Maybe a better URL could be: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/grim-fandango-puzzle-desig...

Agreed. Grim Fandango is a game that's all about the setting and characters. For that alone it's a masterpiece. But the puzzles... ehh..

Well worth playing the remastered version. It makes the control a bit more bearable but otherwise feels like the original.

Soundtrack is dope as well

Majora’s Mask is fantastic

Do it, it's a beautiful work of art.

It's well worth playing despite the many years passed since its release. I first played it in 2020 (despite knowing of it since its initial release), and had an absolute blast of a time.

I have never played through Grim Fandangoo in full, but in my peer group memes from this game permeated so thoroughly that when I see a pigeon I will too often end up shouting at it, "Run you pigeons! It's Robert Frost".

Unique game. Also to think that they pulled out that beautiful 3D toon feel before toon shaders were made.

Same for most LucasArt games, Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Islands, and the others

I first played it in my 40s when the remaster came out, and it's one of the best games I've played. It holds up incredibly well, particularly with the modernized controls.

So if anyone is wondering if this is just nostalgia, or if the game actually holds up, it's the latter. Just play it.

You're missing out; give the Remastered/Extended/whatever edition a try

We take for granted now how much especially the defaults for Halo 1 rebuilt gamepad controls to a useful, reusable standard. It's really fun going back to Halo 1 and its tutorial of how its controls work and its menu full of optional entire layouts to sort of see the exact moment when game controls stopped being lousy and almost random from game to game. You can contrast with Halo Reach where most of the optional layouts are just gone and more people use the defaults and then say Halo Infinite where all the optional layouts are gone because the common ones moved into the platforms (and accessibility settings) and in some cases the gamepads themselves.

It remains an interesting reflection point in the history of 3D games. It's also why the Grim Fandango remaster turned out so well, now that controls have settled into their modern forms.

Heh, I know what you mean. I enjoyed the action minigames and figuring out what to do, but some people found them frustrating.

Mostly, what I remember is the outstanding voice acting, and the most memorable intro ever.

Yeah, whenever I think of Maureen I think of two things: asphalt, and trouble...

SCUMM games always had a "win" key for action sequences, and I remember it would sometimes be mentioned in the manual. (Remember when games came with those? I was one of the sorts of nerds that read them.) Off the top of my head I think it was Alt+G. My first many playthroughs I always used the win button for all the action sequences in Full Throttle. It made the game a lot better back on my original PC I played the game on where it would stutter in the action games and make them hard to win. I still sometimes think the game is better without the action sequences, even if I can normally win them now.

(As I recall even GrimE had a similar or the same combo key. A lot of the complaints about Monkey Combat in EMI I didn't have because after a couple attempts I recall just pushing the win button and moving on.)

Same, it's one of those things that stays with you for life.

For similar feels, check out Disco Elysium

Planescape Torment

and almost anything by Amanita Design

Absolutely this. The game is a prime example of how characters can drive engagement.

I would also recommend reading all of the comics you can get ahold of, and then also watching the Fox TV show.

Looks like Tom Schafer style; I find him whimsical and funny in all of his communication. I don't think it's a stretch that this aspect extends to nom-public communications.

Design document, from the page that links this pdf (http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/grim-fandango-puzzle-desig...):

"Tim Schafer at Double Fine has posted the puzzle design spec for his classic adventure game, Grim Fandango. It is that game's tenth anniversary; it was released on the Day of the Dead, 1998."

Not so much a first draft I think, as the puzzles and story seem fully-formed.

The doc itself is a good high level spec, useful as a walkthrough and for testing, but the detail in each puzzle description isn’t deep enough for someone to implement it.

I think this is indeed a doc pitched at higher-ups, where they want to know that the detail has been worked through, as the game exits the design phase and moves to full production, but don’t want the low level details.

I’d love to see a detailed process of how one of those puzzles was designed though.

Looks like a GDD but just for the puzzles, a PDD

Yes. Literally one of the best.

Fortunately George Lucas only directed them to "Not lose money".

Always fascinating to peek behind the curtain at how these classics were built. Grim Fandango had some truly brilliant, and occasionally maddening, puzzles.

I came here to post just this.

That GDC talk just showed up on my YouTube frontpage this morning and I watched it. And now I check HN and here we are.

Seems like ultimately they aren't actually able to track us as well as they claim.

Not a coincidence. Submitting references and sources is a bit of a HN cheat code.

I've been playing most of Lucas Arts games with my 10 y/o daughter. Grim Fandango is the one she has liked the best. It is not perfect, has lots of bugs (crashed on several occasions) and weird things, but the atmosphere is so cool.

Monkey Island comes second of course.

"This report by its very length defends itself against the risk of being read" Winston H. Churchill

And this comment will prove it, by referencing only the very first part of the document, being the comment most likely to garner upvotes and replies, as opposed to deeper nuanced comments.

Nice, Tim Schafer is someone whose writing I really admire, if you haven't checked it out yet Double Fine (the studio he leads) documented the entire (7 year!) development cycle of Psychonauts 2 in a 32 episode documentary series, and it in my opinion one of the best documentaries ever made. It covers a lot of cool stuff, like Covid, them getting acquired by Microsoft, big project leadership struggles. It's long as hell but it is really worth your time if you have an interest in creative work in large teams.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd70y34zh2erWWpM...

They are currently doing a company wide gamejam/game idea incubation thing, after surviving Microsoft undoing the acquisition and the same Documentary crew is doing a doc about that (they did a kickstarter campaign to fund it)

Agreed. I actually didn't find it buggy when I bought it in 1998. I loved the box art.

