Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]
gameshelf.jmac.org
gameshelf.jmac.org
[first] "This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." -Winston Churchill
[last] "To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you!"
Most software work tends to move away from this kind of ... I don't want to say documentation, we have better documentation tools than ever, more-so a level of writing in general that is more 'human', be it written documents at length or well commented code.
Another one is `The Sims` https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064273
I recall a Warcraft III one I once saw, that went into technical details on the tooling/scripting packaged with the game. That was another great document too, but I don't have it :)
I wonder how this document was used? Did they write all of it before implementing the game? Or was it written in parallel to making the game, as a reference?
They started with cornering Tim and getting him to describe each area/room, including the soundscape, and then they would temp in music and sound effects and then went and got a lot of SF street musicians to record a lot of the music.
I remember them showing a build of the game that had Tim describing each scene instead of the final audio.
It was amazing to see behind the curtain.
You guys must have impacted thousands upon thousands of lives with your hard work and creativity.
I have a near identical form letter job offer from lucas digital as Tim Shafer posted re his application: https://www.doublefine.com/news/twenty-years-only-a-few-tear...
But we would visit for the company store, and I would be nosy and go talk to people. This was during production of grim fandango and there was a tangible ramp up of stress in that building as the release approached. I remember one of the testers sitting there staring at the manny character on his screen and bemoaning, "I used to love playing games".
The end result was truly a standout though.
Overall I remember being somewhat disappointed because of my struggle to make progress. Maybe my expectations had been too high - I was a recent convert to point n' click at the time and of course LucasArts being masters of the genre, meant my anticipation had reached fever pitch.
But at some point I followed instructions to complete the game along to the end. It's probably fair to say that following the journey of the game is one of the fondest memories of my life.
I highly recommend the remastered version from 2015 on Steam. I bought it and did another playthrough. It brought back so many emotions, and getting insight from the developers let me really connect with them.
Grim Fandango is probably even better now, since you can easily look up solutions to some of the more frustrating puzzles. The remastered version is also very good, changing just enough to make it play well on modern systems, without fundamentally altering the experience.
I think I have rose colored glasses as I remember the game being difficult in the sense of lots of walking around trying to find the solution to the last couple of puzzles. Having played the remaster, it was clear how clunky the controls were. But wow, I still love that game.
I suspect there is a hint in the name of the document. I can't tell how these "puzzles" are meant to be puzzles and to this day I never figured out how people were meant to solve them in the context of the game. The Discworld series as I recall were terrible for this, but these puzzle structure diagrams just don't make sense to me. What is the player being challenged to do? Grim Fandango is trying to tell a story but it won't reveal what the story is until after the player has already figured it out through telepathy and brute force clicking.
For all these games were landmarks it was an era where it wasn't obvious what a computer game could or should do to be interesting and entertaining. Something like Return of the Obra Dinn captures the intent of these games (storytelling through close inspection) much more cleanly.
As for your question about “what is the player being challenged to do?” I had to sit and think for a bit. I think the most straightforward answer is to just think abstractly and make connections in the context of a humorous noir story. You certainly aren’t being challenged to solve a mystery, but I’m not sure it really matters. I’m not sure if you mean it like Chess challenges you to vanquish your opponent and The Witness demands color/pattern/maze analysis.
I can't easily reconcile that with the linked puzzle document. If I pick on something at random (page 16, Puzzle #12: Get Starter [0]). I don't see any particular advantage to abstract thinking or even superficially understanding the scene. It looks like the player is expected to brute-force solutions. The situation overall is pretty entertaining and we learn a little bit about the world; but the actual puzzle - even with the design docs - doesn't give any hints about how players are meant to come up with that solution thoughtfully. The design doc doesn't seem to think that clues, hints or the like are important. If the symbology of using spiderwebs as sling-shots with bones is a standard trope then I suppose maybe I'm just out of it - but I don't think it is. That isn't how spiderwebs work. It seems logically suspect even in the game's own context - if the scythe can't cut the web, why can't we use it to slingshot? Or if not getting the scythe stuck is critical, why do we need the scythe at all? Manny can just grip the bone.
It isn't bad as such; these puzzles can be solved and I enjoyed a bunch of these games with walkthroughs in hand. But it is easy to see why the market for point & clicks evaporated - the gameplay loop is weak and the puzzle aspect is also weak.
[0] And we can see what that became in the game here - https://youtu.be/jIoSL-uSwfs?t=4223
The only puzzle that stumped me was much later in the game, when a pneumatic tube demon asked me questions about Maximino where the answer was a number. I was so used to gleaning info from conversations or Manny’s quips that I didn’t realize the demon was using some bingo number picker or something in the background.
They're still out there! Scroll down this recent thread for many, many, many examples: https://bsky.app/profile/grundislavgames.bsky.social/post/3l...
It shone, pale as bone
As I stood there alone
And I thought to myself how the moon,
That night, cast its light
On my heart's true delight,
And the reef where her body was strewn.I must say, it has not really grabbed me.
It sadly suffers from the common problem of these sort of games where you have to combine seemingly random items to make any progress. There are so far very few actual "puzzles" that you can solve, but instead mainly you just need to brute force the combinations of items to find that One Weird Combination that does something - most recent example: use a piece of coral on a rope so you can then climb the rope... wtf?! This is made even worse by the sheer tedium of having to walk backwards and forwards across the screens and trying everything on everything. Please game designers if you are forcing me to walk around aimlessly please at least make it quick to move around!