Return to Monkey Island

[EdgarMonkey]

Search on YouTube “Return to Monkey Island Demake”. Pixel edition!

I have also another videos from Curse of Monkey Island in pixel art.

[Zaxx]

On 5/23/2022 at 1:20 PM, LUAbar said:

Sorry but I have no doubts at this point, Monkey Island 3a never existed and Ron’s been lying to us all along. Let us compare some of his statements through the years.

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.

[OzzieMonkey]

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.

Edited May 26, 2022 by OzzieMonkey

[Lagomorph01]

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

[Thrik]

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

[Laserschwert]

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

[OzzieMonkey]

26 minutes ago, Laserschwert said:

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

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

Edited May 25, 2022 by OzzieMonkey

[Toymafia88]

2 hours ago, Thrik said:

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

I checked but i'm afraid we found everything.

 

[OzzieMonkey]

36 minutes ago, Toymafia88 said:

I checked but i'm afraid we found everything.

 

Does this imply that Wally the cartographer is also Where's Wally? or do you call him Waldo?

[Toymafia88]

12 minutes ago, OzzieMonkey said:

Does this imply that Wally the cartographer is also Where's Wally? or do you call him Waldo?

Wally confirmed! 😎😂

 

I call him Wally too 😁

[Giorgio]

New post by Ron Gilbert about ReMI:

 

https://grumpygamer.com/dev_diary

[Giorgio]

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).

Edited May 25, 2022 by Giorgio

[KestrelPi]

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.

 

Quote

Thinking about the ui. I hate the current status-quo.

 

 

He's mentioned having done interesting things with the UI in a couple of places.

 

Quote

There is pointing and clicking. That is true. [laughs] Interface-wise, this one does other things, you know—[we’re] having fun and advancing things. It’s obviously not the seven- or nine-verb interface from Thimbleweed or back in the day. We did a lot of playing around when Delores came out, with interface and stuff, and we just kept looking and evolving. An important part of this, in some ways, is keeping and evolving the genre. Not letting it get static, saying, “Well, that’s what we did thirty years ago, so that’s exactly how we’re going to do it these days.” In some ways, that was Thimbleweed Park. So this game, we really have looked at things we can do that are going to be different and better and more streamlined, and Dave and I spent a lot of time looking at the interface going, “What is important to people? What are people trying to do?” I don’t want to say exactly what we did yet, but it is definitely a really fun evolution of the interface.

 

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.

Edited May 25, 2022 by KestrelPi

[Jake]

@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. 

[KestrelPi]

24 minutes ago, Jake said:

@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. 

I haven't but that sounds interesting. Should I finish Thimbleweed first?

[Lagomorph01]

Comments are back on too, and here’s an interesting tidbit by Ron:

(Warning: could be considered a spoiler)

Quote

 

We decided against a playable Elaine because the story went in a direction where that didn't make sense anymore.  It would be fun to do a MI with Elaine is the playable character and Guybrush is the sidekick, but that will have to wait for another game.

Edited May 25, 2022 by Lagomorph01
Spoiler warning added.

[Trapezzoid]

Context lists can cheapen the experience a bit too. You ideally want to come up with an idea and try it. Clicking a hotspot and seeing an interesting option you hadn't considered pop up on the list defeats the purpose. That's just the game telling you what to do.

[Lagomorph01]

Another interesting comment by Ron:

Quote

MI3 is a good game. The only thing I didn't like about it was Guybrush and Elaine never should have gotten married. But what is done is done.

 

Seems like, even though he would’t have chosen that himself, he’s accepting it as canon.

Edited May 25, 2022 by Lagomorph01

[KestrelPi]

1 hour ago, Trapezzoid said:

Context lists can cheapen the experience a bit too. You ideally want to come up with an idea and try it. Clicking a hotspot and seeing an interesting option you hadn't considered pop up on the list defeats the purpose. That's just the game telling you what to do.

 

I didn't really mind that for MI2SE, I tend to think that non-use verbs are needed SO rarely in most adventure games that I'd actually rather have a subtle hit for the rare occasions when they're needed. Also when replaying MI2 I got to see a lot of custom responses I didn't know about because verb would be there when the response wasn't generic, so that was fun.

