just you know run on all of your stuff across it so that's why it was it was a kind of a verbose language and it didn't look very programmer now you're gonna make this scripting language for the game obviously you know nowadays it's like oh well you know we're gonna type the script in the script window and then the games running and we'll just alt tab between them or they're on the same screen and my multi-monitor right there but we're talking about a Commodore 64 the situation here so how does that like what what did that process of look at the time to because now you're like okay how are people making these scripts and how does the turnaround time look like and I think like again it may not be that relevant to the to the programming of it so much but it's kind of interesting just to think back about how ago screen there was how did that process go what was that like at the time well we we had a we had a wonderful development environment and the the Lucasfilm games group was was kind of spun off or a part of the Lucasfilm computer division which later changed their name to Pixar ok so there's all those people you know they all kind of worked in our group and so we had these like really really smart people and you know Lucasfilm the hi entire company ran on these big mainframe you know fax machines you know uniques machines and everything and one of the things they did was they they built these little things that literally plugged my Commodore 64 into the backs UNIX machine really I would plug the thing in and then I worked on a UNIX terminal on my desk and I had complete control of the Commodore 64 I could pause it I could download stuff to it I could upload stuff from it so I never programmed on the Commodore 64 it was all done on these big UNIX machines I which was very useful because scum was a compiled like yes and so the compiler ran on the UNIX machines it didn't run on the commodore 64 so the whole compiler and the art pipeline and all that stuff just happened on the UNIX machines and then we just download everything in the Commodore 64 it was nice because we could do a lot of hot loading stuff right we could just run things down to the machine you know while I was running and this was you know in nineteen eighties yeah right and I was very very very different years a lot like it is today but very very than what was happening back then yeah that's actually incredible so does that mean that somebody who was working on a particular room for the game could literally have a UNIX thing open modify some scripts and in a relatively short period of time see the result almost instantly that's insane so that is insane yeah because we would just we would just push the script down and the other thing about the scum system was you know the comment of 6040 at 64 K a memory right but a lot of that was taking up with the program yeah and you know I actually had only 19 K of memory free for all the assets in the game okay and so you know what I what I had done was I wrote actually chip and written it because he was starting to work on habitat at that okay so he wrote this wonderful memory management system where you know all the assets in the game were kept on this little heap okay and the system was smart enough to understand that okay this stuff's old no one's using it flush it out and if I bring in new stuff just spool the stuff out of memory while the new stuff is brought in right that's not a Commodore 64 right that all this stuff is happening so you know the whole game is just kind of you know almost open-world continuously put all the stuff that just spooled in from the disks okay so I've made the debugging very easy on the from the UNIX theme because we had all these assets whether they were art or scripts we could just pump a new one down to the heap and it would just it would just work right there on the thing so it was a very very quick development so you literally on the Commodore 64 running on the Commodore 64 had hot loadable assets yes during without restart yes it just keeps running and you could swap like the guy with a new bitmap yeah that's that's kind of crazy I don't even know all right I have trouble getting networking today yeah we did have to recut it enter the room you were in right so it wasn't just magical we had to do a quick reload I'll give that yeah Wow okay well so I guess scripting language wise how did you approach that problem I guess I should keep track of time because that's kind of wanted to talk about two things it looks like we have plenty so we're good so tell me a little bit about how you approach the scripting language problem because like you said if that was something that sort of someone said hey why don't you do a scripting language like oh maybe that's a good idea how did you know I mean even how to build such a thing right did you have some experience of scripting languages did you let go get learn scripting there's just in 2031 days or whatever it is I'm sure there was a popular book at the time like did you like how do you even know how to build one because you know again back then we take it for granted now that if I want to learn how to type it into Google how do I build a scripting language and there's some ones to toriel that's not the case so what did that look like well that looked like a couple of things when you know before I got my job at Lucasfilm back when I was in I guess high school I got a Commodore 64 ok so that was that was you know I'd learned programming on the Commodore pets and some other stuff but the Commodore 64 I got one of those and I just thought this was you know an amazing device but the one problem I had with a Commodore 64 is it had really great graphics had wonderful you know sid chip for doing audio none of that was accessible from basic right a bit of it right right if you want to access that stuff you did like peek and poke commands yeah you know to hit the memory and they're super super cumbersome yeah and you know I thought will really be nice if there was actually a basic language on the Commodore 64 that could take advantage of all these graphics right and one of the things I realized when is hacking around with the machine is there's there's like 20 K of wrong in the Commodore 64 where the basic interpreter sets but there's 64 K of RAM so you could you bank out the ROM and then you have a 64 K of RAM to put play with like if you don't need the basic interpreter okay so basically normally the 64 K when the machine starts the 20k of Rahm actually gets moved into the 64k of memory no the ROM actually sits right above it I've been seeing address okay but what I kind of realized was that if I read a bite out of the wrong and then I wrote it back to the wrong it actually wrote to the RAM underneath so what