Return to Monkey Island

[madmardi]

On 5/22/2022 at 7:49 PM, ThunderPeel2001 said:

That’s a pretty huge oversight to me if you look at what I wrote about what I believe to be most important in storytelling. (“Oh I guess we should give them personalities” shouldn’t be an afterthought.)

 

I'm not going to respond to everything you wrote, as it seems like we both experienced the game very differently. However I will say that I think this is a bit harsh. IMHO the characters have fully developed personalities, and I became invested in their personal stories as the game progressed. It is also worth noting that when I played the game I rarely had them converse with each other as it was, but rather felt I grew to know the characters through their interactions with other NPCs and interacting with the environment.

 

Regardless, I do think Ron learned some valuable lessons from TWP, so I'm hoping that RtMI will be even better received.

[OzzieMonkey]

The Thimbleweed Park discussion is interesting because I absolutely love the game, and the tongue in cheek in-jokes really worked for me, but at the same time it totally makes sense if you just want a game with its own story first without a constant barrage of meta-humour. I think that because it felt so committed to the bit that it didn't feel out of place to me and so it wasn't distracting.

Now onto spoilers:

Spoiler

When the ending finally reveals that the entire world is an adventure game, it felt like a no-brainer, and all the signs pointed to it. Of course, a part of me did think "oh man, I guess that really is just the ending of MI2, Ron only knows how to do one ending", but I also have to remind myself that the whole "Guybrush is just a kid in a theme park" thing is just fan speculation that Ron has never seemed to actually indulge as the true intepretation, and I think now more than ever, that version of things should be questioned. I think from what little info we have on Return (I'm going insane as each day passes), the fact that Ron has prioritised this story as being a legitimate pirate adventure tells me that we were way off base about that ending. With Thimbleweed Park, there's no ambiguity, it's spelled out pretty clearly, in fact it might actually be the other way round, that fans saying for years what they thought the ending of MI2 was made him think "hmm, there's something interesting there, that's not what I had in mind but maybe I should do a game like that where the whole world isn't real". I also never felt like the journey was erased by the destination the way some seem to have responded to it, because it was still real to everyone we played as, and ultimately it still felt like a fully realised world. Also, Rey might be in the real world now depending on how you view her story ending, and it seems as though Ransome got to live on forever in flashback land, so it's not a complete downer in the way it tends to be criticised as.

 

Edited May 26, 2022 by OzzieMonkey

[KestrelPi]

5 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

 

 

 

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. 🦊

 

When I talk context sensitive verbs I less mean taking a number of verbs and reducing that and making those context sensitive and more mean playing with what verbs are available to you in a given situation.

 

Thimbleweed played with this, with one character having a different list of verbs to the others, and MI1+2 both did this as a joke, for one scene. But I don't know any game that has REALLY played with the potential of this.

 

What if I perform an action that gives me a new verb, but perhaps only for a short while, and the puzzle is about how to get the verb and go to the right place and use it. Like, here's a gross example: Guybrush has a drink at a bar, and it gives him a 'burp' verb which only lasts for 30 seconds. So you have to have the drink, then find the thing you need to burp at, and do that before you lose the verb.

 

Or what if I get a pirate hook again for a short segment of the game, and during that time I have a 'hang from' 'pierce' and 'slash' verb in my repertroire that can all be used to solve different puzzles during that segment.

 

Or what if there's a specific scene where i have to perform in front of a crowd and all my verbs change to facilitate the performance and the puzzle is about trying to do the performance correctly with the given verbs.

 

Or what if there's a puzzle where a voodoo spell is used on Guybrush that either MAXIMISES or MINIMISES his capabilities (Talk to becomes Yell At or Whisper to, Push becomes Shove or Prod, Look at becomes Analyse or Make Lazy Assumptions about, Walk becomes Run or Limp) and you have to use these changed verbs to solve different puzzles while you're under these effects

 

Y'know, stuff that really makes verbs part of the FUN of the game, rather than just a necessary means to interaction.

 

At least, that's the sort of thing I might be thinking about if I was a veteran adventure game developer who had expressed the idea in the past that verbs weren't very interesting, has a history of messing with verbs for fun and gameplay reasons, and stated that I'd like to rethink how people interact with adventure game.

