Thimbleweed Park Podcast #30

Thanks for the answers.
In the pre-Internet era, that solution was the best possible simple and efficient, I think!

I actually think you did make a valid point. At the same time I reckon never really having a problem in old Lucas games where either rooms where never that big or eternal room chains were avoided (mazes make an exception of course! :) ). Speed on maps was kind of fine in MI1 and travelling between Island could be skipped on MI2. I'm sure you will handle things well avoiding eternal travelling from one point to another (anyone who played Simon the Sorcerer 1 will know what I mean).

Great decision. I always use the shortcut, but only because I CAN do it and it's the easy way. I always have the same thought, that it somehow destroys the world I'm playing through. As in real life I need someone to discipline me to do it the "hard" way. ;-)

The most memorable room of the Neverhood was the Hall of records: long hallway with all of the history of the world written on the walls of countless screens, that You had to traverse to get one of the discs needed to end the game. It was painfull, felt unnecessary, but it worked and now in hindsight I really like the experience. (10 minutes of constant walking)

Well, I remeber the dinning room in MM (the one with the old rotten turkey), it was very long, but it was funny to pass through!
On Commodore 64, I placed the cursor on a particular spot near the lower right corner, and simply pushed the fire button on the joystick to update the walking :-)
It was part of the fun...

I fully agree . For the new C64 Adventure we went with a quick-exit System for (open) doors and room-edges, though. So hovering over an empty door generates an exit-symbol and a double-click then exits the room instantly. For stairs we intentionally did not implement that to allow for a smoother transition (i.e. to the next level of the building etc).

Maybe just speed up the character's walk when you double-click a door/exit?

It could be a little frustrating for a player who thinks he/she has the solution to a puzzle but then has to traverse the entire game world to where they need to try their solution.  And, what if what the player tries doesn't even work out to be the solution?  I remember having to do this several times when playing Broken Age and it was kind of a pain in the butt.

Some design keeps or tries to keep players within a compartment when presented with a puzzle, but ultimately when you open up a lot of the game world, that game world traversal can feel a bit tedious when you are stuck.

Of course, if you have puzzles that are dependent on how a player moves, you will have to design special cases to handle this if you allow the player to move faster or to "quick travel" to other rooms or areas.

My son, a bit shy of two years old, just loves walking around the world of Monkey Island 1. He just taps around all the time - granted that it's not the game you created anymore, being played on the iPad, but still pretty much the same idea.

The same goes for board games adapted to computers and the internet - why on earth are the people playing the games if their only intention is to get through them as fast as possible - isn't the whole idea of gaming at least in part supposed to be in actually spending time in the game, not just achieving the goals?
Where's the leisure or the joy of playing the games if the only goal is to get to the end as fast as possible?

My favourites:
Turrican 2 (music by Chris Huelsbeck)
Monkey Island (I like very much the tracks from Special Edition)
Loom (the guy who composed the score has some chance to become someone :)))) :D )

yeah, I did read that. Probably. Then again, I was possibly looking for an updated answer. Maby?.