I did was I went through and I copied all of the basic ROM writing it right back out to itself banked out the wrong now I had the entire basic interpreter I see Ram and you can modify and so I started playing with it and I built this whole extension to the basic language called graphics basic okay and they'd added sprite commands and line commands and sound commands and I think I think it's kind of where my love of languages yeah and so when I started doing the scum stuff I kind of had this whole experience with with graphics basic you know of what a language looks like and how you know I understood how basic interpreted the language because they'd hacked into the whole thing and figured it all out so when I was working on this gum system I kind of I knew you know what it was like to go through in the you interpret op codes and all that kind of stuff that I had already done okay so basically your experience with with essentially disassembling basic yes we would call which I did I I printed out the entire basic wrong okay I remember sitting on my bedroom floor with these giant printouts and a pencil you know writing comments because I mean there wasn't it was not there were there were no comments right it was just assembly and so from that you learned how they had done their interpreter and so now you knew here's how I can make it interpret right that's amazing yes okay okay so you you sit down to make the scum version of the interpreter and you're just like okay so I'm kind of get a patterned after what I learned from basic and we're gonna you know we have the UNIX terminals so we're going to make the stuff that compiles down how you know how long does that take to get working like how when does that start to come online like how much your process was that uh you know that that took quite a while you know I was saying it it probably took me about a year okay from the point that we started working on it so we had a system that we were actually building a game in and you know I I mean I know this isn't actually true but it feels like I almost got fired okay you know I definitely remember being called into my boss's office and having a talk okay about how long maniac mansion was taking and is we're gonna turn into something so it was definitely taking a long time and I was I mean that was just pure inexperience you know at building we were trying to build well sure and it's very ambitious for the time it sounds like the hooking it up to a fax machine so I want to take just before I move on because I want to talk a little bit about what you're doing now as well and so I wanted to ask one other question kind of to set that up a little bit which is that one of the things that I mentioned kind of in the introduction as well is that one thing I noticed about the the Lucas arts games kind of right from the very beginning so I like I said didn't ever have a chance to maniac mansion but certainly in Secret of Monkey Island and in everything that sort of came at RIT until I don't know maybe something like grim fandago where they went back to maybe like direct control I felt like the click to move implementation in those games was much better than everyone else's click to move in for an implication maybe that's a complete misinterpretation of what I saw but you're right but I wanted to ask about that problem specifically so at some point and I guess I don't know what this point was but at some point you decided I don't want to drive this guy around I want to just be able to click to move him now was that's when you decided early on or late on that was early on that was a part of the whole point click interface was we just okay to touch everything we didn't have a mouse the Commodore 64 was a choices a joystick but you know we knew we wanted to move the cursor around and everything was just clicking looking screens you click to walk okay so that original design document either includes or when we were making it we already had thought of we don't really want you to drive the sky we wanted to click OK which I guess makes sense because if I already have to be clicking on the menu things what am i driving with like ant and so it's kind of forces the issue a muster so you have to approach this problem now it's like okay this is actually quite different than basically anything that I see at games at that time all other games are pretty much direct control whether it's an arcade game or a Sierra game you're driving the guy around so how did you approach that problem initially was it a big deal for you or was something just did like what what was the mindset there and how did that go well the issue is obviously pathfinding yeah is I you know I wanted I wanted to be able to click anywhere on the screen and I wanted the character to figure out how to get there yes if it was possible for the character to walk from point A to point B and he had to walk around the table and between some chairs and you know around the lamp I wanted him to do that right I didn't want him to walk in a straight line and get stuck yeah against the dining room table ready walk around the table so that became you know a you know a pathfinding issue and you know I don't I don't exactly remember kind of the genesis of you know how how it all came about but we used the system which was which we called WAP boxes ok and and what it was was you know if you think about the room yeah no it's it's kind of a flat but think about the floor then and I I would just put these boxes and they were literally squares ok because we didn't have the CPU power to even have angled lines and figure out you know the intersection some kind of rectangle so they were boxes you know the lock boxes and I would just you would just I would just them on the floor as many of them as I needed and you know make sure that there was an overlap you know on the lines okay so all of the rectangles are slightly overlapping is that what you mean they're they share a pixel in common so exactly overlap they they they escalate at this point if you okay all right okay yeah and then and so you have all these boxes that litter the floor about where you can walk now the hard part is well how do you pass right right and today I mean you just don't worry right you do some a star thing you know whatever it is but you just didn't have the CPU on a wait 0.8 you know megahertz and I was 6502 so you know that the idea that he came up with is you just do a lot of pre-processing and and so I had all the boxes there was like box 1 2 3 4 5 6 ok and I had this two-dimensional grid and you you look at the box you were in so you were in box 1 okay you wanted to go to box 8 okay so you just you look up in the grid you know box 1 I want to go to box 8 and that number right there was the next