 

It's possible (probable, in fact) they've done something completely different to this but it's fun to consider, at least, what the possibilities could be.

Edited May 26, 2022 by KestrelPi

[KestrelPi]

36 minutes ago, madmardi said:

 

I'm not going to respond to everything you wrote, as it seems like we both experienced the game very differently. However I will say that I think this is a bit harsh. IMHO the characters have fully developed personalities, and I became invested in their personal stories as the game progressed. It is also worth noting that when I played the game I rarely had them converse with each other as it was, but rather felt I grew to know the characters through their interactions with other NPCs and interacting with the environment.

 

Regardless, I do think Ron learned some valuable lessons from TWP, so I'm hoping that RtMI will be even better received.

 

From what I've played so far, I think they have fairly defined personalities, but I think it is noticeable around the seams. Like, I definitely felt this when I was switching between the two detectives at the start of the game and finding that for a lot of situations they had exactly the same dialogue and stock responses, where I would have expected some variations.

[madmardi]

32 minutes ago, OzzieMonkey said:

The Thimbleweed Park discussion is interesting because I absolutely love the game, and the tongue in cheek in-jokes really worked for me, but at the same time it totally makes sense if you just want a game with its own story first without a constant barrage of meta-humour. I think that because it felt so committed to the bit that it didn't feel out of place to me and so it wasn't distracting.

 

Yea, that's exactly how I felt - all the meta-humour fit nicely into game and didn't seem out of place. I was surprised as I didn't think I'd really be into it that much, but by a few hours in I was really immersed in the story and invested in the characters.

[OzzieMonkey]

22 minutes ago, madmardi said:

 

Yea, that's exactly how I felt - all the meta-humour fit nicely into game and didn't seem out of place. I was surprised as I didn't think I'd really be into it that much, but by a few hours in I was really immersed in the story and invested in the characters.

I kinda received it in the same way you're meant to receive something like Looney Toons Back in Action or Ready Player One. Like those movies, it's designed to be a reference explosion, and I think it works because it's so unapologetic in its approach, it doesn't feel cynical to me.

[KestrelPi]

16 minutes ago, OzzieMonkey said:

I kinda received it in the same way you're meant to receive something like Looney Toons Back in Action or Ready Player One. Like those movies, it's designed to be a reference explosion, and I think it works because it's so unapologetic in its approach, it doesn't feel cynical to me.

 

It seems a bit in conflict with itself me, so far (I'm in the middle of chapter 4, to give you an idea)

 

On one hand it does seem interested in its own world and story, and having an atmosphere unique to itself. And on that level I can appreciate in in the spirit I feel like it was promoted, as a sort of lost LucasArts game found in a drawer.

 

But on the other hand, it's a game about LucasArts games, with all the sort of reference explosion that implies.

 

The struggle I'm having is that I'm enjoying the first thing it's trying to be much more than the second thing. And I don't know you can do the second thing without compromising the first thing.

 

Like. I enjoyed that new Chip 'n' Dale film. I think the references are funny, and it does its job as a meta piece about chip 'n' dale and animation in general. But I also watched the trailer and knew that's what I was getting. If I thought I was getting an old school Chip 'n' Dale adventure, I probably would have come away confused.

 

Watching this trailer I could be forgiven for thinking that TWP wouldn't be SO much of a reference explosion as it turned out to be:

 

 

That said, I do think the style settles down toward the middle of the game and it gets a bit more comfortable with telling its own story.

 

And now, because this has drifted from ReMI for too long, what I will say is that they do seem conscious of this, and I think they will have spent a long time figuring out what the tone of MI is and where its meta-humour fits in with the overall style, so I'm not so worried there.

[Trapezzoid]

Re: verbs. I played a little bit of Delores, and the context-menu system is pretty snappy, but most hotspots can only be looked at so it's effectively a menu with one item. Sometimes two. If I see an object that looks like it can be picked up, I'd prefer to try and fail, rather than be prevented from even trying. This means either you write a lot of tailored responses, or rely on canned responses. It's annoying, but I think it contributes to the "never know until you try" aspect of solving these games.

 

I designed a game interface with a menu that always had at least three options per hotspot-- eye, hand, and mouth. Like CMI, the exact verbs changed based on context. Rather than being able to talk to inanimate objects, most items had a "look at" and a "talk about", which meant writing both Sierra-style popup descriptions AND an in-character spoken line. Might've been descriptive overkill.

