{"id":2002,"date":"2015-05-19T16:03:15","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T16:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=2002"},"modified":"2015-05-19T16:03:18","modified_gmt":"2015-05-19T16:03:18","slug":"classic-ron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2015\/05\/classic-ron\/","title":{"rendered":"Classic Ron"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m the player who smiles at your story and attempt to make it serious-like-movie-serious. I\u2019m the player who presses whatever key to skip anything that is not gameplay. I\u2019m the player who doesn\u2019t read\/listen to any existential shout outs between characters.<\/p>\n

I so do not want to run that errand for that generic, lifeless NPC who\u2019s talking and who I don\u2019t listen  to. Having said that, there\u2019s someone who makes me want to follow the story and read everything:<\/p>\n

Ron Gilbert<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I mean, I\u2019m not the only one and Ron got me when I was a kid so I guess he\u2019s like that uncle who tells stories better than anyone in the family and I\u2019m looking forward to the time when he\u2019ll tell a new one. I think there\u2019s a formula:<\/p>\n

Mysterious agency and unexpectedness<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think Ron is like the Coen brothers: the basic plot is always simple but the way it will be treated will be good. You know<\/em> it\u2019s going to feel different. You know Ron treats you like an adult. Thimbleweed Park, his last game: Thimbleweed Park is the curious story of two washed up detectives<\/b> called in to investigate a dead body found in the river just outside of town. [\u2026] Meanwhile, on the 13th floor of the Edmund hotel, Franklin<\/b> wakes up with no idea how he got there. But that\u2019s not the weird part. The weird part is that he\u2019s dead. Spoiler: He\u2019s not the body found just outside of Thimbleweed Park. Wow! That’s confusing. Don\u2019t panic, we\u2019re just as confused as you are.<\/em> All about the journey and not the destination kind of design. I\u2019m sold already.<\/p>\n

Humor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Probably the hardest part. Ron uses that \u201c90s Simpsons\u201d style that always has been extremely efficient, regardless of where you\u2019re from: The Simpsons probably aired there and you probably liked it. You know, the stupid puns and funny little phrases and regular pop culture jabs. The English non-sense, satire all the way… Very efficient stuff and I insist on the international traction at least for my generation. And what is great and that most people miss with humor and story based games is that it functions as a mechanic\/reward: you explore dialogue and it\u2019s going to end with a something funny, you smile next time you\u2019ll try another branch. <\/p>\n

In serious games with serious scenarios, you just go for the obvious and move on. It\u2019s anti-exploratory. Humor solves that in a very elegant way. It is however really hard not to have a patchwork of different humor that works more or less like in most games.<\/p>\n

I think those two marks are also parts of why Kentucky Route Zero is fantastic or how Oxenfree<\/a> sounds pretty awesome though both are darker in tone.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is the puzzle dependency\/story chart for Thimbleweed, still in development<\/a>. Ron says it\u2019s the most complex he\u2019s ever done. The development blog shows once again how making games is hard, even with a \u201csimple\u201d, old school adventure game. $0.6M is not much to build everything around that chart and make it come true.<\/p>\n

Adventure games have a lot more to share with us. We need more awesome authors like Ron.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m the player who smiles at your story and attempt to make it serious-like-movie-serious. I\u2019m the player who presses whatever key to skip anything that is not gameplay. I\u2019m the player who doesn\u2019t read\/listen to any existential shout outs between characters. I so do not want to run that errand for that generic, lifeless NPC […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2003,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002\/revisions\/2003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}