box you want to walk into ok so and so then and I knew those connected they had to right so then it was very easy to find the connecting line and I would just walk to the center point of the X Box so that's like Dijkstra's algorithm did you know that at the dawn so you fall on just figured it out yourself and worse than that in that little matrix yeah that was something that we we had to build by hand ok we didn't that wasn't pre-processed we'd lay down all the boxes usually we went to the text editor and we lay out that little grid of where you could go so it was it was kind of a a cumbersome process to set up walk boxes but end result in the game yeah is instant so basically you would click somewhere it would no that's in well first of all it would just look to see through all the boxes if in any of these box it's not in the box you're not going to go there or do try to go as far close as it could he tried to do he tried to cope classical so how did that work do you find the closest box it was it was a bit it was a vertical line ok so it basically said like believe searching until we so I find a box there and then I basically set some global you know not global but some state for this actor that's like this actress trying to go to box blah so every time his box you know every time I update his movement I go what box is he in figure out the direction to the next box and go well how does that how are you encoding stuff like that like what direction go from box to box it was really just straight lines okay and you know you had to be clear careful in your boxes because I knew that what what the actor was going to do was go from the point they were standing to the midpoint of where the two boxes intersected and so I just kind of had to make sure I mean sometimes you know we'd have to put a couple of extra boxes just to make it a little bit you know feel right but it was I mean it was pretty brain-dead you know what I was trying to do that's well so that's like a mystery that I've wanted to know for I guess what 30 years now thank you very much yeah it became a little more sophisticated you know by the time Monkey Island rolled around we could do trapezoids okay so the truck just to make less boxes so yeah so we could do like trapezoids it's slowly evolved so let's jump forward now to thimble we'd park right and you're going to this is the only question I think that I've asked you beforehand so I kind of a little bit know the first answer but everything else I don't know so you're gonna make another adventure game and obviously like I mean to to drastically exaggerate if you wanted to you could literally go get someone's reimplementation of your thing which is probably in the public domain now some scummvm you could use so when you sat down to make a new adventure game in like what it was 2014 or 2013 we've worked in December last year December last year okay so so 2014 you're like I'm gonna make a new one mmm how did that decisions like hot what was the motivator for that decision the motivator was again it was Gary Winnick you know he when I were just talking one day about adventure games and and we're talking about modern adventure games you know versus kind of the old classic point-and-click games and it really kind of you know it felt to me that adventure games have lost that charm okay they had back there okay and I really wasn't sure why they had but if it just felt like they kind of lost that charm until Gary and I were talking about you know what what that was you know maybe it was just our innocence of the time yeah it was that it was a brand new genre and it was just magical yes there's not anymore we just when you said that charm you don't really even know what i'd loveo said you're just like i felt like there was a charm here and that term is definitely gone yeah I have no idea what that is and you know we were just kind of talking about that and we didn't really know what it was and you know we started talking about what we should just make a new one yeah we should make one exactly like we made them back then with the same sensibilities the same you know kind of art style everything and just see if we could capture that truth or maybe that charm was it has just been lost to time yeah you know in some way and you know so one thing led to another and we decided to do a Kickstarter for it okay you know Kickstarter is kind of based on nostalgia tend to do very well yes you know so so you know we figured well we've got kind of a perfect yeah opportunity to do this so yeah we did we just did a Kickstarter on it which was successful and we really have approached the game very much as let's just pretend we were back in 1987 and we're making a point and clicking okay let's just use all the same you know ideas that we had back then and see if we can somehow you know we capture that that charm in kind of the way we design and the way we build it the way we kind of think about the game and so building a new system for it is kind of part of that whole mentality would that be an accurate statement meaning like we want to create a new VM for example because that's what we did and we're going to do that again it wasn't specifically that I mean I did spend a little time looking at current adventure gaming guys to see if any of them would do what I and I very quickly discarded that okay and I think I think most of it is I mean I love building game engines and I mean I kind of think in some ways just you know when I design a game it's really just an excuse to build a game engine that's that's all it really is right and so you know I think a part of that kind of recapturing everything was you know I you know it's like what we'd kind of promised to the Kickstarter backers was you know they can relive playing a classic adventures again kind of like you know that there was this game we made back in 1987 they've just been discovered right that they can relive it but but I think in a lot of ways it was more is more about us not to relive making it the the classic game again and you know I do love making you know game engines and adventure game images and that kind of stuff so so that that became a very enjoyable part of the whole process for me and so when you started building you know this this engine from for the new game what like and I guess it's a little bit difficult like I said you know I want to make sure I don't go too far over time or anything but like approaching that obviously there's a bunch of stuff that gets learned before this the I'm sorry after the stuff of maniac mansion right because you've got you went through your secret my key and secret Macallan to it and obviously there's other people also doing games like you know fate of Atlantis or something that are using your system