Recent content on Grumpy Gamer
UPDATE: The Thimbleweed Park Dev Blog is now live. 
 I have good news and bad news. 
 First the good news. 

	 




 The good news is that we just started production on Thimbleweed Park 2, due out in early 2028. 
 We will self-publish with the help of a private investor. 
 Mark Ferrari, Gary Winnick, David Fox, Octavi Navarro, Robert Megone, and…

	 




 After some delays with getting console certification, I’m happy to announce the release of Xbox , PlayStation and Switch (and Steam update) of Death by Scrolling on April 16. 
 Console and Steam feature a big update that includes a new playable character, new world, new powerups, new stuff and new fun. We completely reworked your ability to customize…
Yet another year slips by and Grumpy Gamer remains 100% April Fools’ joke free. 
 It kind of feels like there are less and less April Fools’ jokes, probably because the whole world is turning into a April Fools’ joke. 
 P.S It my not be April 1st when you read this, it’s because I now live in NZ. Earth spinning and all. 


	 




 I’ve been very critical of AI but have never really used it in depth and I feel that needs to change. 
 Don’t criticize what you don’t know. 
 I’m going to ignore the moral, ethical and privacy implementation of AI and just focus on the practical. Morally and ethically, AI is a train wreck. But I’m not going to focus on…
Here is a movie I made with my friend, Tom, back when I was 15 or so. We were sure we’d be the next George Lucas or Steven Spielberg. 
 Little did I know a few years later I’d be working at Lucasfilm and Steven Spielberg would call me up for hints on Monkey Island. He couldn’t use the 1-900 number like everyone else. 
 The movie has sound, but it was lost when it was…
Interesting bug in Death by Scrolling. Let’s dive in. 
 This morning I got up to several Mastodon, Forum messages and Steam posts about a crash in Death by scrolling. 
 ferryman.yack(90) Can't find var CHALLENGE_GEM 
 Interesting. Never seen that before and why now? 
 Turns out this bug is in a Daily Challenge, which is why we’re getting a lot of bug reports all at…
I think 2026 is the year of Linux for me. I know I’ve said this before, but it feels like Apple has lost it’s way. Liquid Glass is the last straw plus their draconian desire to lock everything down gives me moral pause. It is only a matter of time before we can’t run software on the Mac that wasn’t purchased from the App Store. 
 I use Linux on my servers so I am…
UPDATE: It is now live at: static-hugo-comments 
 I’ve been cleaning up my comments script for hugo and am about ready to upload it to Github. 
 I added an option to use flat files or sqlite and it can notify Discord (and probably other services) when a comment is added. It’s all one php file. 
 The reason I’m telling you this is to force myself to actually do it.…
This one hits a little too close to home. Like Tim Cain, I am done with making other people rich off my IP. I enjoying making small games like Death By Scrolling and I’m going to keep making games and having fun. 
 You may like the games, you may not, but I’m making what I want. I’m not rich but I can pay for food and rent and make what I want. 

 
 
…
When I started using Hugu for static site generation I lost the ability to have comments and we all know now supportive the Internet can be, so why wouldn’t you have comments? 
 I wrote a few php scripts that I added on to Hugo and I had comments again. I decided to store the comments as flat files so I didn’t complicate things by needing the bloated MySQL. I wanted to keep it as…
The following is a guest post by Robert Megone, the lead tester on Death by Scrolling. 
 Wish List today! 

	 




 Testing Against a Moving Target: My Role on Death by Scrolling 
 Most of the games I’ve worked on over the years have been slow and deliberate.
Narrative-driven adventures like Return to Monkey Island, Thimbleweed Park, Broken Sword 5…
October 28 on Steam 
 I know you’re thinking the same thing I am: “About f-ing time!” 

 
 
 

