The development blog for the adventure game Thimbleweed Park, with posts on engine design, scripting, and testing by Ron Gilbert's team.
HN commenters recommend it as an interesting development blog, noting its writing on engine design and how long the engine and game took to build.
The best answer to that question is the development blog they made for the first game:
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html
At a quick glance: four months for the engine (which they wrote from scratch [1]) and, based on the budget [2], roughly nine months for crowdsourcing and pre-production (setting the overall story and puzzles, deciding on the look of the game, building small proofs-of-concept), seven months for production, three months for testing and bugfixing, and two months for release (which they overshot by three months).
[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/roadmap1.html
[2] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/budget1.html
The original post:
https://grumpygamer.com/april_fools_2022
Ron is developer of the Monkey Island adventure games, while at lucas arts, now the IP is owned by Disney.
So he made another adventure game (similar but different) called "thimbleweed park". I played through. It was fun.
He made a development blog, while making it (it was a kickstarter).
https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com
but now I have no idea if this new thing is real or not...
Ron Gilbert chose Squirrel as the scripting engine of Thimbleweed Park: http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/scripting_test
If anyone is interested, the development blog is full of examples of how it is being used in the game:
http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/scrolling_rooms
http://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/switching_and_inventory
There is a pretty interesting development blog at https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/. Its been a while since I followed it, but at least in the beginning Ron was writing about the game engine design. They also touched upon what you are referring to, and at least for the in-game font you can switch to an old-style mode.
Ron Gilbert is using Squirrel as a scripting language in the game Thimbleweed Park [1]. For someone developing games for as long as he has, I think it lends some credibility to it (though I would still evaluate it before I choose to use it for my use cases).
[1] https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/text_tron_3000
Also, the original Lucasfilm Commodore 64 games, such as Maniac Mansion, were cross-compiled on UNIX workstations, transferred over the network and uploaded to running C64s — way back in 1987! (Source: The Thimbleweed Park podcasts [0], which I highly recommend.)
[0]: https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com