so but the system itself is kind of growing and evolving so obviously what you just described and you know like you said triangular walk boxes or sorry trapezoidal lock boxes etcetera etcetera basically like you know from wherever that sort of ended in your wherever your thinking process ended and I guess maybe a humongous you maybe would have revisited a bunch of design ideas for internals there from that starting out now or is what you're building similar to the last thing you built that say humungous or something I don't know if that's the most current if that was like the most current architectural thinking that you've done the problem or whatever how similar is it would you say like how much is the same and how much of its different like what's what's the give me little ideas it's it's fairly similar okay you know I wanted you know I wanted the structure of the language to feel a lot like you know the structure okay this gum system had okay rooms are laid out and objects were laid out and objects had verbs and the way that the code for the verbs was embedded in the objects all that stuff I you know I felt would work really well for adventure game so I I definitely replicated you know all of that in the new system so I'm interested in one thing you said there the code for the verbs is embedded in the object so that means that when someone's designing something they design the I guess unpack that so don't know yet it's like well if you look at the code right you you would you would you know object and then you define an object object a front door okay curly brace yeah and then you'd have you know the name of the object and flags for the object and yeah variables for the object then inside of that you would then have a statement that says verb open okay curly brace and a bunch of code and a close brace so that was the code that got run when you opened the object okay that code got run and you know that that just always kind of made a lot of sense to me so closes structure it's sort of it's its own it's like a literal object-oriented programming like we literally have objects and they literally do encode the things they can do in reality in this game right if that makes sense yeah okay and so that's kind of just the the general idea when the designer script or whoever's coming in to do this particular presentation they think in terms of objects more in isolation in that way and is that so that you can make multiple is that is is it the standard maybe object-oriented I guess approach there where it's like the idea is that I can just code one door and and stamp them down or like why why do you like that I guess so what was the benefit I like that idea because it focuses kind of the the function of the thing in one place okay right if there's a a door or there's a key or there's a you know rubber chicken or whatever it just keeps everything compact together this is the rubber chicken of the pulley in the middle object right these are all the things that you can do with the object and the code is just right there close you know to it so it's basically like an organizational technique if you will it's like so at some level it doesn't actually matter whether the things embedded in this or not but it what does matter is I kind of want to know object all the things that can do because that's like sort of the way I want to look at this game thing right does that become like are there problems there because like thinking about like regular kind of code and maybe this doesn't happen as much in adventure games but like in in regular code you end up with problems where it's sort of the interaction between the objects is the complex part and so it's difficult to sort of partition it off into separate things is that not really a problem in adventure games or it is and I guess that's a question it's a problem I mean you know you're you're using objects with other objects and entries you know using key with the bit right and so you know you do have you know the door object and the key object at some point you know one of the twos use verb they're gonna get called and it's going to pass the you know the key into the doors use okay so you do you know you do have to deal with all right but that on the whole doesn't isn't the like I guess what I'm saying is you're not so concerned about seeing the code organized that way like pairs of objects because that's the less common case I guess is that yeah I mean yeah I think about things as the object is the object and what can you not this was a four object area program I know I mean I don't think C++ it was anything more than a preprocessor at that time right so so I mean I didn't know anything about that that was just kind of the way that so you know working on the new game was there any big like and maybe the answer this is no because I guess you did have a lot of time to refine it since you know you actually did two whole company's worth I guess right you Lucas ones and the humongous ones what you both had an interpreter well I guess it's come both times but it's like your you know your evolves him your evolved scum I don't know what that some scum I've been evolving there it is it's wonderful so was there anything that you sat down on like the VM side of things or the scripting side of things was there anything that you went into it going you know yes I've done this a billion times but I really this time I kind of want to solve problem X we just never got it like was there anything like that but you sat down thinking about or was it all the way just like no like we're pretty like I was pretty happy with where we ended up you know at sort of like maybe at the end of the humungous titles I feel like I got most of the problems I want to solve or was there some things that you're just like this time I'm not gonna have problem extra this time I'm gonna fix this thing that always bothered me does that make sense this question there was I don't think there was a big thing again you know I was trying to replicate those yessuh games and I knew exactly what I needed to do to do that and I really did feel that the scum language did what it needed to do with that stuff I mean there's you know the scum language was compiled so you know you'd make changes and you run a compiler and it would compile it and then you'd upload it you know now the compilation just happens in the engine room right so you with it there's a bunch of steps that have kind of been removed you know I no longer need a heap right because I basically have infinite memory you know it to work with so there's a bunch of things that are simpler to deal with but I always like the structure I like the way the multitasking work bents comment replicated all of that it just it just it worked for me so