That method of troubleshooting parser commands Al Lowe discussed at the end was great. I’m a big fan of the modern two-button system. That way it’s more about interacting with the world rather than figuring out how to interact with the world. 🙂
Great video dude. I remember being dissapointed with KQ5 my first time, I never acquired the love for the icon interface that I had for the parser interface. It was the aspect of the games that most blew my mind from the first time I saw KQ I at a RadioShack. My mom said "try bowing to the king" so I typed "bow to the king" and we were blown away by the animation, it felt like you could do anything.
That's the beauty of the parser. It lets you mess with the games in the ways point-and-click UIs rarely do. One thing that springs to mind (even though most people seem to hate it) is in Space Quest II when the chief says, "Just say the word," and you're meant to type "say the word."
I knew it was going to be LSL7! Totally agree. It's a huge shame that this style of interface isn't used in more games. However, I still think there is huge untapped potential for a revival of text parser thanks to modern language models.
Honestly, I vastly prefer the "few is better" style of just two-mouse-button interactions. Because giving me 20 options, where 19 are doing nothing at all is just me having to guess which one is the intended one. That's just wasting my time in an attempt to pretend on giving me freedom while not actually offering any at all to begin with. So one generic "interact" and one "inspect" icon is really all that's needed at the end of the day.
Agree wholeheartedly, and it doesn't just apply to classic adventure games but even some RPGs. I attempted playing cult classic Earthbound (SNES) only to be frustrated that its world interaction was _years behind_ contemporaries like FF4. You pressed the A button to pop up a list of possible verbs, with at most one or two verbs even relevant to the tile/object in front of you for the verb to target, the rest being wasted menu space. Adding insult to injury, a _separate_ controller button was mapped as a combined shortcut for "look/talk/interact" with the target in front of you.
@@StratelierExactly what I was thinking of! From what I remember, Check did nothing when you were looking at an NPC, and Talk To did nothing for non-NPCs. There was no reason to have two different commands when there was only one interaction you could do with any given thing.
The problem with everything other than parsers (save for ludicrously verb-laden interfaces) is that on some level the interface is playing the game for you. You want your experience to be this: "Can I climb this tree? [click] Hey, I can!" but instead your process becomes this: "What can I do with this tree? [click] Oh, climb."
That's true. I still think the best middle ground between being overwhelmed and restrained is a contextual menu system that gives you a variety of unique options per object - some of them possible, some not - and, crucially, that can change over time. So, e.g. if you're told later down the line that it's actually a magical tree, the option to "talk" to it then becomes available.
@@spacequesthistorian I guess what irks me about that is that you end up subconsciously checking the menu for clues, rather than your own intuition. Having a bunch of specific verbs always available isn't necessarily a bad thing if you want to dissuade the player from trying to brute force everything, but the puzzles have to be well designed, with good diegetic clues, and non-annoying fail responses. (I like how in Day of the Tentacle when you push/pull/pick up almost anything, it shows the character reaching out to actually TRY it before saying they can't do it.) In theory, anyway. In practice I think most designers have reduced verbs down for a reason. For my unfinished game I spent a lot of time implementing context menus and rarely needed more than the base Look/Use/Talk. (For non-character hotspots, talk becomes "talk about", so you can get both text-box Look descriptions AND the player character's spoken response for everything.)
I’d definitely love to see a follow up video on more interfaces (a la BASS)! And I’d also love to watch you play Captain Blood one of these days, speaking of bizarre interfaces…
I would definitely like to talk about Steel Sky's interface, especially since Revolution swapped the mouse buttons around for their next game, Broken Sword - I have some words about that. I've heard good things about Captain Blood but I haven't played it. Maybe I should give it a look. There have been a lot of suggestions for weird UIs to take a look at in a follow-up video, so I have my work cut out for me.
My favourite has always been the LucasArts nine verbs UI, although I agree it can be reduced, but maybe not as far down as 4. You still want some intentionality behind the player's actions. With just Hand for everything, it becomes too easy to cheese puzzles. Or worse, accidently solve them while trying to do something completely different (and sometimes not even understanding what just happened). Those UIs that reduce all commands down to a single right-click to look and talk, left click for everything else, are especially guilty of this. What I don't think you mentioned re the icons for verbs: the icons add a layer of mental translation ("I want to use, Use is the...gear icon, find that, Gear icon on Item") and as you point out, cause confusion when the icons don't represent the action in a clear way. With the verbs written out in text form, you don't have that extra layer or that confusion. But what I like most about nine-verb SCUMM (and some of its contemporaries) is that it has you build coherent sentences: "Pick Up Item", "Give Item to Person" etc. So a natural progression from the parser. But with later interfaces, like Curse of MI, Full Throttle and LSL7, you're clicking the item first, so the syntax gets reversed to "Item, Pick Up". That will never cease to feel unnatural and awkward to me (I do understand there are non-English languages where it's going to be _more_ natural though ).
Speaking of Al Lowe, I'm surprised you didn't mention his The Black Cauldron. He basically predicted Sierra's later icon interface by eliminating the parser and moving all the common commands - look, use, etc - onto the function keys. So you walk Taran up to a door and press (iirc) F4 to use it, and it opens. It was really forward-looking design for 1985. Also, if you do that followup GUI video, don't forget the weird modular mess of icons in Return To Zork.
In my experience, TBC was probably the first Sierra adventure game we ever played, and I personally found it odd to use the Function keys as regular gameplay inputs.
Your videos always have great insights - I never really appreciated what Larry 7 was doing until you said it! I remember the manual for Simon the Sorcerer 2 saying "GIVE is a separate verb because there's a big difference between giving someone a chainsaw and using a chainsaw on someone" - and admitting that the use of the WEAR verb was limited ("almost unique, actually") but that having seven verbs wouldn't have looked very good. It's interesting that Sierra went from the wide open parser to very streamlined, whereas LucasArts had the middle ground for a while, giving limited verbs but still using them all pretty separately. I made a couple of attempts at parser adventure games in the early 2000s, and I also kept a file with all the lines the player typed so that I could then ask them to send them to me and I could fill in any actions that I thought were clever! It's fantastic to know that I had the same idea as Al Lowe did :) I started a game tentatively called "Bastard Quest" where the idea was to make it as comically unfair as possible with many silent dead ends and unavoidable deaths, but I didn't get very far because I realized I couldn't hope to compete with what Sierra's games seemingly did without even trying (it's funny to see Roberta Williams saying that King's Quest 5 was their idea of trying to remove things that got in the way of the player enjoying themselves!)
Your idea for a game that contains as many fuck-you-moments as possible sounds eerily similar to our "All Demons Must Go To Hell" game. 😆 We did everything that you're not meant to do in that game, including having too many verbs, a maze with a roaming monster, and tons of soft locks.
Don't know if any classic adventure games used a similar Larry 7 UI (maaaaybe Fallout 1 counts if you cheat a bit), but the Quest for Glory 2 VGA remake had a Point-and-Click / Parser hybrid for those that wanted it. I didn't try it at the time, but have been meaning to lately. And more UI videos would indeed be interesting!
Typing should have been required back in the day. I took it for 2 years in high school and boy, has it paid off BIG TIME. I can type 50 to 60 wpm no problem. I've probably typed millions of words in my life and until voice recognition, typing was the only game in town.
I much preferred Sierra's icons over Dynamix's lack of icons. That generic red arrow was annoying, because I had no idea what it was going to make the character do: open a cabinet, pick up medicine, jump behind the couch, etc.