I recently went through it from start to finish as an adult and found it an incredible slog to get through. The puzzles, to me, made zero sense, which sucks the fun out of the game because the only possible way to solve them is to just try everything with everything or to look up the solution.

The latest Monkey Island. Now THAT's how you make a point-and-click adventure game!

That is the difference between Gilbert's game design versus Schafer's. I much prefer Gilbert.

Obligatory link to The Digital Antiquarian's treatment of the game:

https://www.filfre.net/2024/11/grim-fandango/

Absoltely crazy amount of detailed work

Grim Fandango was one of the first games I bought out of my own pocket. And as was the norm back then, this used up all my games budget for months, so I had to stick to this game, for better or worse, for a long time. I remember it took me a very long time to even find the Tube Room, it's easy to miss unless you do the 3D equivalent of pixelhunting to find the place where you need to take a turn. And boy, was I stuck in Rubacava!

I also remember that it was slightly difficult to buy the game - I was at least 13 at the time, the game had an age rating of 12, but (gasp!) there were skeletons on the cover, and the tag line mentioned corruption and crime. So the lady in the shop actually called her boss before eventually selling the game to me.

I would sometimes just let the game idle at the casino level and just listen to the mellow jazz. That game was a piece of art.

Nope, they integrated their sister project, ResidualVM, that does 3d

Some are, but I'm Danish and I think they translated any of the games to that :)

My 8 year old, improved his English skills a lot from playing Spy Fox. It's a series of funny point and click adventure games from Ron Gilbert's (of Monkey Island fame) company after leaving Lucasfilm.

I also just finished playing DOT with my ten-year-old, and was just today thinking about the next best game!

I had decided this morning that I'll try Monkey Island before Grim Fandango, because of the added complexity of Grim, as you say.

My favorite game of all time. This is awesome

Interesting so much

Grim Fandango is interesting because they are responsible for Lua’s popularity as a gaming scripting language:

https://www.lua.org/doc/hopl.pdf

Peter Chan was the concept artist for this game (as well as several other LucasArts and Double Fine ones)

Nostalgia activated. I now have to play Grim Fandango! Loved that game!

I wonder how does this fits in the general Game development pipeline

Is it Story -> Characters -> Puzzles?

Theme -> Characters -> Story -> Puzzles?

Or everything everywhere all at once?

Are the character descriptions in this doc leading the Story or derived from it?

How much of the story is built around Gameplay and its limitations? (I think I remember GF requiring 2 CDs?)

I'll bite.

    - Nothing like it in style and execution.

    - Superb and unique universe. It's brilliant. Fight me. ;)

    - Charming, engaging storytelling full of wit and humor. Charm and humor are particularly hard to pull off, it seems, given how few games I can think of that have them. (Bard's Tale and... uh...)

    - If you like the adventure games of the era, then this one is right up your alley. The puzzles are much more frustration-friendly than modern games, so they're not for the coddled gamers of today who, frankly, would just use an answer sheet when they got stuck. OTOH forcing yourself to stick with it and get that "Ohhhhhh the *diamond* makes the boat sink around us! *that's* how we climb out!" -- which is a real example from a *different* LucasArts game -- is very satisfying.

It's the theme and characters. Remember this game predates Coco by a lot!

If the Day of the Dead setting does nothing for you, then you'll dislike the game. But if it intrigues you, you'll likely love it.

The puzzles are arbitrary, it's not really what the game is about.

I like some adventure games. But old man murray's take still holds up:

https://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

There's a reason puzzle solutions (like walkthroughs) are called spoilers. It's because they spoil the game.

that is incredible

The two layers seem to say, superimposed on each other:

Manny doubles back to the car, reaches into Olivia's pile of flowers and finds his gun, the one he'd left there. Something really does go down like in Heat, and he's dead. All right then… I don't hate it. No matter. Ouch!

Manny doubles back to the car, reaches into Olivia's pile of flowers and finds his gun, the… Maybe the really cool thing that happens is you see his shadow traveling through time, and that's how you know he's coming back. And although I'm pretty cool with it… Great ending, ta da.

I'm glad I used a walkthrough when playing the game, because even after beating it I still have no idea how the hell the Chain puzzle worked.

Brilliant game, so much soul and character... I wish we could get another game in the same universe.

don't remember where I found this, but here is the viewing list for the movies that inspired the game. It has Tim put his viewing notes in it

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YsollH04QK9si9uEm3VXZWT0snH...

Given Disney owns the IP now, they probably don't need to make a Grim Fandango movie because they made Coco: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_(2017_film)

On the other hand, I still think Disney should make a Monkey Island TV show or movie. They could use Sea of Thieves-style water effects in the Volume for useful shenanigans.

Year 2 of GF might be my favourite memory of any video game, ever.

I don't want a new travel agent, I just want to go home

I hope a similar document surfaces about Monkey Island (or even MI2).

Phenomenal game and a fun fact: Grim Fandango was AFAICT the first high-profile game built on Lua and became the catalyst for industry adoption

One of my all time favorites and one I introduced my Son to as a child. He loved it enough to complete it and get a tattoo as an adult.

Loved this as a teen, although I actually don't think I ever got past year 3.

It's interesting to see how the "non-linearity" is still very linear, it's just that you have three different goals at once.

I just finished re-playing Day of the Tentacle with my kid, and what's amazing about that is the intersecting non-linearity. The three different characters each have multiple of their own goals, but they're forever needing to trade things back and forth, so often the path of one will be blocked until the other one has gotten the thing they need.

The map for the goals for DOT must be like spaghetti.