Two, two of the things that we want to do the most revision on are the puzzles and the story. We really want to make sure that every, every bit of that is singing. And so getting that together in rough form as early as possible so you can just play it and play it and play it is, is the good thing that, the good thing for development.

So to the, to the puzzle question, because I, you know, playing through the game and remembering what it was like playing, you know, decades ago, the, the originals, um, I'm curious your sense of your, just how you've evolved as the creator of these kinds of puzzles and, and how they integrate with the narrative and because obviously you're, we all change over the span of our lives, even, even from one year to the next, we have a tendency to evolve. And so I would think that the design sensibility has changed. Did you find yourself wanting to design things a certain way because that's sort of where you were in life and going, okay, that might be a bridge too far for this game. Or what did it feel like just, you know, natural return to form for what seems really organic to this, you know, that you get the essence of what I'm asking. I'm trying not to sort of spoon feed it into a given, a given lane, but I'm just curious as time has gone, your, your design sensibility and how that factored into this. Does that make sense? I feel like I'm praising that poorly. I have an

opinion, but do you want to go first, bro? No, go

ahead. Does

it say I agree with this is

I don't think our overall process has changed that much. I think we just edit ourselves differently and better now. Um, even, even back, um, 30 years ago, the way we basically approached it was we, we, we have a story and we have a character in that story and we give that character some goals and those goals are sort of designed to support puzzles, right? The puzzles are going to lead up to and solve those goals. And we would sort of break things down further and further and imagine, um, what are, what are the kinds of ways that the character could approach and solve this goal. And we would pick one and kind of look at it and go, okay, but how are we going to do this with the interface and how is the player actually supposed to come up with these ideas and solve this puzzle and sort of put our, put ourselves in a place where we're trying to empathize with the player as they attempt to solve the puzzles and sort of figure it out that way. And, and I think that it's that empathy process that we do better now that, um, you know, with, with the weight of 30 years of experience, we've made enough mistakes now, they're like, oh, well, we shouldn't really base this on a pun because we're going to translate this and it's not going to work either linguistically or culturally. Um, you know, let's avoid the monkey wrench puzzle again. Uh, you know, just stuff like that. I think we've seen a lot of things don't work. Um, and so in a way that makes it a little harder because we're, we're sort of narrowing our own box, but the end result is, I think better.

Yeah, I think, I think for me, the big thing that has really changed is I want to respect the player and respect the

player's time. And we

live in a very different world today than we've lived in 1990. There is so much that is pulling on people from

a media standpoint. There are so many movies and amazing

television shows and

games and all this stuff and podcasts and YouTube videos that, you know, what, what, what we want to do is you want to respect the fact

that you have other things you want to do in your life. And a lot of people that played Monkey Island originally, you know, we're eight and 10 years old, right? They didn't have much going on in their lives. They could come home from school and just dedicate their time to this game nonstop. And that's just not true. A lot of those eight and 10 year olds now have kids. They have jobs and kids and, and we've just, we want to respect that. And so we don't want to do ridiculous puzzles that are only in place to like make the game longer. Right.

And just

an ad frustration. And it's just about, about having everything just be very smooth, you know, that it's still fun. It's so engaging and still challenging. But it's just very smooth as you work your way through it.

You just said something that actually, I remember thinking at the time, and I had forgotten, because I am basically exactly as you just described, I was around 10 when I played it, I'm around 40 now. And what struck me was it felt like both games felt like they were for me. Like, I didn't feel like I was playing today's 10 year olds game. You know what I'm saying? It felt like there was an evolutionary kind of band moving all in parallel there. And, you know, that could just be, you know, my narcissism, I suppose, like this, this is how, how kind of them to make this solely for myself. But it, but it did seem like it was in so, in, in the same way that there was a certain element of your own, it was a conversation with a past version of yourself. It felt like that was extended to the players as well. Again, is that, just my projection, because I was happy to be playing a new Monkey Island game, or was that true in so far as like what you just said about respecting the time and any other kind of ways that might have

manifest? But I think it is true, but not by conscious design. It's like, we didn't sit out and go, okay, well, we want to make sure that people who play the game when they're eight, you know, have a very similar emotional experience. But I think, you know, as Dave pointed out earlier, you know, we just, we're moving forward with you. You know, you as a player are moving forward with your lives, and we as designers are moving forward with our lives. And so there is a, there's a lot of parallel, you know, to those, to those two

things. You know, I think, back in, when we were all in our 20s, we were writing these things and we were writing about the kinds of things that 20 year olds think about sort of, you know, abstract concepts from school and stuff. And now we're writing a little more about sort of people in relationships and, and, and going a little deeper on that stuff. And I suspect that the audience being older now might be picking up on that.