Edited May 26, 2022 by Trapezzoid

[Jake]

That interface looks great! That does sound like descriptive overkill but it’s also really fun. Love the way the sentence builds using the mouse interface. 
 

Is that from Icon Architect?

 

 

I thought I wouldn’t like the Delores interface because at least in the abstract I like the feeling of always having all my verbs all the time. But I also like it when an adventure game is capable of having a snappy cadence without feeling like it’s condescending to me, and I think the Delores UI does a good job of that. I almost always left click on stuff, and then sometimes I have a hunch that there’s more to an object and right click, and find something there. Initially I wanted an indicator for when there was or wasn’t a right click menu but eventually got used to trusting the game and my curiosity. I wouldn’t want every point and click to work this way, but I like it as a concept, and am glad Ron’s experimenting.

[Trapezzoid]

52 minutes ago, Jake said:

That interface looks great! That does sound like descriptive overkill but it’s also really fun. Love the way the sentence builds using the mouse interface. 
 

Is that from Icon Architect?

Thanks, and yup! I actually showed Ron some screencaps when he was demoing Thimbleweed at XOXO Fest, he said he liked my art 🤩

54 minutes ago, Jake said:

I thought I wouldn’t like the Delores interface because at least in the abstract I like the feeling of always having all my verbs all the time. But I also like it when an adventure game is capable of having a snappy cadence without feeling like it’s condescending to me, and I think the Delores UI does a good job of that. I almost always left click on stuff, and then sometimes I have a hunch that there’s more to an object and right click, and find something there. Initially I wanted an indicator for when there was or wasn’t a right click menu but eventually got used to trusting the game and my curiosity. I wouldn’t want every point and click to work this way, but I like it as a concept, and am glad Ron’s experimenting.

That's a pretty interesting thought, that you'd get used to the one-click norm and only think to check for other options on intuition. I think it depends on your completionist urge-- sometimes you need to feel like you've fully swept a room before moving on, and I'd probably never stop right clicking on everything.

[Jake]

 

1 hour ago, Trapezzoid said:

Thanks, and yup! I actually showed Ron some screencaps when he was demoing Thimbleweed at XOXO Fest, he said he liked my art 🤩

ahh that rules  

 

1 hour ago, Trapezzoid said:

That's a pretty interesting thought, that you'd get used to the one-click norm and only think to check for other options on intuition. I think it depends on your completionist urge-- sometimes you need to feel like you've fully swept a room before moving on, and I'd probably never stop right clicking on everything.

 

Yeah sometimes you can’t fight the it!! But I think there’s something to be said for thinking about adventure game design as traditional game design, where your choices as a designer can influence how players play your games. The way they think about the world, the cadence they explore. So often it’s assumed that anything but the SCUMM or Sierra default is bad because it hews from expectation or “what people like in these games,” and I worry that as a designer that can both be a trap (in that it causes you to fractally mine the same fans and their habits, which are the same starting design tropes) and as a designer it can get boring!
 

Playing Thimbleweed I was mostly impressed with how fast everything moved, while not feeling like I was “skipping” anything. Playing Curse of Monkey Island today is a slog for me not because of the story or art (both of which I like), but because the AV of the game is SO HEAVY. Guybrush moves so slowly, transitions take forever, the wait between lines is long. The sets are so big and Guybrush is so slow that you don’t really want to walk anywhere so you skip it all with the double click on exits. I played the beginning of Voodoo Detectice this morning, and it looks fantastic, but navigating his office is so slow that you have a button to skip walking to hotspots. Thimbleweed definitely has the advantage of being abstract pixel art, but it moves. The seamlessness of it all does bump on my completionist tendencies, but the smoothness of Thimbleweed’s character movement and responsive interface, and the attempt at an intuitive smooth UI in Delores reminded me that there is still a lot of room for “game feel” in adventure game design, which is often ignored by designers because the status quo is verbs + a lot of very time-heavy animation (even telltale fell into this trap and they didn’t even have verbs - everything just takes for goddamn ever to do). 