The non game pausing interface is what I really hated. During the AGI period. Especially as I was still a kid, who was still grasping at reading and writing skills, then to be a fast typer and trying to spell a word correctly, created a lot of needless deaths.
Interestingly, if you played the AGI games on a Hercules monochrome monitor, it did pause the action! Because there wasn't enough room on the Hercules display for the parser command line to be visible at all times.
@@spacequesthistorian so you got a better image than a CGA display with 16 shades of gray, you also got to pause the game while you can yell out "Mom how do you spell ... " Where I often had a response of look it up, which wasn't helpful because I didn't know how to spell it so I couldn't find it to be the dictionary.
@@toddfraser3353 Weeeeeelll... the Hercules version wasn't exactly pretty. 😅 cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/2449909-space-quest-chapter-i-the-sarien-encounter-dos-the-beginning-her.png
@@spacequesthistorian compared to the CGA color variant on the RGB display, It was better. In particular I remember a blue background, yellow, green and red.
2:47 Maniac Mansion's interface was obviously intended to be used with a mouse, but for some unfathomable reason, you actually have to push a keyboard button to actually activate the mouse. And it's a random button, not one that actually makes sense, and I still can't remember it off the top of my head. For the longest time, I just used the keyboard arrow keys to clumsily move the cursor around because I had no idea how to turn the mouse on. I get it, back then, mice for keyboards were still pretty new, but I don't know why you need to push a button to turn it on when it should just work automatically like it does for every other game.
I recall working on a game in Adventure Game Studio using the Sierra style PnC interface. I specifically didn't want any generic negative feedback, so I very specifically and intentionally made sure that every single action on every single object in the game had a unique message. It took FOREVER. The number of objects in your game (even inconsequential scenery items) times the number of total verbs equals a ton of possible messages. It was particularly frustrating having to figure out what the character would say when they tried to "talk" to all the inanimate objects. Since then, I've grown really fond of the Beneath a Steel Sky 2 button interface. Use and examine. That's all you need to worry about. It's less guessing for the player, and less busy work for me.
It's funny that you used that Sam & Max game for the "You can't pick that up" section. If you keep trying to tell Sam to pick up items that can't be picked up, he grows increasingly hostile. If you persist, Sam stops responding and just whimpers from then on while Max chastises you for breaking Sam's spirit.
Yes, I loved that gag. I especially love that, in the disk version, Max says the object number for the thing you tried to pick up. Obviously in the CD-ROM version they had to simplify that line to just say "that silly object."
Yeah, that's another thing. Revolution first established the two-button UI with left mouse button being "examine" and right mouse button being "interact." They swapped them around with Broken Sword, and that swap-around is what's now commonly used in indie adventure games, including your own (dare I say masterful) game Technobabylon. And I have some words about that, too, because it sort of relegates "examine" to being an optional feature, since most players have typically been conditioned to clicking the left mouse button first.
@@spacequesthistorian Technobabylon is one of the greatest point-and-click adventure games I've ever letter. Consider making a video about the two button approach from BASS. It really solved a lot of these problems.
@douglasbushong3920 The two-button approach does make things a lot easier but it has its own problems. It would be worth covering in the future, definitely.
Honestly, I would love to see your "Fair and Balanced Retrospective" for the "Quest for Glory" games. I love them, but the central storyline is pretty ridiculous if you think about it too hard: An ordinary nobody who learned all his skills via correspondence school answers an advertisement calling for a hero in a neighboring land, and not only does he succeed in his quest, he goes on to become a hero in several other lands, becomes the adopted son of a sultan, and is offered the crown to a kingdom just a few weeks after setting foot in it. All this happens in the space of about a year, and even if he pursues the path of becoming a paragon of virtue, he can propose to and presumably marry three different women simultaneously. Honestly, it makes Sonny's promotion from traffic cop to undercover narc seem believable by comparison.
I get a lot of requests to do Quest for Glory but it's not really in my wheelhouse. For one, I get paralyzed with FOMO whenever I see stats. Second, I would be compelled to play each game at least three times (four, if I make Paladin), just to be a completionist. It would be a vast undertaking.
@@spacequesthistorian FWIW, you can do some streamlining with QFG. In particular, all the magician content is simply gated by whether you have the ability to use magic, which can be added in character creation. Also, the fighter class sucks and is the least-interesting of the bunch. There's no reason to play it past the second game. So basically, you could do one playthrough as a thief-with-magic build (which is many people's favorite anyway) and then a second as a fighter who becomes a Paladin in QFG2, and see something like 95% of the content with just those two runs. I get if you still don't want to do QFG, just saying.
@@jasonblalock4429 Another method would be to exploit a glitch in the QFGI EGA version that allows you to get a Fighter with all skills. And at least for the first couple of games, if you have all the skills, you can basically do everything, because unlike in later games, your character type doesn't hardcode particular paths.
@@spacequesthistorian I can see your point. It isn't quite as bad as that, since the differences between the Fighter and Paladin are negligible (the Paladin basically gets a few extra "honor quests" and magic skills that aren't available to other classes), and for the first two games, you can basically do all three paths at once if you have a character with all skills; the only differences are which actions give points and whether you qualify as a Paladin at the end of the second game. Building your stats is by far the worst part, though, since they stack from game to game, and some games offer virtually no opportunities to practices some skills (particularly climbing) or make building some skills a lot more time-consuming. If you had access to character files that have already had their stats maxed out, that would save time, since you wouldn't need to worry about building stats as much.
I definitely think the "open" and "close" options Lucas arts games could have been combined. I've had the odds game where push and pull do different things on the same object, but I've never ever been able to open our close something more then once. That is to say, if something is closed, the only option to interact with or is open. And vice versa. I guess it would maybe be possible to open something twice, but I've never seen it implemented.
I actually had a line in the video where I said you could remove the Push and Pull verbs and just keep the Open and Close verbs, but then I remembered that pushing and pulling are a bit broader, and "pushing" a door might be a bit of a leap of imagination for new players.
This might be considered cheating a bit, but I think my favorite point and click UI is the verb wheel from the special edition releases of Monkey Island one and two and Day of the Tentacle remastered. It's been a bit since I played the games but if I remember correctly it only shows you the appropriate verbs that give you a genuine result along with the option to use an item which would then bring up your inventory right next to the wheel added monkey Island. When selecting an item in your inventory the wheel would open up allowing select either give or use, if you select to use then a second inventory window would pop up next to your first inventory window allowing you to select the item you want to combine with your first pick. Or if you wanted to use the item in the environment you would just move your mouse off the inventory window which would then cause the game to close the inventory (at least if I remember correctly, there's a chance you might have had to press a button to close your inventory before you could use your item in the world). And if you wanted to skip the wheel and do the primary verb associated with what you're trying to click on usually resulting in a look at or talk command, you can just right click on PC or pull the left trigger on console. I think it's an excellent way to present the classic Lucasarts verbs with a more modern feeling interface if that works beautifully on both a mouse and a controller
So, it turns out I was wrong about monkey Island special edition using the verb wheel. With that one you just press a button, v on the keyboard in the PC version and it just brings up a menu that lists the nine verbs. The verb wheel was introduced in Monkey Island 2 Special Edition. But now I'm honestly unsure about the inventory system I described. Looks like I got to play through those games again.
I did quite like the verb wheel. It certainly brought the amount of negative feedback down. I also appreciated how the DOTT remaster gave you nearly endless options to customize the experience as you saw fit. Classic UI or verb wheel? New or old sound effects? Classic graphics or redrawn hi-res graphics? All individual options that you can switch on/off at your leisure. That's how you do a proper remaster.