Yeah, well, this audience member certainly did. But another just on that, just to, on the subject of kind of design and the puzzles and whatnot, you know, I remember that back in those days, as you mentioned, you come home from school or you're coming from, you know, you're in college or whatever kind of wherever you fell in life at the time when the first two games came out. It was common where, you know, you'd hit a, you'd hit a puzzle and you couldn't figure past it and it would like sit in your subconscious for days. And then, you know, you'd have that 2 a.m. daydream moment of, of the thing bubbling up and you go, that can't be the solution. And you go and try it and oh my God, that was it. And for me, the, the one of that was the carrying the mug of grog to the prison cell. That was one of those things that it was the most gratifying experience I could imagine realizing what was in front of me because it just wasn't intuitive. And it was also one of the few that required a bit of actual kind of real time behavior on the part of the player. And it felt like the, the, the game, you know, had a light touch with, you know, unforgiving puzzles in that way, although the whole bit with the, the drop of water and the distraction during the sort of algebra test felt like a little bit of that same headspace of you, you're on the clock and you have to kind of pay attention in a real time sort of a way. And it felt like maybe not a literal callback in any sense. But I thought there's definitely the design sensibility I can see in there. But overall, it was very approachable. It wasn't that it didn't require you to actually lean in, but it was, it did feel like it was inviting me to kind of have fun in this world. And it wasn't there as a like men's entrance exam, if that makes sense. And so to that end, the two things that you did that at three things that are kind of interconnected, but potentially that I'd never really seen executed this way. First off, the, the sort of trivia cards thing as a, as a, as a way to that felt like a really natural way to go if, okay, you want to have your nostalgia and you want to kind of do, we can make it a very peripheral, totally optional element to the game. And I was just curious where that it's obviously, you know, compared to all these others is a very kind of small feature by comparison, at least it seems like. But that was a nice touch, I thought. It wasn't heavy handed. Where did that come about?

Well, I knew that we wanted to do

collectibles, like a lot of games have collectibles

and, you know, people

enjoy them. And, you know,

Thimble E park had a collectible and you pick up those backs of dust everywhere, you know, which were

little pixels. And people enjoy it. But I did

a lot of reading on collectibles and games and what worked and what didn't work. And

one of the strong things that people were talking about that

worked well for collectibles and games

is if it wasn't just the act of collecting something, but you collected something and then there was some activity that you had to do with that collectible, that it made it a lot more engaging for players. And so, you know, the idea of the trivia cards came up. And then it was like, well, you get these trivia cards and then you actually then have to answer the questions. And a lot of the questions are about things that happened in the game you're playing. You know, they require you to be observant of what things had happened or what things are going to happen. And then, you know, those expanded to some set of questions about the previous games and a few questions about, you know, Dave and David and I and our time at Lucasfilm. And it just, I think it's just a part of engaging the player a little bit more.

So, they're just roping on something, you know, collectible. But they

have to do

something with that collectible.

Sorry, peripherally related, but just from a design standpoint, the fact that you also give the player the ability to kind of tone down the difficulty of the puzzles to have the kind of casual mode. Obviously, those kinds of things are not that uncommon in, you know, shooters and things like that. That's been standard for decades to have some variation on that. But I don't, I don't remember ever seeing something, you know, in that manner in a game like this for just sort of pure narrative consumption. But I found myself thinking, because I played it on the, you know, I said, I want the full experience. So I didn't, I didn't dabble with the more casual mode, but I was, I found myself wondering, how would you distill this? Like, how does this, so this is just for getting my ignorance that I just didn't play it that way. But how did you even design for the idea of, well, we have to, this has to have a simpler solution as well, or is this a cuddable puzzle or how did that actually work in practice?

Well, Monkey Island

2 had the easy and hard mode. That

was the first game that we had. Oh,

that's why I completely forgot that. Yeah, there you go. There you

go. And then when I did them, when we park, I also put in an easy and hard mode in that game as well. And so it just, it seemed very natural to kind of put that. I think that goes back to, you know, respecting the player's time. And you know, designing the easy hard mode is a lot easier than you would think, because you know, what we do is we design the hard mode. That is the game we design. Then at some much later stage in the

process of the game,

we then go through and we look at the puzzles and we go, which one of these can we just cut? Right. And we figure out, we're going to cut this puzzle. We're going to cut this puzzle. We're going to cut this puzzle. Tie up a little loose ends around it. And then you just have easy mode. And the thing I like about that is that if you play easy mode and then you go

to

play hard mode, it's not that easy mode has spoiled a bunch of puzzles for you.

Right. It's that in a hard mode, you now have a bunch of brand new puzzles.

Yeah, it's funny. I had to forget. Say again, Dave. I

was just saying, I think that's, you've oversimplified it a little, because I definitely remember us putting a lot of work into the easy versus hard mode and we had it's, you know, the brainstorm page. And when we, you know, the theory was we'll design the hard mode and then we'll just cut some stuff. But in fact, when we went to do that, some of it was like, well, this feels like an easy mode puzzle and let's make a harder one for hard mode. Some of them don't have just a thing is cut here. It just works a little differently in the easy mode and we make a thing simpler. So

I think it is.

Ron's version sounds like, oh, we spent, you know, one day distilling out the easy mode. That is the

answer was the casual mode answer. You're offering the hard mode answer. So it feels, yeah, it's very on point. Yeah,

I think that is true. You know, what you say for return to my yeah, and I know like in Thimbleweed Park, that that was probably a little closer to the process I described is we really did just totally design implement the

hard mode version of that. And then went through and cut stuff to make easy where

that wasn't. Yeah, we did go through and make some of the

puzzles harder later in the stage for return to my yeah.

Related to that, I also, I liked that you had the sort of writers cut option as well. Is that also one that has a prior precedent that I'm sort of ignorant to because that I found myself going, that's a nice idea. Like that's that's that's, you know, there's commentary tracks and things like that, but I had never seen the sort of this option appear. And again, I don't know what it's like if I don't have that checked. I clicked it. I said, give me the full the full experience.