Interesting (two week old) news about Deathspank (Ron Gilbert's in production new game): According to http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=22894, Ron Gilbert's upcoming new game is going to use some sort of Scumm derived game engine.
I'll quote the relevant part here (it's from a talk with Hothead, the game producers):
Then to DeathSpank, which is designed by Ron Gilbert and is "in full production", and is described as "an RPG with Monkey Island humor", and apparently is a Diablo or Zelda-style action RPG. Ron came in with an engine to build DeathSpank, and is an updated SCUMM-style engine. So they now have two almost completely different engines in development - but it's still possible to work.
chrisis wrote:and is an updated SCUMM-style engine
No way it could be SCUMM. They just mean that the engine will look similar to SCUMM games in the end.
Do you think so? After all, the Humongous games (remember, that's Ron Gilbert's previous enterprise) used SCUMM too (so he seems to have some rights on the engine), and since Ron Gilbert is the original SCUMM author there might be a chance that at least the engine could be similiar in some ways. After all he probably has some intimate knowledge of the engine.
Well, of course this is all speculation. That's the reason I posted it into the Junkyard, after all
What "SCUMM-style engine" means is that he is going to reuse the _idea_ of SCUMM.
That is;
A well thought out separation between gamefiles and gamelogic on one hand and hardware specifics on the other hand.
This means it will be easier to make more games using the same engine and to port games to other platforms. The price you pay is that it requires more effort up front.
Obviously the original SCUMM is not in shape to be the basis of a modern action game. It's the SCUMM idea of how to organize a project that has served Gilbert well and that he plans to reuse, not the actual code.
ERKAN wrote:Trust me, I'm sure gilbert knows that not many would like to buy a 2D SCUMM based game today!
What I'd wanna see from Gilbert is Maniac Mansion 3!
Unfortunately, Lucasarts still owns the copyrights to Maniac Mansion so I don't see another game coming out espically since Lucasarts only cares about Star Wars and Indiana Jones.
