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If I Made Another Monkey Island...

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Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#61

Post by Contero »

Aloisius wrote: post #40

I may be an odd ball here, but I cheated at Monkey Island 1 and 2. I don't like to be frustrated with a puzzle that relies on either randomly choosing inventory items or seeing some pixels that look like almost every other set of pixels on the screen and trying to pick them up. For me, what made Monkey Island great was that it was a pretty quirky comedy. I wanted to see what Guybrush would say next. Further, it shock…

I think Machinarium is a good example of how you can preserve the fun frustration of adventure games without pushing people to cheat. They would allow you to play a mini-game in order to reveal some extra hints which would push you in the right direction enough to figure out the rest on your own.

In Monkey Island I would sometimes get annoyed and google for what to do out of angry frustration. It was easy for me to throw my hands up and say "I don't give a shit any more, time to move on!" Lots of times the solutions made zero sense to me. In Machinarium I still got a sense of frustration and puzzlement, but I would try to forego the hints out of pride for as long as I could which made for a much more enjoyable experience.

Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#62

Post by egypturnash »

Honestly after "The Cave" and "Deathspank" I'm not sure Gilbert is on my HERE TAKE MY MONEY list any more. And him saying "MI3 will be RETRO looking!" isn't making me interested; the Monkey Island games were GORGEOUS for the time, but I don't want to go wallowing in nostalgia for something made now.

Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#63

Post by DoggettCK »

kbruner wrote: post #50
ComputerGuru wrote: post #12

Is SCUMM really better than Lua?

No. I've used SCUMM, was the core systems engineer on Grim, and founded Telltale. I'm very familiar with both. The spirit of SCUMM is very much alive, but SCUMM is a system, not just a language. Lua runs circles around SCUMM as a language (SCUMM didn't support >8bit numeric types till Monkey3!), but as a game development system SCUMM was really cool. There's much that Unreal, Unity, etc could learn from it, but "runn…

Thanks for your work on Grim. It's the reason I learned Lua (via LuaDec and extracting code out of the .LAB files), and I play it at least once a year.

Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#65

Post by rmc »

derefr wrote: post #28
rmc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read about SCUMM, it was designed to be very similar to writing a regular script for, say, a TV show. There's a programming language for writing textual interactive fiction games, Inform 7 ( http://inform7.com/ ), which reads as a natural language. For example, here's part of the "programme" of a game (copied from http://www.hpiweb.com/newmedia/i7/cbrk/source.html ) The Forest is a room. "This forest i…

I wouldn't call Inform 7 a programming language, so much as a DSL for entering fact-tuples into a graph database (though some of these tuples do attach "rules" [predefined functions] together using AOP join-points). When you actually need to tell it how to "make things happen", you basically break out into a separate, imperative programming language--which happens to be I7's ancestor, I6.

I know only a little of Inform 7. I somehow thought it was as full featured as Inform 6. What can you do in I6 that you can't do in I7?

Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#66

Post by kybernetikos »

nsxwolf wrote: post #45
gavanwoolery wrote: post #32

I have no less respect for Ron than I did back in the 90s, but I think that sometimes the veterans lose sight of what made their old games great (and this of course, is just my opinion). He wants keep the retro aesthetic, which is good, but then wants to include things like DOF and glows...which can technically be done with a palette, but I don't think this is what he is getting at, and could potentially destroy the…

I think one of the things he said is telling and gives useful perspective - they wanted to do more with the visuals, but were stuck with what was possible in 1990. We shouldn't elevate retro pixel art to some perfect art form. It's unlikely to be what the original artists intended, rather it was what they had to accept.

What the original artists intended may well not have been as good as what they ended up creating.

As soon as you hear George Lucas say the words 'what I originally intended' you should run a mile.

Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#67

Post by soneca »

nsxwolf wrote: post #54
soneca wrote: post #10

I supported Double Fine Adventure on Kickstarter and lot of the last points of the OP refer to how Tim Schafer is managing it. But, in this case, if Ron Gilbert is making a proof of concept with this post, a MVP to check if Monkey Island 3a can be crowdfunded - or even if it is just a critique of Double Fine Adventure campaign, I am on Tim Schafer's side here. Crowdfunding is not about "give me the money and trust me…

I don't get involved with the games I fund. I love that other people do; I think that's a really neat thing that's become possible. But it's just not my thing, personally. I'm happy to wait and see what they come up with. I'm fine with funding projects with either philosophy. If it comes down to just "give me the funds or the game can't get made", and I want to play that game, then I'm happy being a substitute for th…

Sorry, I think it as a more common word in portuguese than in english (maybe I mistranslated it too).

Maecenas would be someone that gives money to an artist be able to produce its art. Long time ago, before artists could access market to finance themselves, great artists (e.g. Renaissance artists) often needed a Maecenas to pay the bills while they were creating their masterpieces. No financial interests, arts for art sake (sure, other reasons like vanity, social influence, power demonstration and etc were involved too).

Not sure this was an accurate explanation, but I tried.

Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#68

Post by agosnell »

soneca wrote: post #67
nsxwolf wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get involved with the games I fund. I love that other people do; I think that's a really neat thing that's become possible. But it's just not my thing, personally. I'm happy to wait and see what they come up with. I'm fine with funding projects with either philosophy. If it comes down to just "give me the funds or the game can't get made", and I want to play that game, then I'm happy being a substitute for th…

Sorry, I think it as a more common word in portuguese than in english (maybe I mistranslated it too). Maecenas would be someone that gives money to an artist be able to produce its art. Long time ago, before artists could access market to finance themselves, great artists (e.g. Renaissance artists) often needed a Maecenas to pay the bills while they were creating their masterpieces. No financial interests, arts for a…

That sounds like what would normally be called a patron in English. See definition 4 here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/patron#English

But I think patron may have connotations of influence over the artist. (I could be wrong on that.)

Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#69

Post by ricardobeat »

Contero wrote: post #61
Aloisius wrote: post #40

I may be an odd ball here, but I cheated at Monkey Island 1 and 2. I don't like to be frustrated with a puzzle that relies on either randomly choosing inventory items or seeing some pixels that look like almost every other set of pixels on the screen and trying to pick them up. For me, what made Monkey Island great was that it was a pretty quirky comedy. I wanted to see what Guybrush would say next. Further, it shock…

I think Machinarium is a good example of how you can preserve the fun frustration of adventure games without pushing people to cheat. They would allow you to play a mini-game in order to reveal some extra hints which would push you in the right direction enough to figure out the rest on your own. In Monkey Island I would sometimes get annoyed and google for what to do out of angry frustration. It was easy for me to t…

You mean Altavista?

Re: If I Made Another Monkey Island...

#70

Post by soneca »

agosnell wrote: post #68
soneca wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I think it as a more common word in portuguese than in english (maybe I mistranslated it too). Maecenas would be someone that gives money to an artist be able to produce its art. Long time ago, before artists could access market to finance themselves, great artists (e.g. Renaissance artists) often needed a Maecenas to pay the bills while they were creating their masterpieces. No financial interests, arts for a…

That sounds like what would normally be called a patron in English. See definition 4 here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/patron#English But I think patron may have connotations of influence over the artist. (I could be wrong on that.)

#4 is quite similar of what I have in mind. But no connotations of influence in theory - in practice, I imagine that was hard to have zero influence on the supported artist.
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