[ThunderPeel2001]

21 hours ago, madmardi said:

 

I'm not going to respond to everything you wrote, as it seems like we both experienced the game very differently. However I will say that I think this is a bit harsh. IMHO the characters have fully developed personalities, and I became invested in their personal stories as the game progressed. It is also worth noting that when I played the game I rarely had them converse with each other as it was, but rather felt I grew to know the characters through their interactions with other NPCs and interacting with the environment.

 

Regardless, I do think Ron learned some valuable lessons from TWP, so I'm hoping that RtMI will be even better received.

I was just talking about the two Agents really. The other characters were more developed, I agree. 
 

But yes, I just didn’t gel with TWP, as much as I wanted to

[Toymafia88]

GamesBeat: Are you taking inspiration from outside the series?

 

Crowle: There’s wider inspiration from some of the other LucasArts classics like Day of the Tentacle. When making a game like this, it can be a challenge to figure out how to cram everything that’s required into each environment, as they are often just a single screen. But Day of the Tentacle has some fantastic design solutions for that, and they create a lot of variety and a sense of rhythm and flow as you move from one screen to another.

 

I knew it!!! This background screamed of DOTT vibes.

[Vainamoinen]

Here we go, whenever that screenshot is posted, I keep clicking on the book with the crossed swords cover.

 

In my defense, I really want it.

[OzzieMonkey]

59 minutes ago, Vainamoinen said:

Here we go, whenever that screenshot is posted, I keep clicking on the book with the crossed swords cover.

 

In my defense, I really want it.

I wonder what that will be for in the game. Are we really going back to insult swordfighting again?

[Vainamoinen]

Just now, OzzieMonkey said:

I wonder what that will be for in the game. Are we really going back to insult swordfighting again?

 

We don't need no stinkin' books to learn insult swordfighting!

 

You'll have to learn that directly from the dairy farmer's mouth. 🐄

[ThunderPeel2001]

22 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

And now, because this has drifted from ReMI for too long, what I will say is that they do seem conscious of this, and I think they will have spent a long time figuring out what the tone of MI is and where its meta-humour fits in with the overall style, so I'm not so worried there.

 

Come back and tell us what you think when you're done! 

[KestrelPi]

It's nice to have it confirmed but I heavily suspected Rex was a huge Monkey Island fan - not just because he's made fan art in the past but because in talks he's given in the past he's talked about his first computer being an Amiga 500. I couldn't imagine he had amiga in the 90s in the UK and didn't eventually encounter Monkey Island. Also this establishing shot from Knights and Bikes always reminded me of Melee Island (and a bunch of other stuff in that game is quite monkey-islandy.)

I think it's useful to brace ourselves against our expectations when it comes to the art, because we've lived with the characters for 30 years some of us, and have very strong ideas in our head about what the characters and locations should be like. I know I remember initially being put off by CMI guybrush - how blond he was, how tall and lanky he looked. EVEN the voice, which we all know is great, but my guybrush spoke in my own accent, in my head. I got used to all these things after a while but at first they really threw me, and we should all expect the same thing to happen when we see the new guybrush and the rest of the characters.

But hopefully it's also reassuring to know that these are also characters who have lived in Rex's head for 30 years, and are intimately related to the reason why he's working in games now. I think everyone who really KNOWS Monkey Island brings their own little piece of understanding of what makes it what it is, and you can tell. I definitely felt that from Jake's involvement in Tales, and I think once we see the whole thing we're really going to understand how much love went into it. He's not going to phone-in a project to work on the game that got him into games, is he? Well... I mean. Aside from the fact that because of COVID he literally sort of had to phone it in. But you know what I mean.

 

But just... yeah, expect a shock at first, I guess? As for me, I'm finding more to like, the more I look at the screenshots.

[KestrelPi]

5 hours ago, Toymafia88 said:

GamesBeat: Are you taking inspiration from outside the series?

 

Crowle: There’s wider inspiration from some of the other LucasArts classics like Day of the Tentacle. When making a game like this, it can be a challenge to figure out how to cram everything that’s required into each environment, as they are often just a single screen. But Day of the Tentacle has some fantastic design solutions for that, and they create a lot of variety and a sense of rhythm and flow as you move from one screen to another.

 

I knew it!!! This background screamed of DOTT vibes.