 

But what I am thinking about more when I talk about context based verbs is the entire list of available verbs changing based on context. We already know Ron likes playing with this stuff. I haven't tried Dolores but I thought it was neat that

 

Spoiler

the ghost character has his own verb set

 

for example, and I always thought it was fun when they'd play with the verb interface in the old games. So why not go all the way, and REALLY play with the concept of what a verb is in an adventure game. Make them fun to explore in a way they usually aren't.

[Toymafia88]

I found this interesting. 

 

It makes sense Ron would need to replay MI1, MI2, MI3 since they need to handle the MI2 cliffhanger.

 

However, since Ron didn't play Escape or Tales it looks like they won't be important or referenced.

 

Somebody on the team must have replayed Escape and Tales though if they want to avoid contradicting the canon.

Edited May 26, 2022 by Toymafia88

[Jake]

I mean, Dave Grossman helped make Tales. He was in charge of the writing and design department at the studio that made it. He’s probably aware of what’s in it. 

 

5 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

I haven't but that sounds interesting. Should I finish Thimbleweed first?

Yeah probably. It’s mostly standalone but has some post-game narrative stuff that could be a spoiler. 

[demone]

1 hour ago, Toymafia88 said:

I found this interesting. 

 

It makes sense Ron would need to replay MI1, MI2, MI3 since they need to handle the MI2 cliffhanger.

 

However, since Ron didn't play Escape or Tales it looks like they won't be important or referenced.

 

Somebody on the team must have replayed Escape and Tales though if they want to avoid contradicting the canon.

 

Escape had a lot of contradictions to the overall story and lore, so I think just avoiding references to that one is probably for the best. I actually really enjoyed that game, but it did make a lot of contradictions with Herman's new backstory. Ron has already said in an earlier tweet that Herman will be back to being just an old man. As for Tales, Ron did collaborate with Dave and Telltale on the overall story direction and did reference Guybrush going to the afterlife in his Grumpy Gamer blog, so he seems to remember the overall layout of that story well enough. If not, he has good ol' Dave who helmed the project.

Edited May 26, 2022 by demone

[OzzieMonkey]

23 minutes ago, demone said:

 

Escape had a lot of contradictions to the overall story and lore, so I think just avoiding references to that one is probably for the best. I actually really enjoyed that game, but it did make a lot of contradictions with Herman's new backstory. Ron has already said in an earlier tweet that Herman will be back to being just an old man. As for Tales, Ron did collaborate with Dave and Telltale on the overall story direction and did reference Guybrush going to the afterlife in his Grumpy Gamer blog, so he seems to remember the overall layout of that story well enough. If not, he has good ol' Dave who helmed the project.

If nothing else, they can watch video

walkthroughs or look up the main story beats on the MI Wiki

[Marius]

Or he wanted to share his love for the Mission Impossible franchise.

[Vainamoinen]

14 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

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.
 

 

On top of that, superverbs can have symbolic meaning and be used to perform symbolic acts (like e. g. the very last puzzle of The Longest Journey). And I'm a huge fan of those, because they can drive the story in an unparalleled way.

 

But when I look at the history of the point and click during the last two decades, what's happened is that developers primarily focus on inventory items and reduce the verb system to plainly just one, which is "click to do something with that" (CTDSWT). It's my main (and possibly only!) gripe with Broken Age and a whole lot of other adventure games, some of which at least reserved right clicking for "look at" – an extraverb that was swiftly abandoned once mobile gaming came into focus.

 

15 verbs in Maniac Mansion and 9 in Thimbleweed Park, I would assume that Ron hasn't cut down verbs to one yet (PHEW 😌). But context sensitive verbs have been done before. Take Full Throttle, or better yet, Curse of Monkey Island: the open mouth could mean "eat", "talk to", "inhale" etc.; the hand could mean "take", "push", "pull", "touch" and so on. Ron seems to have taken a late liking to CMI, which is wonderful but odd to experience, sooooo ... 
 

... a variant of the verb coin with fitting inventory items, maybe?

 

Anything besides the CTDSWT would be nice. 🦊