SCI0 was my favorite. You didn't have to faff around with the mouse cursor, and if KQ5 was SCI0, you could have started typing throw boot at cat and it would have paused while you typed. That was a big thing with AGI games - typing something, moving into a new screen, and then immediately hitting Enter to avoid slow typing or fuckups. But you forgot the most vanilla of them all... The Black Cauldron that only had arrow keys and a few function keys for select item, use selected item, do, and look
@@KM-hv1jgVersion 0 of SCI, mostly characterised by being 16 colour EGA, driven mostly by the keyboard and used text parser. Games built on SCI1 were 256 colours and driven by the mouse. Similar technology under the hood otherwise. Chronologically, it went: GAL (original KQ1) to AGI (KQ1-3, SQ1+2, PQ1, etc) to SCI0 (LSL2+3, PQ2, QFG1+2, SQ3 etc) to SCI1 (SQ4, PQ3, etc) and then onto whatever the hell SCI variant SQ6 and KQ7 used which looked and felt terrible
@@KM-hv1jg Sierra Creative Interpreter version 0. It was used for games like King's Quest 4, Space Quest 3, Police Quest 2, Quest for Glory 1 and Leisure Suit Larry 2 & 3.
Discworld Noir has a great unique interface. You’re a detective, so everything - topics and inventory items - written down in your notebook. You can ask about an inventory item, or a topic! It’s pretty cool.
I have been playing adventure games since the first Sierra releases that required us to write the actions and yes, it was really hard since I was a kid and english is not my born language. The abstraction behind the icons and just clicking was a nice evolution and made the adventure games a lot more fun to play for me. Greetings from Brazil!
I recently replayed The Dig, and I was reminded how much I actually liked the "one click does everything" interface. Yeah, it limits freedom and creativity for games that might have multiple solutions, and it can be jarring when it does something unexpected. Like if there's a grocery store display of a stack of canned tomatoes, and I'm in a one-click game, I might expect the controlled character to take one off the top, but it's weird if instead they kicked the whole display over. The kicked display might be part of some other puzzle, but if you haven't encountered the need for it yet, it's still weird. Best if there's no unknown fail state though, like clicking something in the wrong sequence or from the wrong direction locked you out. At least The Dig still had inventory. Neverhood didn't have one, at least not one you could interact with. You could pick up various objects on your journey, like video recordings or keys, and just whenever you'd click on a video player or locked door the character would automatically use them. Just me though.
Cruise for a Corpse had a contextual verb list too with hotspots. Don't think it was as robust as LSL7 though, but it did only give you verbs that made sense with what you're interacting with.
Thanks! I grew up on English language cartoons and tv shows, and being an exchange student in the U.S. when I was a teenager probably helped a bit as well.
A big problem with the Sierra icon interface was when the game used an icon to do something unexpected. The legs icon means walk but it can also mean kick or jump or any other interaction that uses your legs. I blame SQ4 for changing the kq5 walk icon to legs and other games followed suit allowing ambiguity (kq6 kept the Kq5 walk icon but it could still mean jump). Let's not mention the hand icon, what it does is never clear as it doesn't just mean use it is also the take action and other things like push, pull and can weirdly even mean jump (good job kq5, this should have been an indication the system was flawed, that strange second walk icon could have been jump). LSl7 really is the best. context menus are very user friendly and by the time of lsl7 they were something people would have commonly experienced in Windows. Some rpgs have context menu like interfaces where you target an object and choose an action from a huge multilevel menu (mostly just types of attacks, the spells you can cast, quick use items, skills and special abilities) but I've never seen any other game attempt a custom action like lsl7
I've been thinking about making a classic style adventure game, so this could not have come out at a better time. Would love to see the follow up video!
Recently gotten into making a classic sierra game lately too, and as somebody with a backgound in Unity, Unreal, Gadot, Python based engines, and Mono, let me tell you Sci Companion is a dream. It has a bunch of useful tools that cut out a lot of the guess work and the only real difficulty is how sparse the documentation is, so you need to constantly trawl the programming forums to figure out the right functions and grammer of the coding language it uses. That and managing the low amount of memory to avoid the out of handles error for more complicated scenes. Would love to see more people playing with it.
@@SlvtSammichArchive hey man that sounds like tons of work, and more power to ya. I couldn't even imagine tryna pick up sci haha, truth is ive only just started learning Godot, and making a classic adventure game worth its salt is my first major goal.
@@thecrackedgasmask0071 different challenges in each approach, for example you wont need to program a parser, or screen to screen room systems, in SCI, but that will need to be coded from the ground up in Godot. But in coding that stuff yourself you do get much more flexibility, and theres way more reference material for a big engine like Godot, so you can def borrow from tutorials. There is something fun about reverse engineering old classic sierra games by decompiling them and trying to figure out how they coded ladder climbs in KQ4 for example lmao. Good luck!
I love the design of LSL7 overall. The interface is the best, but the game is still tricky at times so the interface doesn't make the puzzles easier by any means. Some of them is really out there (but then it's Al Lowe).
Before LSL7 popped up, I was about to type up a rant about how these sorts of games should swap the select action and select target steps, good to know at least one of them did.
The console adventure games had to go with a different UI then text parsers to try make it work with a controller and to do this going back to '85 on the Famicom. Hoshi wo Sagashite (Story of Mio) for the Sega Mark III has extra commands that translate to Hit and Eat and I think you only have to Eat once, this along with having to quit to get your password save and after getting your password just getting dumped to the title. Fast forwarding to Policenauts you have context options when you click something that does give away what can be done making the brute force method far too effective.
I think the classic Lucasarts SCUMM Interface was perfectly reduced to the necessary "Eye", "Hand" and "Mouth" Icons in Curse of Monkey Island, which were used context sensitive...or is that game to new to be regarded als a classic Point & Click?
Definitely not too new, but... it does suffer a bit from the same "Hand icon does everything" syndrome that Sierra's icon bar UI does. In fact, it's quite ironic that LucasArts ended up mimicking Sierra's UI in their later games (most evident in Sam & Max: Hit the Road).
text adventures needed basically a list of synonyms and aliases for each noun or object. If you put a rock into a room, you need to code for "stone" as well as "rock" and might as well add "bolder" while you're at it. Just need a synonym dictionary at your side when you create all the objects in the game. Same with verbs. Just have to put your thinking cap on and think of all the various and sundry ways the task can be done. PUshing games out quickly without doing a group test or testing with potential players is probably a large % of the parser issues. Gotta get that next game out ASAP and get that $ but.... haste makes waste. 18:30 ? That's exactly how ANY testing is done. The tester keeps track of bugs and then lets the dev know about them after testing so they can change the code to be able to properly handle those scenarios. I wouldn't have thought that was any novel idea in the late 80s but maybe for adventure game programmers it was genius.
Re: the 18:30 thing. The innovative part of this is that the testers didn't log this; it was logged automatically. Testers wouldn't report every input they tried that failed because that's not their job. They're looking for bugs, not missing parser responses.
@@spacequesthistorian ah, I see. That's the "write to floppy every time the wtf scenario is encountered" a data dump of the status of the game. But in terms of computer science, that's not new. At least, I don't think it is. It's like when a program crashes and it dumps all the variable contents to a file b4 it closes but in this case, it's not really a crash, just a catch-all basket for when there is no verb-noun matching. I used to play text adventures back in the early 80s. 1981. Then some of those Space Quest ones or at least SQ6 I think it was. MI 1 and 2. I thought those were really nice. The humor in there was nice and the graphics and soundtrack. Voice acting. Well-done all around. Seems making a graphic adventure game single handedly would take a really long time. thx
I really enjoyed the Escape from Monkey Island UI where there was a medallion that popped up with all the potential actions one could do with a given item, Larry 7's example reminded me of it.