 

I do think a lot about the unintentional side effect of low res art. Obviously the artists would have wanted their art scanned and rendered in the game in the highest resolution available, but at the time that was pretty low, but that had the side effect of us as players imagining more details than were there, and mentally inserting a sort of 'graininess' to the art that was quite unintentional, and growing attached to that.

 

Of course, I'm not saying that's the ONLY difference between the old art and this stuff, but I do think it's interesting that as soon as I pixelate the art, my brain adjusts and goes 'yes, that's an adventure game background like how I remember'

Edited May 27, 2022 by KestrelPi

[madmardi]

Very well said KestrelPi. In fact, after reading your post and looking at that screenshot again it made me even more excited!

 

It most likely will be a shock, but that's really a part of the series as every game looks and feels a little bit different... yet they are all still Monkey Island.

[Toymafia88]

Maybe Return to Monkey Island might appear here? Probably not... but maybe?

[Toymafia88]

3 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

 

I do think a lot about the unintentional side effect of low res art. Obviously the artists would have wanted their art scanned and rendered in the game in the highest resolution available, but at the time that was pretty low, but that had the side effect of us as players imagining more details than were there, and mentally inserting a sort of 'graininess' to the art that was quite unintentional, and growing attached to that.

 

Of course, I'm not saying that's the ONLY difference betweent the old art and this stuff, but I do think it's interesting that as soon as I pixelate the art, by brain adjusts and goes 'yes, that's an adventue game background like how I remember'

Wow yeah i fully agree with this 

 

I was really tempted to add the Day of the Tentacle verbs menu to this but ran out of time.

Edited May 27, 2022 by Toymafia88

[Vainamoinen]

20 hours ago, KestrelPi said:

I do think a lot about the unintentional side effect of low res art. Obviously the artists would have wanted their art scanned and rendered in the game in the highest resolution available, but at the time that was pretty low, but that had the side effect of us as players imagining more details than were there, and mentally inserting a sort of 'graininess' to the art that was quite unintentional, and growing attached to that.

 

Last year I started one of my patented never-going-to-be-finished™ art projects.

 

 

The ingame artwork of Captain Dread's map gave me next to nothing for this, and the "high res" variant found in the MI2 Special Edition was ... insulting. So I sought out the original Purcell painting. Which had a different format and was even more confusing (but such is Dread). It did have all the intended detail though. It was shocking to see what was lost. The detail on the sea monsters was completely lost, they had to redraw the numbers completely to make them legible. And of course the format was wrong so they had to compress the whole art vertically. 

 

I guess sometimes after scanning, the digital cleanup crew back in the 90s still had a whole lot of work in front of them. 😬

 

So, like you said, nostalgia fanatics like myself have become attached to their own interpretation of less legible loose pixel collections. Then there's the fact that a whole lot of work was done on the backgrounds after scanning. AND then there's this tiny little problem that these backgrounds were painted in a ridiculously small format, I'd guess around 25 cm / 10 inch in width. The detail that we have thought to recognize in-game might have never been there.

 

When the Monkey Island 2 Special Edition came out, I heard a lot of people asking "Why didn't they just take the original art and scanned it in high resolution?". I think we're dangerously close to several good answers to that.

 

Where was I heading? Ah, yes. I think Rex is bringing back, intentionally, what was unintentional in 1990, this search for meaning in areas with less detail. It's a bold, a dangerous path, it will go wrong for many. But it also kind of makes us co-conspirators and accomplices in his crimes.

 

I kind of like that. ✊

 

[Trapezzoid]

MI2's art is scanned and digitized kind of poorly IMO. The retouches are minimal, they left in a lot of grain and smudginess. By DOTT and Sam & Max their process got a lot cleaner. Those games' paintings are totally repixeled over with solid colors and handpicked palettes, using the scanned artwork as more of a guide layer for the final pixel art.

 

[ThunderPeel2001]

14 hours ago, Vainamoinen said:

When the Monkey Island 2 Special Edition came out, I heard a lot of people asking "Why didn't they just take the original art and scanned it in high resolution?". I think we're dangerously close to several good answers to that.

 

I think the original paintings look more beautiful than the ones in the final game. And better than the ones used in the SE. Even if they needed to add some details to reach 4K (which seemed to be their target) they could have used the original paintings as more of a guide.
 

 

Edited May 29, 2022 by ThunderPeel2001