Two side-by-side articles in my news reader from the same site.
I remember the first time I read this I just chuckled. That was 10 years ago and the myth keeps going. It’s been printed (well, web printed) so many times that it is slowly going to become fact and I want to set the world straight.
What is true
During the early days of Monkey Island I didn’t have a name for Guybrush. We just called him the “guy”.
When Steve Purcell was doing concepts for “the guy” he was doing them in dpaint. In dpaint you could select a section of the screen called a “brush” and save it out.
It was these files I got from Steve. I saw the file names so many times that the name “guybrush” stuck.
What is NOT true
I have seen multiple places recount this story (most recently) but they get one fact wrong.
The file I would get from Steve was called guybrush.lbm not guy.brush. All artwork on Monkey Island was done on the PC under MSDOS. MSDOS had a limit of three letters for filename extensions. It could not have been .brush. One of three things is going wrong here.
- People are forgetting or never knew that MSDOS had a three letter file extension limit and the files dpaint saved out where
.lbmor.bbmfiles.
or
- The Amiga allowed longer filename extensions and people assumed we did art on the Amiga. We did not. It was all done on MSDOS using dpaint or dpaint animator.
or
- It makes a better story and screw the facts. Facts are so 2015.
If you read this incorrect fact anywhere, please direct them to this link.
[1] For Monkey Island 1 all the art was gone in dpaint on MSDOS. For Monkey Island 2, the backgrounds were scanned on a Mac using Photoshop 1.0 and then moved to a PC and finished on dpaint.
Thanks to everyone who showed up. If you missed it, here it is…
I use Microsoft’s Azure to do cloud compiles of the c++ engine for my new game. For Thimbleweed Park builds were hand compiled which took a lot of time and was very error prone. More than once I made DEBUG builds rather than RELEASE builds or forgot to change some debug setting back. It’s nice to have builds compiled in the cloud and know they are from a pristine environment each time. I also don’t have to keep a Windows machine (or a VM) around just to do a build.
Cloud builds are also critical for my (slow) move off the Mac to Linux (more on that later).
To compile the Windows build on Azure takes between 6 and 15 minutes which is crazy since I can compile the game locally in 1-2 minutes. Same with the Mac build. For me to get a new playtest or (more importantly) a dev engine build can take 15-30 minutes.
While waiting on compiles to fix a critical bug, I can’t help but imagine Azure is running hundreds of jobs on some pour Windows machine stuffed in the corner of Steve Ballmer’s old and forgotten office. I know this isn’t true, but it’s what it feels like when I desperately need a new engine.
I might give AppVeyor another try now they can do Mac builds. The .yml files for Azure and AppVeyor are annoyingly different so I’ve resisted doing a compile speed run-off.
On Azure you can pay for 2 jobs which does allow the Mac and Windows builds to compile concurrently, but what I really want is to run on less overloaded machines. It’s not worth paying for a dedicated machine due to it being idle 99% of the time. Self-hosting is another option but it defeats the purpose of wanting to make maintaining machines “someone else’s problem”.
Ideally I would be able to get builds in less than 5 minutes.
Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.
For the first time in four years I am slowly remembering a feeling known as calm. I look forward to Jan 21st when I can read the morning news and not feel a sense of dread.
We now have two+ months of a narcissist ranting, blaming, and of course suing. Oh, he also has nukes.
What was I saying about calm? Never mind that.
git switch - is my new favorite command.
The Video Game History Foundation is working to save the history of the making of video games.
On Oct 30th they are doing a live stream special event to help raise money and I’ll be a guest talking about the making of Monkey Island where you can ask me questions (as long as it’s not about the secret because after 30 years I’ve completely forgotten what it was).
Some marking people just don’t understand that people hate ads not because they aren’t targeted, they hate them because they are fucking ads.
The only time I’ve ever enjoyed ads are when I would read Byte magazine as a kid. That didn’t mean everywhere I went I wanted to see ads for 16K of memory being as low as $795.
We’ve started doing some open alpha/beta testing for Linux Delores. If you run Linux and are interested in helping out, visit the Thimbleweed Park Forums Linux Test Topic
Thanks!