I think a lot of it depends on the design of the game itself and how well it fits with the interface (whatever that may be). The first wave of Sierra games to use the point-and-click interface were, on the whole, pretty weak (IMO), because the lack of parser robbed the designers of a lot of the “tricks” they would use for puzzles (e.g., players no longer had to think up a specific verb when they can just click the Hand around). But as the designers got more used to the interface, the games got a little bit less obvious. The Dagger of Amon Ra interface was great, because it used the “notebook” interface to carry over the more intricate character interaction options from The Colonel’s Bequest (where you could not only “Talk” to characters, but also “Ask” or “Tell” about specific characters and items, often receiving unique and helpful responses). Super important in a detective game!
I loved that they at least gave designers the chance to mess with the icon bar. When I asked Al if the Zipper icon was a reaction to the limits of the point-and-click interface, he responded, "No, I just thought it was funny." 😁
@@AbNormalHumanBeingsStuff Oh, it will. Maybe I'll do a follow-up video on the stuff *I* considered for inclusion in this video, and then tackle people's suggestions in the future.
I like text parsers that pause the game, but only when they write a lot of reactive text. If there's just one or two things to do in a scene and everything else just gets errors, it's dull.
Absolutely agree. Unfortunately a lot of SCI0 games, like PQ2 and KQ4, suffer from a lot of the "nah" syndrome. They just wanted you to get on with the game, not explore your environment.
If I recall correctly, LucasFilm tested out the pick-a-verb interface all the way back in “Habitat” days (1985). Sierra did the same in Black Cauldron (the same year). Infocom followed suit with Journey 1989. Magnetic Scrolls introduced their clunky UI-assisted parser with Wonderland circa 1990…what a mess that was!
I am personally a fan of fewer options, LB2 is my preferred due to the interrogation symbol. I find the Lucas style clogs up so much of the screen and is slow and clunky. (I played Thimbleweed Park on the switch, for real) Hilariously, though, from memory is the 'hit-pixel' of the KQ5 hand icon is in the middle of the palm (great for pixel hunting), not the logical finger tip. I'm currently trying to play Gabriel Kinight 1, and my brain hits a wall every time remembering the symbollic difference between the *2* hand icons, a set of gears, and a swinging door!
Yeah, the hotspot for the Hand icon took a while to get used to. At least GK1 had that little diamond shape that indicated where the cursor's hotspot was!
I think Altered Destiny, the lil sierra style knock off by Alcolade from 1990 had some interesting inclusions that get slept on for parser design. Still all the same issues you're describing, but in trying to figure out the item you want, lets say 'Look Item' it will then bring up a list: 'Do you mean the X item, the Y item, or the Z item' which basically informs you of the correct nouns. So then you just need to type look Z item and the problem is solved. Really nice stuff.
I never played Altered Destiny but that does sound very interesting. Have you played the Snail Trek games? They used stuff like auto-complete and spell checking to ease players into using the parser.
@@spacequesthistorian You should totally give it a look, its def inspired by SQ and is a really quirky lil game. JP and his popcorn explore an alien world. I haven't played Snail Trek but now I have to so thanks for the rec ^^
I'm not sure Ken & Roberta can be trusted to provide accurate accounts of their company history. I've never, ever heard either one of them give an honest and candid reflection of the mistakes they made, or regrets they had, or how other companies improved upon their work. They seem instead to only be interested in cementing the legacy of Sierra in an entirely positive narrative. That's really unfortunate because there's a lot of really interesting gaming history that they were witness to, which we will never hear about.
If I made a text parser game, I wouldn’t allow the verb “use” to actually accomplish anything, but also program in funny messages about the character trying to use the item in some nonsensical way. Like “use key on door” would make the character tap a jaunty tune on the door with the key.
The game shown at 11:24 is a jam game we did called All Demons Must Go to Hell where we made the UI as confusing as possible - but we purposely didn't include a "Use" verb.
I still think you should give Quest For Glory some time. With the exception of the grinding of skill points, there is a decent story good humor and forgiving gameplay.
Definitely. The big thing about QFG is that for better or worse, the class system gave you multiple ways to approach and solve puzzles. It's fair to dislike the grind, but that flexibility is a strong point.
When Roberta Williams decided to change from the parser based interface in 1995 to point and click, my strong interest for adventure games started to decline rapidly. IF adventure games will come back with a parser, now powered with tech like LLM, I will certainly give adventure games a new try.
That was a jam game I did with my friend TorpedoBear. We intentionally tried to make the worst adventure game of all time - overly complicated UI, a maze with a roamning monster, and tons of dead end puzzles. You can download and play it here: gamejolt.com/games/demons/618553
Troels. I desperately need you to play through Spud!, which has an elf-based lament configuration interface, and its even worse sequel The Quivering, which replaces the gnomes with imps - both of which are limited resources that must be sacrificed to save the game, in a game with deaths.
I have not watched the entire video but I prefer the text input / parser interface far above the point and click. I learnt a lot of english through Sierra games.
Did you ever play a Legend Entertainment adventure? The 90s ones have a point on text and image system that is quite unique. I can recommend Eric the Unready for humor and the Gateway games for scifi.
I played about five minutes of Eric the Unready, which had that very peculiar (and somewhat overwhelming) parser/point-and-click combo UI. I also played - anf somehow finished - a later game of theirs, Companions of Xanth, which greatly simplified the UI but still tried to stay true to their parser roots. Definitely a strange transitional time for point-and-click games.
QFG1 SCI1 had the mouse interface even when you were multiple-choice choosing what to talk about, which was disappointingly spoilery. Give me a parser any day for QFG.
You missed the absolute worst point and click adventure game interface, that of "Armaëth: The Lost Kingdom" - fortunately it also has a parser, but the icon bar has 10 icons, many of which have a different action on left-click or right-click, and if you thought that was bad... the icon bar also has two additional rows of 10 icons, so it's a total of 30, of wich only 10 are shown at the same time. There is some duplication, but a total of 34 distinct actions. How distinct? Well, there's "talk" and "greet" as separate actions, "eat" and "drink" are separate, "climb up" and "climb down" are separate, "light torch" and "extinguish torch" are separate. Each of those are individual icons! And there's even an icon for washing an inventory item in water (you can't just "use" the inventory item on water, as there is no "use" icon at all).
I could never get into Lucas Arts. Having to slowly move my mouse to the action I wanted, and then slowly move it over to the object I wanted to click on was so boring! I just wanted to type like in Sierra games. It was so much faster.
@@jarnalyrkar They were in all of them. In the older ones it's by position (e.g. Q is the top left verb), in the newer ones it's the first letter. Also, don't forget about the highlighted most common verb you could use with the right mouse button, introduced in Monkey Island.
I grew up on Sierra games, so I'm decidedly a bit partial to having a screen-filling background not visually constrained by a persistent HUD, but I do remember attempting to play a game with a Lucasarts/SCUMM style interface and noting that when I clicked on an action type then hovered my mouse over various targets, the simple fact that it popped up a text description (e.g. "talk to person") made me ask "then what's the point? why not just offer a text parser?" (especially if the target was something moving quickly / difficult to actually click on) A game whose text parser _includes suggestions/autocomplete_ would be a lovely design idea to see, now that I think about it.