so how did the multitasking work since come well the monkey the multitasking with one scum you're they're basically scripts which was a logistic functions right and and this is like we were saying in the door if I have door open there's some code in here that would be sort of the type of thing we were talking about yes yeah so that's gonna execute in this commune right and but but the thing the thing that I you'll want to do with this gun system was I wanted the objects to be you know a little bit self-contained okay like if you know the clock needed to tick and it needed to move its little pendulum yeah I just wanted to have a little piece of code that just moved right I didn't want to have to have a big state engine that you jumped into and you had to spawn out to all the different pieces precisely I just wanted a little function so the one of the coolest things to me was the scum system had a do loop that had no until or while okay it was just do open brace close brace right and it would just run like right and so that script would just sit there and do whatever it needed to do and you could spawn off all these different scripts for all these different objects and really let the objects deal with themselves in a way and how do you do I mean I guess for the most part in in most circumstances you're describing these do loops I would know that I wouldn't have to execute one if I'm not in the room with that object but I would imagine sometimes maybe I even do and so like how did you how do you manage the fact that we could have tons of objects doing do loops and which ones do I do now like what did that sort of look like I guess is that well there were two kinds of functions there were global functions and local functions okay local functions were local to the room so when you left the room all of the threads running that were local functions just got killed killed right so you didn't have to manage that so only the global functions were the ones that would and objects could implement global functions or local functions inside them so you gotta just say this is something has to happen all the time or something only happens when you're in the room with this particular object or whatever yeah like the clock ticking you only care about that I can see if the clock is there where another function this may be you know waiting for the shopkeeper to get back from looking regular swordmaster yes that's got to be a global function that's a surprise I see so all right so it's taking the example that I asked before with the walk system right the walk box and so on so tell me a little bit about your approach to that now right because like again at the time like we were saying like okay I got to make all the boxes and then we by hand put in like the thing but the time you had gotten to say the like maybe the end of the loop sorts of slices say monkey Alan - were you still manually entering in the walk paths or did you already kind of yeah no we still manually okay so how about end of humungus we didn't we didn't have wok boxes because the characters in the humungous games they didn't really kind of walk around the rooms in the same I guess they kind of animated yeah yeah they were there were more animated stuff so they didn't really have to path fine okay so now in this game like I've even seen the videos assembly park with you walking the character round so obviously it is pathfinding guess so we have wok boxes yes so what do you still do wok boxes do you still enter it manually no now I don't well I did for about a month the first month I was manually remove myself a hand but yeah I mean the wok box is in you know in the in the new system for thimble we'd Park and there's still walk boxes but they can now just be incited polygons right right they don't have to be you know squares and trapezoids they can just be anything that we can really twist around yeah you know the objects and then you know at runtime you know you know it'll kind of split the you know those polygons up into okay so you like do a generic kind of polygon thing that you can make whatever you want right this is the walkable area and then we will go ahead and test light that for you and also figure out the connectivity that we used to by hand and then then from there the system is pretty similar yeah then it's it's actually very similar okay at that point you know the stuff that happens under the hood is it's just we've removed that that kind of human step that's just all done by robots all right so let me check how much time we got here I don't actually know so 518 I don't even know my handwriting is so bad that I can't even read what I wrote down let's see yeah it's definitely not handwriting here oh this is five 20 it says I think we don't have to so correct me if I'm wrong but this was five thirty five that I was supposed to write down here right so we have we have easily probably twenty or thirty minutes left so this is this is pretty good okay all right so I guess I just kind of want to drill down in a couple things here that we sort of already talked about but that or there may be a little bit more a little bit more processing let's save so you now have a situation and I guess this would have been true for example going back to something like Secret of Monkey Island - or something where you've actually have a fair number of people working on this game right so it's like there's a lot of rooms to create there's a lot of objects a lot of scripts to write that sort of stuff so what's the process like you know what's the toolset like for buildings is like like wok boxes for example right do you tend to do a lot of like rolling tools as necessary like was this a thing where you know I'm maybe maniac mansion I put in the coordinates by hand or something and then later on we make a tool for drawing like if you tell me a little bit about like the tooling up process as you sort of you know go through the various games especially because now I know you guys had like hot loading on a VAX or whatever I just want to know like like what did it actually look like to make this thing because you know there's a couple by the same token you were entering Lockbox things by hand so I have no idea I can't even guess where things would fall on your tooling level if that makes sense yeah we had you know by the time Monkey Island milk rolled around and and really that was because you bet that might be all rolled around will you know we were working on PCs okay we weren't working on Commodores anymore so we had a lot more we weren't doing working on the fax machines at that point - we were doing our coding and compiling on the PCs and were you still able to retain sort of the hot loading stuff when you move that's not as not as nicely really yeah