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Well, I'm definitely to blame. I didn't "show up to" any "Steam release" in my entire life. 😅 I understand Duke Nukem guy to a large degree, but the brunt of his 'advice' is easier said than done. The in jokes, the references, the slavish use of the same old formula, that's the stuff that sells. Take a look at Hollywood, heck, take a look at the game industry. The recipe that works is going into innumerable iterations. I hear even Star Trek: Resurgence did pretty well, and that's really The Walking Dead 1.01A. He's asking for larger development teams, well bad news Mister B., we have wall-to-wall game sales in the industry right now. Even in the popular genres, it seems that only two types of game developers can succeed, either a two people development army backed by a bunch of freelancers or a quadruple A 20,000 staff company desperately clinging to making the nth iteration of their most popular game. Wadjet Eye games tried 'something new', and their later games are really great point & clicks with great storylines (and ... less than great puzzles), but apart from 'the other Gilbert', I struggle to think of adventure games that aren't stuffed to the brim with references to Monkey Island. In their later years though, it seems they had lost the power to innovate. They still innovated, naturally, but the new things weren't accepted any longer. Their fans largely expected very concrete things and when these expectations were not fulfilled, bam, Grim Fandangbomb. The problem of the living legend maybe, people expect the same great things from you over and over. Back then LucasArts still had staff willing to innovate with each new games, but the audience had such fixed expectations, petrified the whole company into a statue, a memento of former greatness unable to move its arms and legs.

I don't think he's entirely right or entirely wrong. The concept of "a point and click adventure" is almost anachronistic in itself at this point. The genre is a product of a time when it was the best possible marriage of story and gameplay. Back then no other genre of game could incorporate as much of a compelling narrative and still have enough interactivity for the games press and audience to accept it as a "game." Nowadays, every game of every genre can potentially have just as much story content as The Secret of Monkey Island. Every game can have cinematic cutscenes and relatable characters and comedy and drama beats that land. Everything from the old text adventures to visual novels to Myst to Monkey Island to Ace Attorney to The Cave to Gone Home to The Walking Dead to Life is Strange to The Stanley Parable to Coffee Talk to Harold Halibut are all part of that same legacy, and even games like Psychonauts and Half-Life 2 and Portal and Mass Effect and Fez and The Last of Us and who knows what else are building off of that legacy. If you set out to make a game that just tells a great story, it can look like anything and feel like anything and play like anything. The Adventure Game genre didn't die out at all, it just invaded every other genre. Which means that if somebody sets out specifically to make a "pure" point and click adventure game in the current era, it is a conscious decision to make a game that feels more like Monkey Island than it does any of the thousand other things that it could feel like. Nothing wrong with that, but when that's the direction a game takes, those are the comparisons that it will invite, and those are the fans that it will attract, whether it overtly references the older games or not.

Hi folks. The LucasArts Places Mastodon and Cohost bots have been running strong for over a year now, but I haven't totally forgotten about the other part of this project, a browseable online repository for all the art. Around this time a year ago, I had a look around at all the different javascript lightbox libraries out there, and tried out a few of them. "nanogallery2" seemed as good as any, so I did a couple tests on my site, just to see what a single game's page might look like (ignore the page's CSS and overall visual style, that's just what my personal website uses): http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/maniac64/ http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/monkey2/ One of the difficulties I encountered was in how to handle all the games with non-square pixels (ie everything before Curse of Monkey Island). With HTML <img> tags it's certainly possible to non-uniformly scale an original 320x200 image to be the correct aspect ratio, but there's no guarantee it'll look good in most browsers. For the tests above, I pre-processed the images, doing the same kind of upscale + aspect correct that the LucasArts Places bot code does, effectively increasing the image's size X4 so that the nonuniform scale doesn't look too noticeable. The file size increase, while non-trivial, isn't the biggest concern; it's more that it's changing the original image from the collection, and one of my primary goals here is to provide those images as close to the source formats as possible. Of course, the answer there might simply be to have a "download original" link for each piece of art. I also wanted to present the art for each port of each game "side by side", with the alternate versions just a click away. Here's an attempt at that kind of functionality I just whipped up: http://vectorpoem.com/lucasarts_backgrounds/gallery_tests/multi_plat_images/ Alongside aspect ratio correction, this is another feature that off-the-shelf lightbox plugins don't have - as Ron pointed out, most of them are aimed at photographers. And of course there's always the dream features, like being able to toggle on a CRT shader, and heck maybe even embedding the music for rooms where applicable. And gosh, what if the few backgrounds that made use of color cycling (things like the labyrinth waterfalls from Fate of Atlantis) used something like the HTML5 Color Cycling Demo tech to present those? That's getting wayy ahead of myself, though. So I'm kinda wondering if this means I should try modifying one of the open source lightbox plugins to add these features. Or maybe there's already something out there that would work great for this, that I just don't know about.