@@kpanic23 Quite certain it was reversed: the older games (ie Last Crusade) had it by first letter, and later ones (Fate of Atlantis) were corresponding keys Q-C, which was a _whole_ lot easier to use without looking down.
I have to be on the side of buttons with text. No ambiguity, easy to understand what each button does and if you don't know what the word means (if you're not a native English speaker), you can consult a dictionary.
You say that the verb "swallow" is used only once or twice in the game and takes up space. Well? The same applies to any inventory item: it's used once or twice in the game and takes up space. Why don't you make the same criticism about inventory items? Perhaps because the inventory is scrollable, so an item is not always visible? But then, the verbs just need to be scrollable, and the problem is solved? In my opinion, the fact that something (verb or item) is used only once or twice in the game is not a problem. On the contrary, this is exactly what the game is. The game _is_ figuring out that _now_ is the right time to use that verb, or that item. It’s right that it is used only once or twice, otherwise there wouldn't be a game.
Inventory clutter can be it's own issue (for some players), but it's not as much of an issue as a cluttered or unclear verb menu that you're constantly using to interact with the world. I don't think it's as simple as making the verbs not all fit on one page - maybe if you had all the common ones on the same page, but I expect some players would forget alternatives exist and get stuck.
The interface has to die With each UI there comes a different design idea. SQH pointed out a lot of the reasons why the ideas changed, but there's a slight shift in game design that lead to radical different forms. The change in technology and taste produced different stories that produced different manipulation methods. I think the manipulation aspect of interaction with the game world is fundamentally determined by the narrative. The linear approach implicates more actions than the explorative. If the player is in one situation at a time, he has to have lots of options to manipulate that situation, so here the parser comes in handy to give the illusion of freedom, even though there are very limited correct actions. As the story progresses to the next situation, the player has to adopt to that and might get more creative to use the parser. This creativity is overwhelming when many situations are already open to the player. The more exploration is an integral part of the game, the less linear its narration could be and so the focus lies less on problem solving. Text adventures often overwhelm with an illusion of things to do, while the number of puzzles to solve the games are relatively low. In early graphic adventures this still is the case. Progress is made by narrowing the problems down. Gradually though this idea comes to its limits. The explorative game introduces more and more problems that would be overwhelming if the method of manipulation was just as complex. To have an enjoyable experience though, complexity has to be interesting. Here it comes again: The narrative shifts to another form of exploration. While the manipulation method itself was the creative field of exploration in before, the discovery of different situations now becomes the center of interest. The player merely wants to discover all the graphical world has to offer, not the vocabulary of the parser. The consequence is a change in methods of manipulation. If the game even drifts away from the exploration of the game world and gets more film like in nature, the narrative again shifts into another form which has to be reflected in the UI. In simple terms: If the interface kills the story, the interface has to die.
My personal favorite is from _Quest for Glory 1_ (mainly its VGA remake) where if you go outside town and start clicking the "Look" cursor on the background (trees/rocks, etc), it will randomly select a response from a small library of negative responses. (Was that the legendary "Money Tree"? Where?)
That method of troubleshooting parser commands Al Lowe discussed at the end was great.
I’m a big fan of the modern two-button system. That way it’s more about interacting with the world rather than figuring out how to interact with the world. 🙂
Great video dude. I remember being dissapointed with KQ5 my first time, I never acquired the love for the icon interface that I had for the parser interface. It was the aspect of the games that most blew my mind from the first time I saw KQ I at a RadioShack. My mom said "try bowing to the king" so I typed "bow to the king" and we were blown away by the animation, it felt like you could do anything.
That's the beauty of the parser. It lets you mess with the games in the ways point-and-click UIs rarely do. One thing that springs to mind (even though most people seem to hate it) is in Space Quest II when the chief says, "Just say the word," and you're meant to type "say the word."
What an amazing gaming memory to have about your mom and to share with us gamer friends 😊
I knew it was going to be LSL7! Totally agree. It's a huge shame that this style of interface isn't used in more games.
However, I still think there is huge untapped potential for a revival of text parser thanks to modern language models.
Honestly, I vastly prefer the "few is better" style of just two-mouse-button interactions.
Because giving me 20 options, where 19 are doing nothing at all is just me having to guess which one is the intended one. That's just wasting my time in an attempt to pretend on giving me freedom while not actually offering any at all to begin with.
So one generic "interact" and one "inspect" icon is really all that's needed at the end of the day.
Agree wholeheartedly, and it doesn't just apply to classic adventure games but even some RPGs. I attempted playing cult classic Earthbound (SNES) only to be frustrated that its world interaction was _years behind_ contemporaries like FF4. You pressed the A button to pop up a list of possible verbs, with at most one or two verbs even relevant to the tile/object in front of you for the verb to target, the rest being wasted menu space. Adding insult to injury, a _separate_ controller button was mapped as a combined shortcut for "look/talk/interact" with the target in front of you.
@@StratelierExactly what I was thinking of! From what I remember, Check did nothing when you were looking at an NPC, and Talk To did nothing for non-NPCs. There was no reason to have two different commands when there was only one interaction you could do with any given thing.
The problem with everything other than parsers (save for ludicrously verb-laden interfaces) is that on some level the interface is playing the game for you.
You want your experience to be this: "Can I climb this tree? [click] Hey, I can!"
but instead your process becomes this: "What can I do with this tree? [click] Oh, climb."
That's true. I still think the best middle ground between being overwhelmed and restrained is a contextual menu system that gives you a variety of unique options per object - some of them possible, some not - and, crucially, that can change over time. So, e.g. if you're told later down the line that it's actually a magical tree, the option to "talk" to it then becomes available.
@@spacequesthistorian I guess what irks me about that is that you end up subconsciously checking the menu for clues, rather than your own intuition. Having a bunch of specific verbs always available isn't necessarily a bad thing if you want to dissuade the player from trying to brute force everything, but the puzzles have to be well designed, with good diegetic clues, and non-annoying fail responses. (I like how in Day of the Tentacle when you push/pull/pick up almost anything, it shows the character reaching out to actually TRY it before saying they can't do it.)
In theory, anyway. In practice I think most designers have reduced verbs down for a reason. For my unfinished game I spent a lot of time implementing context menus and rarely needed more than the base Look/Use/Talk. (For non-character hotspots, talk becomes "talk about", so you can get both text-box Look descriptions AND the player character's spoken response for everything.)
I’d definitely love to see a follow up video on more interfaces (a la BASS)!
And I’d also love to watch you play Captain Blood one of these days, speaking of bizarre interfaces…
Yes please!
I would definitely like to talk about Steel Sky's interface, especially since Revolution swapped the mouse buttons around for their next game, Broken Sword - I have some words about that.
I've heard good things about Captain Blood but I haven't played it. Maybe I should give it a look. There have been a lot of suggestions for weird UIs to take a look at in a follow-up video, so I have my work cut out for me.
My favourite has always been the LucasArts nine verbs UI, although I agree it can be reduced, but maybe not as far down as 4. You still want some intentionality behind the player's actions. With just Hand for everything, it becomes too easy to cheese puzzles. Or worse, accidently solve them while trying to do something completely different (and sometimes not even understanding what just happened). Those UIs that reduce all commands down to a single right-click to look and talk, left click for everything else, are especially guilty of this.
What I don't think you mentioned re the icons for verbs: the icons add a layer of mental translation ("I want to use, Use is the...gear icon, find that, Gear icon on Item") and as you point out, cause confusion when the icons don't represent the action in a clear way. With the verbs written out in text form, you don't have that extra layer or that confusion.