yeah I mean a lot of that stuff went away does that develop you know not really just because there were so many other benefits okay when you're working on a Commodore 64 with 19km heat space yeah you know when you have suddenly 120 km deep space on a PC it's you know it's like Nirvana right so I think you're you're kind of to leave some of that stuff you know I'm the right side so you know tool wise we did have tools we we had our own animation tool that we did okay there was and we had our own character and ritual the tool that we laid out rooms was called flam everything followed the scum okay like flam and mucus okay so all right you know phlegm was the tool that you lay the rooms out in and you know the basic who would bring the art in the all the art was done in D paint okay and so that would just bring in these you know lbm rooms in d paint and I would load him in and then you could go through you know with your cursor and you would tag the objects on the screen okay and you would lay down the lock boxes so that was all done visually okay so there's basically like a markup process that happens in there and so what does that look like today so forth in building fit will be Park similar different I you know I I'm probably I guess the most unoriginal person in the world I'd built a tool that you bring in Photoshop files and you mark objects and you lay down so it's it's like it is exactly the same process yeah it is well hey man if it works it works yeah okay and so what what sorts of stuff happened and and maybe the answer is people just got really good at it or what but what sort of stuff happened once you start expanding even perhaps on me and Ike mansion I don't know but obviously it probably didn't have much of a much you could do about it but maybe later on you know that scripting sort of system and like the scummvm and all that stuff that you're starting to make a significant chunk of what happens in the game is going through this system it becomes hard with no tools perhaps to debug problems like because we don't know you know why did the clock stock ticking we don't know right at what point or you know did you start having or did you ever have like tools for looking at that was there inspection that's our stuff how did like what what did that sort of looked like yeah I mean once we didn't have the UNIX machines where we could yeah you know look at all the memory you know we had to do that on the PC okay so tell me a little of that so on the UNIX machines you would actually just sort of freeze the cameras to see for his execution mm-hmm and just you just inspect the memory respect the memory yeah okay that was that was pretty crude okay but by the time that the the PC version came about you know we all had kind of second monitors you know we bought like you know cheap black-and-white okay Achilles monitors okay and so we had you know the main PCB we had a secondary black-and-white monitor which we did all the debugging in okay and you know at that point we could do source-level debugger so you know we could stop a we could single step in the source code would just show up on the secondary monitor and we could just you know through the lines in the source code so you actually had fairly ER that's on maniac mansion even know that's who never shipped on the PC yeah we never had that okay so that was on Monkey Island or that was that was started with Lulu's really the first full PC game okay and so at that point you guys decided hey we should probably have a debugger if it's tough there's so much it's hard to like actually figure out swinging on scripts let's do it here Simba we'd park thimble we'd park I don't have a source-level debugger no kind that's one thing I don't have that I hope to write you know someday so I can do that the debugging is a lot easier I mean the language is a lot more dynamic so you know there's like a little little debug window which I can actually type in commands your actual language command I say you know call functions change variables and and you have some kind of dumping I assume so you like print out this object so you kind of it's back to printf okay so basically like in some sense now in thimble you park you rely and I guess that's typical like a top level or something like this to people called like the ability to typing code dynamically gives you the ability to sort of like okay well I can go in and if I'm wondering why something's doing something I can printouts in the state or I can also kind of twiddle with things and see if that you can choose what it was or you call functions can you kick their game into a certain state and do you do a lot of fun we park in terms of creating those scripts or do you like is that do you have people who are doing game scripting at is it is it more similar to like the monk down case right yeah and you're doing yeah there's one other person David Fox and you know it coincidentally he was the other scripture I mean II act mansion okay right so so it's exactly because yeah when it was the artist management right and I'm you're the management and scripting and David is doing the script it's like we're all just older and yeah so you he does probably the bulk of the scripting you know I my time is probably split between you know building the engine and doing scripting stuff although most of my scripting tends to be more experimental stuff it's like I'll add some new feature and so I'll program a part of that and it needs that feature to see yeah we're David will then kind of go off and do more than that so are there any new features in the VM that you're using now there so that's built now that we're like very different from the scaling was there was there anything or is it like no no like it is basically scum like I just kind of did you know a new take on the exact same thing or was there like have you experimented you say especially when we say experimental scripting for features are those just features that used to be in scum that you have an implant in yours yet or those new features we're like I think it would be nice if adventure games or players had this I mean there are a lot of new features just just to make you know in the language I've got coding things okay functions we can call you know the game is all kind of you know classic 8-bit you know art stuff except we have shaders okay and then do lighting okay so so the lights in the world actually project light okay out and they actually shade the characters as they walk ice engine and so you know there's stuff like that this kind of new and you know so you know I create commands in the language to be able to control the lights because I see the lights to be able to blink on them all these other things so it's just tying you know all of these new