Save before you try to solve a puzzle…
The insult thing was born as an attempt to discourage you from trying things at random 
I see it is not working as intended.
2 Likes
Well, they had a read verb. And i am sure that back then the look verb was dropped because we had these nice graphics now instead of a text adventure where you needed to have pages of scenery description and clues as to what objects needed further investigation (a bit like those hidden object games).
Talking about chores… I always exhaust the “talk to” verb anyway, and it is highlighted in green anyway when there are new things to be said. So I would ditch the Talk to too - just like you did with the look at.
Although sometimes when there is a bunch of (optional) jokes lined up, it would mean you enter an area and need to click through dialogue after dialogue which may be variations on the same theme, which does get old soon too. Perhaps the sweet spot is to have the ones that do advance the story/set up new puzzles are done automatically?
E.g. I do find myself returning to the town square often just to see if there is any new news.
I actually like you don’t have to walk over to the place where you saw the object (which is the difference between “remember” and “look at”)
So perhaps you can simply move all objects that are in the current room from “remember” to “look” list and keep both in there?
Note that sometimes when you are walking(or teleporting) so fast from one room to another, you might have even completely missed there are some objects in the room (in the list at least). It does feel weird if you can remember anything about them if you haven’t looked at them in the first place.
2 Likes
Don’t get me wrong, it was discouraging to me. I didn’t want to lower my intelligence level, and it made me anxious whenever Olivia told me a solution made no sense 
and I awaited my verdict.
When I tried all wrong things on purpose just to see the insults I missed, the comedy was just not there. It’s the setup that made it worthy, so I think it works
Right but it works on very few object so I think we can ignore it.
And it was a very good line of reasoning I think!
Now I wonder why it was introduced with Monkey 1. Because, if the object is common, it doesn’t need a description. And if it’s uncommon , isn’t it better to have guybrush look at it automatically when entering the location? So actually it’s a good question why there is a look verb at all… (Maybe they reasoned "what if you forget the description? How do you recall it?)
I’m considering removing the green color, anyway it means “pressing this button is needed to advance in the game”, and not “there are new things to be said”. (but it once meant that)
I can’t , because then you’d see a huge amount of text when you enter a location… covering different topics. it’s better to split it sometimes, if the topic changes.
My main purpose is that , when you enter a location, there should ideally always be a new joke told. So I can’t have you press “talk” in sequence, otherwise you exhaust the choices and there’s no one left when you reenter the location. So, after a couple of presses, the “talk” button usually disappears.
But I don’t want you to miss very good jokes either. So, sometimes, I don’t hide the “talk button” immediately, and paint it “green” (even if it’s not strictly necessary to move forward, contradicting what I said above). Then, when you’ve read all the IMPORTANT jokes, the talk button stops being green and /or disappears (depending on the location)
So there is a balance to be found: if I allow you to press “talk” too many times, you exhaust everything and then there’s nothing new when you get back to that location: catastrophic failure. If I hide it immediatly, you may end up not seeing all jokes: slight failure. It’s not easy.
1 Like
at the witch I have four diffeernt topics to talk about, and they all advance the story. I considered merging them as you said, but in the end I prefererd to split them and mark the talk button as green (= required)…
your suggestion about the button wouldn’t solve this… because the newsboy can say some specific news only after you already have an object. or only after you have got some information.
for this reason I had to require you to go to the newsboy regularly. I know it’s a chore, but it’s only one location, and there’s teleport. It’s not like “cruise for a corpse” if you know what I mean.
To remove that need, I could add a non-clickable objective “go to see the newsboy” when it’s time. Just like I already do to suggest to you to go in other places. Would you prefer this? (But then, Olivia would be a psychic. How would she know she has to go back to the square because there’s something new to listen to?)
Maybe you are confused with an old version?. Right now, “remember an object” only allows you to remember objects that are in the current location (or in the inv).
as I said above, I don’t even need to do that… you already only see objects in the current location in that list…
Exactly. So if I rename “remember” to “look” I need to pay attention to whether you’ve already examined the object once. But it can be managed. All in all, I think it might be worth it… why be so different for the sake of being different? if the player expects “look”, why call it “remember”? just because I’m lazy not to implement that distinction? I think I will…
She could just be one of those people who obsessively open some news website or worse. Plus a bit of a delay. It’d still feel a bit artificial admittedly.
How about " a voice in your head tells you you should pay a visit to the newsboy"? Or Camilla saying “Olivia, it’s been a while since we’ve listened to the news”?
That’s basically exactly what i said?
1 Like
Chicken. With. A. Pulley. In. The. Middle.
(Also… because of the hints you get when you look at either the red fish or Jojo…)
I can only guess. After what is it… 32 years(?) it still is only a title of an awesome looking game that I would like to play on day. And I probably better leave it that way.
Actually, I didn’t try it yet… I wanted to see how much I could still solve by remembering in real life first
It does indeed solve the look vs remember issue.
Only now I need to remember on what screen I saw some object.
then again – sorry if I insist – is it really a problem that you regularly need to visit the town center? I mean, if you are not stuck you don’t need to. And if you are stuck, it’s probably a very small thing to ask. When you are stuck, you usually visit several locations anyway, don’t you? So I am no longer sure there’s any real need to add an objective…
Now I don’t follow if you are not already seeing that object in front of you, why would you want to remember something about it? it usually happens like this: “oh, look , there’s a strange contraption here. I wonder what it is… or: I wonder if someone ever talked about it…” . But if you don’t see it…
it’s so attractive, right? But it’ll make you regret you were born… there are no dead ends, but each time the clock advances you need to go through all the ship and also peep into all the portholes. and probably also try to reopen all drawers,which previously didn’t contain anything or were locked… it takes like 20 minutes…
I see. Well, forcing the user to read 100 descriptions just because one of them has hints doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. There are other ways to disguise a hint, for example in the dialog when you enter a location for the first time…
I think I solved the problem with music over the comedy dialog…
I’ll ask the musician a version of each song without the melody, but only with percussions and (maybe) bass. with the same length. And when there is text on screen, I’ll seamlessly switch from one to another. How about it?