 You won’t even have to fake an illness to take the day off to play because your boss will be spending the day playing Death by Scrolling and won’t notice you’re gone. 
 Coming soon to Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation. We’re working…
Who doesn’t enjoy a good history lesson? I know I do. Oh please let there be a test at the end. 
 Let me take you back to 2018. We had just released Thimbleweed Park, finished all the ports, done an update, and I am thinking about something new. 
 I was regularly going to Daniel Cook’s Seattle prototyping meet-up and trying to come with a new game to show every two weeks. It…
I want to talk about three things that has fundamentally changed my dev-life. There are a lot of things, like ImGUI, that are very amazing and useful but they don’t provide a general solution across many problems. 
 In no particular order… 
 Git 
 I’ve been using Git since 2010 and it really has changed my dev-life. I’d used version control before that, mainly…
Hi there! I’m Elissa, and I’m the other designer on Death by Scrolling and doing a guest post this week. It’s technically my second project with Ron now, and when I’m not designing my own Roguelike (Dungeons of Freeport), or other games such as Deck & Conn, I’m drinking coffee and fighting drop-bears here here in the sunbaked land of Australia. If you want to follow me on…
“But? Wait?” I can hear you saying, “Isn’t grumpygamer.com a static site built by Hugo? What dark magic did you use to get comments on the static site?” 
 No dark magic. But it does involve a small php script. 
 You can embed php in a hugo page and since grumpygamer.com is hosted on my server and it’s running php it wasn’t that hard. 
 No…
Have I mentioned that you should Wish List Death by Scrolling now, before you finish reading this? 
 Here is the code the runs TesterTron3000 in Death by Scrolling. 
 There is some code not listed that does set up, but the following runs the level. 
 It’s written in Dinky, a custom language I wrote for Delores based on what we used for Thimbleweeed Park and then used in Return to…
I first created TesterTron3000 during Thimbleweed Park (hence the name). It was a simple automated tester that randomly clicked on the screen. It couldn’t play the game because it has no knowledge of inventory or puzzles. It did find the odd errors, but was of little real value. 
 Fast forward to the futuristic year of 2025 and I’m working on Death by Scrolling and need a new…
It is with great pleasure, relief and waiting that we can finally announce Death By Scrolling, one of the most anticipated games of 2025. 

 
 
 

 Wish List now , coming soon. 

I was having a discussion with someone on Mastodon about unit testing games and how it is a next to impossible job. Once clarified, I think we saw eye-to-eye on it, but I do hear about it a lot, mostly from programmers that don’t live in game dev. 
 Testing games is hard. So much of what fails during testing is due to random behavior by the player. Them doing something you didn’t…

	 




 We just got Death By Scrolling running on the Switch. We had to do some optimization because we were doing stupid stuff with rendering the tile map. Modern PC machines are so fast these days that you can do a lot of stupid stuff and it doesn’t matter. Back in the day (queue angry old man) I had to count cpu cycles and every byte of memory was precious.…

	 




 If you haven’t read my previous post about Death By Scrolling way back in February, I suggest you do. 
 Of course this is my lazy way of doing the 2nd promised blog post for Death By Scrolling. 
 In all fairness, I started to write it and it seem awfully familiar so I went back and checked and sure enough I had already written about it. 
 But,…

	 




 I miss the Kickstarter days of Thimbleweed Park where each week I would write a blog post about how things were going and we’d to a podcast. If we were doing Thimbleweed Park today we’d have a video podcast on YouTube. 
 I watch a lot of YouTube videos from indie game devs where they document everything they are doing on their game with a fancy…
When I build my game for testing, it’s a completely automated process from the command line. 
 I type pub.sh --test on the command line and a long chain of events is started. 
 The script pushes to git, which starts the cloud based CI machine (Azure) building the Mac, Windows and Linux executables. 
 When they are done, my local script is notified and they are download locally.…
Going on n+1 years, I proclaim grumpygamer.com to be 100% April Fools’ Day joke free. 
 I realized that I lost a large chunk of the early April Fools’ posts due to moving content from one back-end to another over time. It pains me as I’m sure they are seen as culturally significant and worth preserving for future generations. 
 “Grandpa! Tell us the story of when…
First screen shot from my new game called Death by Scrolling. 

	 




 I started working on this game back in 2019. It started out great and everybody I showed it to loved it, but it was simple. Everyone asked for progression and “game” stuff and over the next six months I proceeded to ruin it. 
 Then a little game called Return to Monkeys island…
I recently asked on Mastodon how a player would expect damage to be computed in an RPG. 
 (base_damage + extra_damage) * damage_buff
 
 or 
 (base_damage * damage_buff) + extra_damage
 
 General consensus is there was no consensus. 

	 




 The one thing people did agree on was that the skill/weapon description should say what the order of…
I’m a big fan of Tim Cane’s YouTube channel . 
 If I was going to have a YouTube channel, I would want it to be like his but talking about adventure games, not RPGs. Maybe someday. 
 So imagine my delight when he posted this: 

 
 
 

 Clayton and I wrote this poem many years ago, but not much as changed. 
 I’ve never met Tim Cane but hope to…
!! P.S. Static site is now live on grumpygamer.com !! 
 I spent the last weekend converting grumpygamer.com to a static website using Hugo . 
 I don’t really know why. The old dynamic site was working fine. 
 It’s still hosted it on my server but there is no php, etc. I may move it to a static site hosting platform. 
 If your reading this, you’re on the new static…
As the world spins into chaos, the one constant that brings stability into your world is knowing that grumpygamer.com will always remains April Fools’ joke free. 