you know features that we have in the engine back into the scripting language and how all that kind of stuff works but what if the charm of old adventure games was that they didn't have lighting you're getting Europe you're ruining that one you know you never know right it's like I guess there was some though I guess when I when I did the Kickstarter it's like my goal was it wasn't to make a classic adventure game the way they were yeah it was to make a classic adventure game the way you remember them okay right because people don't remember those games exactly like they were right they they kind of extrapolate the graphics out to much better than they realize it and so I wanted to be able to kind of remain true and pure to the 8-bit stuff I see but I'm not opposed to using shaders I see it's a really nice you know subtle lighting effects on everything because I think that's the way people remembered those game okay and that makes sense so it's kind of like saying we're trying to we're trying to reproduce your memory of Monkey Island not the actual Monkey Island because the Accu Monkey Island you might be like ah that doesn't look so good exactly so we want to take that away so it's got a walk I guess almost like a fine line between it can't look like a completely modern game because then it obviously isn't Monkey Island but we can't go all the way back to exactly what it looked like because it's too far so you're kind of like in this middle ground of trying to like nail what did you remember is the feeling is this feeling feeling of dying those games and and you know we can certainly do a little more with the hardware you know I can actually do scaling you know through the GPU and I can do stuff like that now that what's your approach been - this is kind of a little off topic but I just kind of realized I hadn't even written this down what's your approach been to music over time because I feel like you know in in sort of the I want to say monkey island to maybe it kind of had very very advanced interactive music for its time period right I'm used system yeah the I'm use thing and and then like I don't really know what you guys did with the humongous titles necessarily because a lot of those actually featured more heavily sort of recorded like produces stuff which couldn't probably be so interactive but what's your what was your feeling about those such there was that something you really weren't that interested in anyway and maybe some other people went off and did it or did you care a lot about the music and what's your approach to it now can you give me yeah like I said this was never on the list but I just kind of thought of it and I was like should ask well I mean the I'm you system which did probably one of the most amazing interactive music systems I've ever seen okay and it was it was amazing and I was incredible to work and it was it was time-consuming we had you know one whole game scripter who did nothing but look in all the music really for stuff for mochi I own too so you know it was intensive to do that kind of stuff but I mean is really became not possible with the whole digital revolution of stuff because I'm use was still just playing maybe steel and MIDI cards or whatever and when digital music hit the scene it really couldn't you couldn't do what I'm used it anymore and and so I think it just kind of lost a little bit of that stuff but you know music the music in thimble we Park I kind of described as fully modern I'm not a big fan of like chip tunes and I'm not a fan of that stuff and and so I just I felt like music kind of embodies such a kind of an emotional tone fair game that I really just wanted the music to be to be full and really nice and do you think that like so is that something that's kind of missing nowadays in some sense would you say like your description of the I'm use system or or I guess the results of the IBEW system and having gone to digital and sort of losing most of that is that something that you think we kind of need to get back at some point like as a technological problem like what or do you think the games don't really suffer much from not having that technology like what's what's your take on it as someone who's made games with and without yeah I I think really sadly I think music is kind of ignored and it's it's too bad that it is I mean I'm not a music person I don't know nothing about music sorry I could not I do not play an instrument I couldn't name the notes I tell you right so you know I kind of entrust that there are other people that do that kind of stuff very well but I really enjoyed working with I am you system I enjoy kind of interactive music you know the in the music the thing about the music in monkey on the - and the immune system was that was one continuous piece of music yes from the time the game started until the game ended and but as you kind of move through the world it just slowly changed to match the different rooms you were in the different areas of the game you ran and it was just it was seamless and flawless and I missed that yeah I miss I like having that that non-stop music going on but it does need to emotionally change as you work your way through the world and it just needs to happen very subtly so you don't realize that so what's your approach in timbal we Park to this we just kind of blend between yeah I mean the pieces were the approach that we're using the tempo we park as the musician is writing a whole lot of these little ten-second little pieces of music and he's writing them so they can chain so the end of one piece can chain to the beginning of you know virtually any other piece and I just have these pools of music and I can just switch pools and so the most that you'll lag is ten seconds well it kind of finishes one piece and then transitions into another piece so we can do just kind of wall-to-wall me that's not that far off from my muse then it's time you sense it's not I mean it's getting some of it but I'm you'd do it on a note by note basis right we're here but that 10 seconds but so in some sense you are I guess trying to sort of recapture that same feel because obviously you know you could have done something worse like I fade one out and fade the other one in right so you're you're actually kind of going to a certain distance that actually minigames don't go like minigames actually will not have music that can change in that way they just kind of like fade in and out things or it's what we're trying I don't know how successful I'll be but I mean there's a lot of work for the musician right yes he has to make sure that that a whole bunch of pieces yeah kind of chain into other pieces too much abruptness yeah kind of carry over it's a lot of work on his part yeah all right well that's