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I think I found a silhouette in the background that looks like Guybrush. Has that been discussed yet?

I checked but i'm afraid we found everything.

We're definitely close to more concrete news about the release: The Game Awards' Twitter account responded with a little train emoji...I'm going to take that as tacit confirmation that they'll be showing the game off at Summer Games Fest...probably with a release date.

@KestrelPi have you played the free Delores Thimbleweed Park spin-off game? It was described as A Thimbleweed Park Mini-Adventure started out as a prototype for Ron Gilbert’s new point-and-click adventure game engine and grew into a fun little game. It has a lot of thinking about simplifying and providing a contextually aware interface for point and click games. It’s two years old now but that means it’s probably a good representation of where Ron’s head was at when starting work on Return. Two years of development is a long time (and had Grossman join up, along with a whole team), so its probably not safe to assume “this is how it will be,” but Delores is definitely interesting. I had some knee jerk responses to the UI when I first started playing, but it’s very thoughtful and grew on me pretty quickly.

New post by Ron Gilbert about ReMI: https://grumpygamer.com/dev_diary

But that's in two weeks! How are we gonna keep this thread alive until then?!?

I'm sorry but I think that you misunderstood something in those quotes if you managed to come to this conclusion. Planning a trilogy doesn't mean that you have a set ending in mind nor that you even have any idea of what the ending will be.

I'd be surprised (pleasantly) if the Elaine controlling segment made it, considering how early it was. Also ... if I were Ron, I'd have been tempted to edit that out of the post if it actually ended up happening - leave it as a surprise. The thing that stuck out to me was the comment about the UI. He's mentioned having done interesting things with the UI in a couple of places. It makes me think that what we're going to get is not going to be like the old school SCUMM interface (unsurprisingly) but also isn't going to be like CMI, or even MI2:SE (which I think is the best version of that kind of thing). It makes me think they've really thought about what a verb is. Here's my out-there guess: In the new interface, the verbs available to you change, based on the context. And the context might be where you are, what you're doing at the moment, and maybe even what you know. This introduces a whole vector of puzzles that you can do, because you're not just limited to the same 3-9 verbs that are used in all screens but you can add and drop verbs as needed. It also means you can tell jokes with this part of the UI. Remember how fun it was when all your verbs change in MI1 before you touch the parrot? Imagine that, but stretched across a whole game where verbs can change from context to context for both puzzling and humourous reasons. Personally, I agree with Ron here. The status quo isn't great. And part of that is that verbs aren't very compelling. Basically, when it comes down to it, everything is just use. They are, as Ron has said in the past, cruft. I once went through the entire walkthrough of DOTT, a 1993 adventure game, and even back then there were only 3 or 4 actions in the whole game that couldn't be solved by 'walk to' 'use' 'talk' and your inventory items. Several years ago I had a sort of epiphany while thinking about a set of adventure game puzzles I was designing: inventory items are verbs. When you say 'use banana picker with bananas' all you're really saying is 'banana pick those bananas'. But inventory items are SUPERverbs. You can do all sorts of things with them you can't ordinarily do with regular ol verbs. You can gain them, and lose them, exchange them for something else, they can have a quantity (pieces of eight), they can change over time (mug of grog) and you can combine them together to make new stuff, and that ultimately makes them more FUN to play with than verbs as they traditionally exist in adventure games. If Ron and Dave have designed a new UI which brings some of the flexibility of inventory items to the world of verbs, they might have found a way to make them relevant again. Of course none of this actually addresses how the interface might actually look/respond. For that, I have no guesses.

Two things that caught my interest: 1) the possibility of controlling Elaine as a playable character for a game section was considered; 2) the sections of ReMI seem to be called acts (as in EMI) rather than parts (as in the first three games).

In the words of Fink, "oh no, not this story again!" 😂

There must be something we haven’t analysed yet in the screenshots or trailer. Come on!

We have been pretty much active on SCUMM lately thanks to the fact that the number of maintainers for this engine has grown up to four/five concurrent devs, so please send your bug reports and don't be scared to do so! Yes, the enhancements are on by default!

Idk if anyone follows Aaron Giles on Twitter, but he's recently been tweeting about his progress creating a native intepeter for the Lucasarts games called DREAMM (I believe this was mentioned in Mojo's interview). It seems to be going well, and he recently posted that he got CMI to work, which was the one game he thought wasn't possible to het running!

Thank you for setting up this list! I've just fixed this particular point in ScummVM development version. ScummVM is much more open about fixing/improving this kind of things, nowadays. There's quite a lot of work going into that direction, lately, and there's also a new toggle option that lets you choose between fixing original SCUMM bugs vs. keeping the original behavior, whenever this is possible (I'm also working on improving this part a bit more). Of course, this is a volunteer project, so improvements and fixes will always come from someone's spare time and work, in the end. And developers also need access to legitimate copies of the games: Zak is the only LucasArts title where the FM-Towns version can be bought at a sane price (on GOG), for example 😕 Anyway, I know that some original bug reports were closed quite abruptly, years ago, but nowadays it's worth it to report things again, in my opinion. Not that reporting things mean that they get immediately fixed (you still need someone's skills, time and motivation), but at least having them tracked somewhere (with enough context to reproduce/compare things) will always be helpful if someone is motivated in contributing a fix, at some point Anyway, thanks again for this list! I can't do much in the graphics, UI or sound area for example, but for some SCUMM script issues I'm always glad to help when I can.