But what I like most about nine-verb SCUMM (and some of its contemporaries) is that it has you build coherent sentences: "Pick Up Item", "Give Item to Person" etc. So a natural progression from the parser. But with later interfaces, like Curse of MI, Full Throttle and LSL7, you're clicking the item first, so the syntax gets reversed to "Item, Pick Up". That will never cease to feel unnatural and awkward to me (I do understand there are non-English languages where it's going to be _more_ natural though ).
Speaking of Al Lowe, I'm surprised you didn't mention his The Black Cauldron. He basically predicted Sierra's later icon interface by eliminating the parser and moving all the common commands - look, use, etc - onto the function keys. So you walk Taran up to a door and press (iirc) F4 to use it, and it opens. It was really forward-looking design for 1985.
Also, if you do that followup GUI video, don't forget the weird modular mess of icons in Return To Zork.
In my experience, TBC was probably the first Sierra adventure game we ever played, and I personally found it odd to use the Function keys as regular gameplay inputs.
2 Minutes into this video I was thinking "hope he mentions LSL7, it had the best UI" - well, glad we're on the same page!
Score! 😁
But it fails to be visual enough. No icons to understand what the words mean...so, missing that aspect of it.
Your videos always have great insights - I never really appreciated what Larry 7 was doing until you said it! I remember the manual for Simon the Sorcerer 2 saying "GIVE is a separate verb because there's a big difference between giving someone a chainsaw and using a chainsaw on someone" - and admitting that the use of the WEAR verb was limited ("almost unique, actually") but that having seven verbs wouldn't have looked very good. It's interesting that Sierra went from the wide open parser to very streamlined, whereas LucasArts had the middle ground for a while, giving limited verbs but still using them all pretty separately.
I made a couple of attempts at parser adventure games in the early 2000s, and I also kept a file with all the lines the player typed so that I could then ask them to send them to me and I could fill in any actions that I thought were clever! It's fantastic to know that I had the same idea as Al Lowe did :) I started a game tentatively called "Bastard Quest" where the idea was to make it as comically unfair as possible with many silent dead ends and unavoidable deaths, but I didn't get very far because I realized I couldn't hope to compete with what Sierra's games seemingly did without even trying (it's funny to see Roberta Williams saying that King's Quest 5 was their idea of trying to remove things that got in the way of the player enjoying themselves!)
Your idea for a game that contains as many fuck-you-moments as possible sounds eerily similar to our "All Demons Must Go To Hell" game. 😆 We did everything that you're not meant to do in that game, including having too many verbs, a maze with a roaming monster, and tons of soft locks.
Don't know if any classic adventure games used a similar Larry 7 UI (maaaaybe Fallout 1 counts if you cheat a bit), but the Quest for Glory 2 VGA remake had a Point-and-Click / Parser hybrid for those that wanted it. I didn't try it at the time, but have been meaning to lately.
And more UI videos would indeed be interesting!
Typing should have been required back in the day. I took it for 2 years in high school and boy, has it paid off BIG TIME. I can type 50 to 60 wpm no problem. I've probably typed millions of words in my life and until voice recognition, typing was the only game in town.
I much preferred Sierra's icons over Dynamix's lack of icons. That generic red arrow was annoying, because I had no idea what it was going to make the character do: open a cabinet, pick up medicine, jump behind the couch, etc.
Haha! That short Al Lowe interview. Priceless! 😂
The non game pausing interface is what I really hated. During the AGI period. Especially as I was still a kid, who was still grasping at reading and writing skills, then to be a fast typer and trying to spell a word correctly, created a lot of needless deaths.
Young me was unable to get past a certain point of PQ1 because I couldn’t spell “license”
Interestingly, if you played the AGI games on a Hercules monochrome monitor, it did pause the action! Because there wasn't enough room on the Hercules display for the parser command line to be visible at all times.
@@spacequesthistorian so you got a better image than a CGA display with 16 shades of gray, you also got to pause the game while you can yell out "Mom how do you spell ... " Where I often had a response of look it up, which wasn't helpful because I didn't know how to spell it so I couldn't find it to be the dictionary.
@@toddfraser3353 Weeeeeelll... the Hercules version wasn't exactly pretty. 😅 cdn.mobygames.com/screenshots/2449909-space-quest-chapter-i-the-sarien-encounter-dos-the-beginning-her.png
@@spacequesthistorian compared to the CGA color variant on the RGB display, It was better. In particular I remember a blue background, yellow, green and red.
2:47 Maniac Mansion's interface was obviously intended to be used with a mouse, but for some unfathomable reason, you actually have to push a keyboard button to actually activate the mouse. And it's a random button, not one that actually makes sense, and I still can't remember it off the top of my head. For the longest time, I just used the keyboard arrow keys to clumsily move the cursor around because I had no idea how to turn the mouse on. I get it, back then, mice for keyboards were still pretty new, but I don't know why you need to push a button to turn it on when it should just work automatically like it does for every other game.
I recall working on a game in Adventure Game Studio using the Sierra style PnC interface. I specifically didn't want any generic negative feedback, so I very specifically and intentionally made sure that every single action on every single object in the game had a unique message. It took FOREVER. The number of objects in your game (even inconsequential scenery items) times the number of total verbs equals a ton of possible messages. It was particularly frustrating having to figure out what the character would say when they tried to "talk" to all the inanimate objects.
Since then, I've grown really fond of the Beneath a Steel Sky 2 button interface. Use and examine. That's all you need to worry about. It's less guessing for the player, and less busy work for me.
It's funny that you used that Sam & Max game for the "You can't pick that up" section. If you keep trying to tell Sam to pick up items that can't be picked up, he grows increasingly hostile. If you persist, Sam stops responding and just whimpers from then on while Max chastises you for breaking Sam's spirit.
Yes, I loved that gag. I especially love that, in the disk version, Max says the object number for the thing you tried to pick up. Obviously in the CD-ROM version they had to simplify that line to just say "that silly object."
Let's all take a moment for "open telescope"
"open gates to hell"
Wow Al Lowe's dedication to create a pleasant user experience is so amazing. There must have been so many frustrated and dirty words in those lists!
Two Button is my go-to, and I sitll find players forgetting that there's a second button for "look at"
Yeah, that's another thing. Revolution first established the two-button UI with left mouse button being "examine" and right mouse button being "interact." They swapped them around with Broken Sword, and that swap-around is what's now commonly used in indie adventure games, including your own (dare I say masterful) game Technobabylon. And I have some words about that, too, because it sort of relegates "examine" to being an optional feature, since most players have typically been conditioned to clicking the left mouse button first.
@@spacequesthistorian Technobabylon is one of the greatest point-and-click adventure games I've ever letter.
Consider making a video about the two button approach from BASS. It really solved a lot of these problems.
@douglasbushong3920 The two-button approach does make things a lot easier but it has its own problems. It would be worth covering in the future, definitely.
Honestly, I would love to see your "Fair and Balanced Retrospective" for the "Quest for Glory" games. I love them, but the central storyline is pretty ridiculous if you think about it too hard: An ordinary nobody who learned all his skills via correspondence school answers an advertisement calling for a hero in a neighboring land, and not only does he succeed in his quest, he goes on to become a hero in several other lands, becomes the adopted son of a sultan, and is offered the crown to a kingdom just a few weeks after setting foot in it. All this happens in the space of about a year, and even if he pursues the path of becoming a paragon of virtue, he can propose to and presumably marry three different women simultaneously.