I recently asked on Mastodon about favorite quests. I’ve collected some of the responses here. I apologize that I can’t credit the individuals who posted, but you can find them there. I need to update grumpygamer so I can post rich Mastodon links. 
 If you have a favorite, post it on Mastodon and @ me. 
 
 Baldur’s Gate 3 quest to safe Arabella on the druid’s…
I recently did an interview about speed running Monkey Island (I’ll post a link when it’s available). 
 One of the topics was how speed runners dislike random events and the end of Monkey Island 2 has a lot of randomness around when LeChuck appears. I was asked how this worked and to be honest that was a long time ago and I don’t remember every little scrap of code. It is…
I posted this chain on Mastodon, but am reposting it here… 
 Getting AI to write your game dialog is about the same as getting some C- high school student to do it. At least with the later you be giving a high school student a job. 
 I really hope the TV writers can get something meaningful from the strike. I’m skeptical only because big companies taking advantage of creatives…
All the dialogs in Return to Monkey Island were done in a format called yack . These were created for Thimbleweed Park and (very) loosely based on Ink . 
 During the Secret of Monkey Island and LeChucks Revenge, these were all hand-coded in SCUMM and a pain in the [REDACTED]. 
 The goal is to free the writer from “programming” and focus just on the writing and logic of the…
I got Covid from someone who went to GDC and today is the first day I’ve been well enough to make it to the computer. It pains me to have dropped the ball on my long running April 1st post and to have missed the one year RtMI announcement. 
 Rest assured, grumpygamer.com will always remains April Fools’ joke free. 

** SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THE GAME YET *** 
 Game design isn’t a destination, it’s a journey and this was one of the stops along the way. 
 There are some fun puzzles in here but they all were cut for a reason, mostly pacing but sometimes because it wasn’t as interesting as we thought. Part 3 got cut in half at some point because it felt too long in the…
Click here! 

Compiled by the International House of Mojo 

 
 
 



 
 
 


Jul 17, 2020 
 First official day is Monday but I’ve started setting up Slack and other web services. 
 Jul 18, 2020 
 Ordered Linux machine. Talked to Dave about maybe controlling Elaine for a section of the game. 
 Starting to worry about finding great people. It’s going to be hard because we have to keep the project a secret. 
 Played MI1 again. Taking a lot of…
Nine years ago I wrote a blog post titled “If I made another Monkey Island” and it feels like there are some things I need to say. 
 I can’t remember the exact incident, but the day I wrote that I was feeling down about never being able to make another Monkey Island. I wrote it in a single afternoon, and it was not much more than a stream of thoughts. In the movie version,…
I felt bad about the April Fools’ joke so over the weekend I whipped up the game so no one was disappointed. 

 
 
 


For 18 years the Grumpy Gamer blog has been April Fools’ day free because it’s a stupid tradition. 
 So to mix things up a little I’m taking this opportunity to announce I’ve decided to make another Monkey Island. 

Well, it’s 2022 and everything is turning out exactly as I predicted back when I was 7. Self-driving cars, space stations, the internet. Nailed it. 
 Favorite TV show of 2021 was Only Murders in the Building. 
 Favorite game of 2021 was Loop Heroes. 
 Favorite book of 2021 was Einstein’s Fridge. 
 Favorite rediscovered joy of 2021 was reading physical books. 
…
Placing the last piece. 

	 




 And then disaster stuck while moving it. 

	 




 Most of the debris is still assembled large chucks, so it shouldn’t take long to fix. I’m sure this happened to the real coliseum. 

That didn’t take long to fix and rebuild. I don’t know what is taking the city of Rome so long. 

	 




 Start to finish, it took just over a year. I blame Limited Run Games. 

Holiday repost! 
 Clayton and I did this back in Dec of 2004. Interesting how much hasn’t changed. We’d have more “male” spouses now, something about loot crates and IAP, kissing up to steamers, and maybe change the last verse to be more “indie”, but its shockingly accurate years later. 
 The Twelve Days of Crunch Time 
 A poem by Gilbert and…
We should be done in time for the upcoming gladiator ‘22 season. Tickets are still available. I hear Ferocianus Maximus is going to do well this year. 

	 





After 7000 signatures, some progress. I am getting help. 

	 





Last month I finally got done signing over 7000 cards for the Limited Run Games physical release of Monkey Island. 
 They asked if I would hand sign cards to go in the boxes. Sure, how many can that be? 500? 800? 
 Nope. 
 They had over 7000 preorders and I signed every one of those cards. If you bought one of the LRG Monkey Island boxes you won’t get a Certificate of…