actually very interesting I didn't know that let's see let's see how we're doing on time so I think we're kind of getting to where we should probably start wrapping up I think I got actually most of the things that I wanted to ask but I will point out the fact that earlier in the day when Mike Acton was up here he wanted to know if creating cut scenes had always been a problem and he wanted to hear that from the person who did you guys even coined that phrase yes I want to say you're like the people who introduced the phrase cuts in history so tell me a little well first we might as well since this is this is entirely self-indulgent for me tell me how that comes about like games don't have cutscenes and now they do what what happened I mean games had interstitials yeah games had little canned animated sequences that was not something we created the word cutscene yeah that was something that we definitely coined and and it came from in maniac mansion you be playing the game and the game would literally just cut away and show you what was happening in doctor friend's lab and Merced in his room or weird Ed's room or something and I mean it did it very crudely in the fact that there was just a little timer running and you know when 18 minutes expired it was just no matter what you were doing right you could be writable of solving some really important puzzle and we just cut away gotcha and so they were scenes that cut away from the game yes they were called cutscenes and there was even a and in the scum language called cutscene okay and it was it was very sophisticated command in that when you'd run a cutscene it would kind of save the game state away right go off and do the cutscene and when the cutscene ended it would just automatically restore the game state to where you might save before so it kind of takes the vm state at this time dumps it go load this entire state and then as soon as we're done it's kind of like a you know an excursion if you will where it's like and then we're just gonna like full-on romp over that with the new thing yes okay okay so that's actually probably one of the harder things to implement in scum because everything has to work right through that well that was I mean that was definitely a sophisticated yeah yeah really powerful so Mike wants to know where cutscenes always a foul like like our cut seat where cutscenes I guess implementing them was but I mean for the artist creating them and that sort of stuff no no they weren't they weren't a problem okay because you're doing something wrong I don't know what to say but somewhere between Monkey Island they weren't a problem because they were all hand coded right right then we didn't have a tool that we built these cutscenes on if we needed their Sedna to walk around the room while she was saying something we literally had code that walked her here then water there so we didn't have that came that seemed you know ask that export problem that you know cutscenes have today because you know they're coming out of these big tools is that so I should ask that actually about the sort of we talked about the multi processing thing and creating cutscenes that sort of stuff because my recollection again and it's been a very long time I guess since I played it but my recollection even even in Monkey Island but I think almost certainly in muck down to there were definitely places where the the and putting away sort of what your definition of cutscene was there there are definitely places where scripted sorts of things happened in conjunction with the player still having the freedom to do things right so there were times when something relatively elaborate like this guy is gonna go walk off the screen and go somewhere we you didn't actually freeze the entire players ability to do stuff I remember there being some concurrency there even like I said as early as monkey on and maybe that's my memory being bad but that's my that's correct what did that kind of look like at that time because you know that's sort of a really hard problem especially you know again when you're talking about a very limited system that has a lot of constraints to even just do the basic stuff it does now we're talking about sort of this sort of thing that was like you know half-life 2 was struggling to do these sorts of things right so we're talking about how do we have the ability to script something that has to happen but we don't really know what the player was doing at this time was that something you guys thought a lot about or was it just because hey we tried to keep it so that really wouldn't be a problem or what like what was that leg at a time because that must have been that was a really early attempt to do something like this and you know it went surprisingly well it's a really hard problem yeah because you know I think players intrinsically just want to up everything you do ok they just do yeah and so you know it's it's it's it's not that we could have the scene where you know you're following the shopkeeper into the forest to find the swordmaster we really couldn't plan that the player was going to do exactly what we wanted them to do yes follow behind him yeah stay in the back no it's not what players do when players want to run up in front of him yeah well other things so yeah I mean we had we had to do with it we had to deal with all that stuff and I think you know the way we solved a lot of that stuff is is you just cheat as much as you can okay you know so when the when the shopkeeper is walking from his store to the certain master he's not literally walking through those rooms right he he walks to the door and he leaves and then we just kind of do a little bit of timer stuff there's just a timer running and so when you walk into the next room we just put the shopkeeper close to the exit and just have him walk off this possibly camera and if the timer had went went too far then you just lost them you didn't appear ice it's just it's all about just creating weird little shortcuts and cheating your way through the problem as much as you can well I think we are just about out of time yet we are so thank you so much that was like that was extremely enjoyable don't feel like so many things I

Channel: Molly Rocket

Views: 13,984

Rating: 4.9751554 out of 5

Keywords: Handmade Hero, HandmadeCon 2015

Id: cktmhqXMsGI

Length: 71min 27sec (4287 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 06 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/drjeats]

The awesome part of this talk is where he mentions plugging a Commodore 64 into a VAX in order to reload assets on the fly and step the program counter for debugging.

[u/ninomojo]

Both Gilbert and Muratori are guys I have great respect for. It's nice to see them talk together.