Honestly, it makes Sonny's promotion from traffic cop to undercover narc seem believable by comparison.
I get a lot of requests to do Quest for Glory but it's not really in my wheelhouse. For one, I get paralyzed with FOMO whenever I see stats. Second, I would be compelled to play each game at least three times (four, if I make Paladin), just to be a completionist. It would be a vast undertaking.
@@spacequesthistorian FWIW, you can do some streamlining with QFG. In particular, all the magician content is simply gated by whether you have the ability to use magic, which can be added in character creation. Also, the fighter class sucks and is the least-interesting of the bunch. There's no reason to play it past the second game.
So basically, you could do one playthrough as a thief-with-magic build (which is many people's favorite anyway) and then a second as a fighter who becomes a Paladin in QFG2, and see something like 95% of the content with just those two runs.
I get if you still don't want to do QFG, just saying.
@@jasonblalock4429 Another method would be to exploit a glitch in the QFGI EGA version that allows you to get a Fighter with all skills. And at least for the first couple of games, if you have all the skills, you can basically do everything, because unlike in later games, your character type doesn't hardcode particular paths.
@@spacequesthistorian I can see your point. It isn't quite as bad as that, since the differences between the Fighter and Paladin are negligible (the Paladin basically gets a few extra "honor quests" and magic skills that aren't available to other classes), and for the first two games, you can basically do all three paths at once if you have a character with all skills; the only differences are which actions give points and whether you qualify as a Paladin at the end of the second game.
Building your stats is by far the worst part, though, since they stack from game to game, and some games offer virtually no opportunities to practices some skills (particularly climbing) or make building some skills a lot more time-consuming. If you had access to character files that have already had their stats maxed out, that would save time, since you wouldn't need to worry about building stats as much.
I definitely think the "open" and "close" options Lucas arts games could have been combined. I've had the odds game where push and pull do different things on the same object, but I've never ever been able to open our close something more then once. That is to say, if something is closed, the only option to interact with or is open. And vice versa. I guess it would maybe be possible to open something twice, but I've never seen it implemented.
I actually had a line in the video where I said you could remove the Push and Pull verbs and just keep the Open and Close verbs, but then I remembered that pushing and pulling are a bit broader, and "pushing" a door might be a bit of a leap of imagination for new players.
This might be considered cheating a bit, but I think my favorite point and click UI is the verb wheel from the special edition releases of Monkey Island one and two and Day of the Tentacle remastered. It's been a bit since I played the games but if I remember correctly it only shows you the appropriate verbs that give you a genuine result along with the option to use an item which would then bring up your inventory right next to the wheel added monkey Island. When selecting an item in your inventory the wheel would open up allowing select either give or use, if you select to use then a second inventory window would pop up next to your first inventory window allowing you to select the item you want to combine with your first pick. Or if you wanted to use the item in the environment you would just move your mouse off the inventory window which would then cause the game to close the inventory (at least if I remember correctly, there's a chance you might have had to press a button to close your inventory before you could use your item in the world). And if you wanted to skip the wheel and do the primary verb associated with what you're trying to click on usually resulting in a look at or talk command, you can just right click on PC or pull the left trigger on console. I think it's an excellent way to present the classic Lucasarts verbs with a more modern feeling interface if that works beautifully on both a mouse and a controller
So, it turns out I was wrong about monkey Island special edition using the verb wheel. With that one you just press a button, v on the keyboard in the PC version and it just brings up a menu that lists the nine verbs. The verb wheel was introduced in Monkey Island 2 Special Edition. But now I'm honestly unsure about the inventory system I described. Looks like I got to play through those games again.
I did quite like the verb wheel. It certainly brought the amount of negative feedback down. I also appreciated how the DOTT remaster gave you nearly endless options to customize the experience as you saw fit. Classic UI or verb wheel? New or old sound effects? Classic graphics or redrawn hi-res graphics? All individual options that you can switch on/off at your leisure. That's how you do a proper remaster.
Can’t believe you don’t have more subscribers man, absolutely love your channel! Keep up the amazing work :)
Thanks! I'm in a pretty niche market so I'm not that surprised, but I'm steadily climbing towards the 10k mark.
Yea i always felt push/pull was there just for the added puzzle of the rare times you need it result in an "ah ha! Eureka" moment for the player
Great video, great pacing, informative, and interesting! Thank you for uploading this and I hope you get bigger on the platform
That's very kind of you to say. Thank you.
I read this as "what is the best UTI"...
see what's on your mind :P
None?
Clearly the answer to that is 'scum' (second m optional)
SCI0 was my favorite. You didn't have to faff around with the mouse cursor, and if KQ5 was SCI0, you could have started typing throw boot at cat and it would have paused while you typed. That was a big thing with AGI games - typing something, moving into a new screen, and then immediately hitting Enter to avoid slow typing or fuckups.
But you forgot the most vanilla of them all... The Black Cauldron that only had arrow keys and a few function keys for select item, use selected item, do, and look
Big fan of SCI0 as well. I'm slowly trying to make a game with it.
What does SCI0 stand for?
@@KM-hv1jgVersion 0 of SCI, mostly characterised by being 16 colour EGA, driven mostly by the keyboard and used text parser. Games built on SCI1 were 256 colours and driven by the mouse. Similar technology under the hood otherwise.
Chronologically, it went: GAL (original KQ1) to AGI (KQ1-3, SQ1+2, PQ1, etc) to SCI0 (LSL2+3, PQ2, QFG1+2, SQ3 etc) to SCI1 (SQ4, PQ3, etc) and then onto whatever the hell SCI variant SQ6 and KQ7 used which looked and felt terrible
@@KM-hv1jgOh, and SCI itself stood for "Sierra Creative Interpreter", which doesn't tell you much
@@KM-hv1jg Sierra Creative Interpreter version 0. It was used for games like King's Quest 4, Space Quest 3, Police Quest 2, Quest for Glory 1 and Leisure Suit Larry 2 & 3.
Discworld Noir has a great unique interface. You’re a detective, so everything - topics and inventory items - written down in your notebook. You can ask about an inventory item, or a topic! It’s pretty cool.
My idea for (partially) solving the ambiguity of the "use" icon is to split it into two verbs - "pick up" and "poke/fondle/gently caresh"
"Fondle" and "Fiddle." Or "Grab" and "Grope."
I have been playing adventure games since the first Sierra releases that required us to write the actions and yes, it was really hard since I was a kid and english is not my born language. The abstraction behind the icons and just clicking was a nice evolution and made the adventure games a lot more fun to play for me.
Greetings from Brazil!
I recently replayed The Dig, and I was reminded how much I actually liked the "one click does everything" interface. Yeah, it limits freedom and creativity for games that might have multiple solutions, and it can be jarring when it does something unexpected. Like if there's a grocery store display of a stack of canned tomatoes, and I'm in a one-click game, I might expect the controlled character to take one off the top, but it's weird if instead they kicked the whole display over. The kicked display might be part of some other puzzle, but if you haven't encountered the need for it yet, it's still weird. Best if there's no unknown fail state though, like clicking something in the wrong sequence or from the wrong direction locked you out.
At least The Dig still had inventory. Neverhood didn't have one, at least not one you could interact with. You could pick up various objects on your journey, like video recordings or keys, and just whenever you'd click on a video player or locked door the character would automatically use them.
Just me though.
Cruise for a Corpse had a contextual verb list too with hotspots. Don't think it was as robust as LSL7 though, but it did only give you verbs that made sense with what you're interacting with.
