On November 18, 2014, Gilbert posted an update to his blog, in which he revealed that talks about the game had begun "several months ago" while he and Winnick had been discussing how fun their time developing
Maniac Mansion at
LucasArts (Lucasfilm Games at the time) had been, and how they liked the "charm, simplicity and innocence" of the adventure games of that era. Winnick proposed that they should make a new game in the style of their old ones; as such, it is designed as if it had been made in 1987 and as if it were "an undiscovered
LucasArts adventure game you've never played before". Gilbert agreed, and suggested that they should crowd-fund it on
Kickstarter. Development started with Gilbert and Winnick building the game's world and story, designing puzzles using puzzle dependency charts, and creating characters around the puzzles. From the start, Gilbert says, they wanted to parody the TV shows
Twin Peaks,
The X-Files, and
True Detective. and was accompanied by a podcast that documented development and included some of their weekly check-in meetings.
Crowd-funding A month-long crowd-funding campaign for the game was launched on Kickstarter on November 18, 2014, with a goal of
US$375,000; people who pledged at least $20 received a copy of the game. According to Gilbert, a lot of the failed transactions were from people who had problems with Amazon, and who then went on to pledge money via PayPal instead; because of this, he suggested that perhaps only half of the $4,890 had been lost. Budgeting was done around the money from Kickstarter, while the PayPal money was to be a safety net, or for potential added improvements to the game. but because of his experience of always wanting to modify engines to do exactly what he wants from them, he decided it would be easier to create his own engine. He already had a 2D graphics engine written in
C/
C++ that he had used for his non-adventure games
The Big Big Castle! and
Scurvy Scallywags, which he decided to use for
Thimbleweed Park;
SDL was used for handling window creation and input, while Gilbert's own
code was used for rendering the graphics. The only other thing that was needed for the engine was a scripting language; Gilbert had looked at
Lua, and while he considered it "easy to integrate and highly optimized", he disliked its syntax. He considered making his own scripting language, but due to time concerns, he chose the language
Squirrel instead.
Updates While the game was released on March 30, 2017, the developers have continuously released updates not only fixing problems but introducing various new gameplay elements. On the June 20, 2017 release, the characters became able to talk to one another (fully voice acted as the rest of the game), which became an inventive "hint system" without explicitly offering specific hints to solve the puzzles. Apart from this there's a more classical hint system which includes calling a "hint line" using the phones available in the game, which offers context-sensitive help. == Spin-off ==