How the hell did you learn to command English so brilliantly you Danish dude!
Thanks! I grew up on English language cartoons and tv shows, and being an exchange student in the U.S. when I was a teenager probably helped a bit as well.
A big problem with the Sierra icon interface was when the game used an icon to do something unexpected. The legs icon means walk but it can also mean kick or jump or any other interaction that uses your legs. I blame SQ4 for changing the kq5 walk icon to legs and other games followed suit allowing ambiguity (kq6 kept the Kq5 walk icon but it could still mean jump). Let's not mention the hand icon, what it does is never clear as it doesn't just mean use it is also the take action and other things like push, pull and can weirdly even mean jump (good job kq5, this should have been an indication the system was flawed, that strange second walk icon could have been jump). LSl7 really is the best. context menus are very user friendly and by the time of lsl7 they were something people would have commonly experienced in Windows. Some rpgs have context menu like interfaces where you target an object and choose an action from a huge multilevel menu (mostly just types of attacks, the spells you can cast, quick use items, skills and special abilities) but I've never seen any other game attempt a custom action like lsl7
Harvester had an optional parser but it was only used for conversations and it was rarely useful.
I've been thinking about making a classic style adventure game, so this could not have come out at a better time.
Would love to see the follow up video!
Recently gotten into making a classic sierra game lately too, and as somebody with a backgound in Unity, Unreal, Gadot, Python based engines, and Mono, let me tell you Sci Companion is a dream. It has a bunch of useful tools that cut out a lot of the guess work and the only real difficulty is how sparse the documentation is, so you need to constantly trawl the programming forums to figure out the right functions and grammer of the coding language it uses. That and managing the low amount of memory to avoid the out of handles error for more complicated scenes. Would love to see more people playing with it.
@@SlvtSammichArchive hey man that sounds like tons of work, and more power to ya. I couldn't even imagine tryna pick up sci haha, truth is ive only just started learning Godot, and making a classic adventure game worth its salt is my first major goal.
@@thecrackedgasmask0071 different challenges in each approach, for example you wont need to program a parser, or screen to screen room systems, in SCI, but that will need to be coded from the ground up in Godot. But in coding that stuff yourself you do get much more flexibility, and theres way more reference material for a big engine like Godot, so you can def borrow from tutorials. There is something fun about reverse engineering old classic sierra games by decompiling them and trying to figure out how they coded ladder climbs in KQ4 for example lmao. Good luck!
I love the design of LSL7 overall. The interface is the best, but the game is still tricky at times so the interface doesn't make the puzzles easier by any means. Some of them is really out there (but then it's Al Lowe).
Before LSL7 popped up, I was about to type up a rant about how these sorts of games should swap the select action and select target steps, good to know at least one of them did.
The console adventure games had to go with a different UI then text parsers to try make it work with a controller and to do this going back to '85 on the Famicom. Hoshi wo Sagashite (Story of Mio) for the Sega Mark III has extra commands that translate to Hit and Eat and I think you only have to Eat once, this along with having to quit to get your password save and after getting your password just getting dumped to the title. Fast forwarding to Policenauts you have context options when you click something that does give away what can be done making the brute force method far too effective.
I played Dr. Dekker on the Switch and having to type in what you wanted to ask the characters with the controller was a fucking chore.
I think the classic Lucasarts SCUMM Interface was perfectly reduced to the necessary "Eye", "Hand" and "Mouth" Icons in Curse of Monkey Island, which were used context sensitive...or is that game to new to be regarded als a classic Point & Click?
Definitely not too new, but... it does suffer a bit from the same "Hand icon does everything" syndrome that Sierra's icon bar UI does. In fact, it's quite ironic that LucasArts ended up mimicking Sierra's UI in their later games (most evident in Sam & Max: Hit the Road).
text adventures needed basically a list of synonyms and aliases for each noun or object. If you put a rock into a room, you need to code for "stone" as well as "rock" and might as well add "bolder" while you're at it. Just need a synonym dictionary at your side when you create all the objects in the game. Same with verbs. Just have to put your thinking cap on and think of all the various and sundry ways the task can be done. PUshing games out quickly without doing a group test or testing with potential players is probably a large % of the parser issues. Gotta get that next game out ASAP and get that $ but.... haste makes waste. 18:30 ? That's exactly how ANY testing is done. The tester keeps track of bugs and then lets the dev know about them after testing so they can change the code to be able to properly handle those scenarios. I wouldn't have thought that was any novel idea in the late 80s but maybe for adventure game programmers it was genius.
Re: the 18:30 thing. The innovative part of this is that the testers didn't log this; it was logged automatically. Testers wouldn't report every input they tried that failed because that's not their job. They're looking for bugs, not missing parser responses.
@@spacequesthistorian ah, I see. That's the "write to floppy every time the wtf scenario is encountered" a data dump of the status of the game. But in terms of computer science, that's not new. At least, I don't think it is. It's like when a program crashes and it dumps all the variable contents to a file b4 it closes but in this case, it's not really a crash, just a catch-all basket for when there is no verb-noun matching. I used to play text adventures back in the early 80s. 1981. Then some of those Space Quest ones or at least SQ6 I think it was. MI 1 and 2. I thought those were really nice. The humor in there was nice and the graphics and soundtrack. Voice acting. Well-done all around. Seems making a graphic adventure game single handedly would take a really long time. thx
I really enjoyed the Escape from Monkey Island UI where there was a medallion that popped up with all the potential actions one could do with a given item, Larry 7's example reminded me of it.
There's also Clock Tower's two button style, which boiled it down to look and do something.
I think a lot of it depends on the design of the game itself and how well it fits with the interface (whatever that may be). The first wave of Sierra games to use the point-and-click interface were, on the whole, pretty weak (IMO), because the lack of parser robbed the designers of a lot of the “tricks” they would use for puzzles (e.g., players no longer had to think up a specific verb when they can just click the Hand around). But as the designers got more used to the interface, the games got a little bit less obvious.
The Dagger of Amon Ra interface was great, because it used the “notebook” interface to carry over the more intricate character interaction options from The Colonel’s Bequest (where you could not only “Talk” to characters, but also “Ask” or “Tell” about specific characters and items, often receiving unique and helpful responses). Super important in a detective game!
I loved that they at least gave designers the chance to mess with the icon bar. When I asked Al if the Zipper icon was a reaction to the limits of the point-and-click interface, he responded, "No, I just thought it was funny." 😁
The best adventure game UI looks like this.
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But... in Police Quest, it looked like this:
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😵
@@spacequesthistorian lol. OK fair enough.
+1 on wanting a follow-up - thereˋs more interesting stuff to talk about for sure!
Absolutely there is, but all the suggestions in the comments are from games I've never played. 😆
@@spacequesthistorian More than understandable. Maybe the spark will strike some day :)
@@AbNormalHumanBeingsStuff Oh, it will. Maybe I'll do a follow-up video on the stuff *I* considered for inclusion in this video, and then tackle people's suggestions in the future.
I like text parsers that pause the game, but only when they write a lot of reactive text. If there's just one or two things to do in a scene and everything else just gets errors, it's dull.
Absolutely agree. Unfortunately a lot of SCI0 games, like PQ2 and KQ4, suffer from a lot of the "nah" syndrome. They just wanted you to get on with the game, not explore your environment.
Great video! 😀 Always a fab watch with plenty of facts 😊
If I recall correctly, LucasFilm tested out the pick-a-verb interface all the way back in “Habitat” days (1985). Sierra did the same in Black Cauldron (the same year). Infocom followed suit with Journey 1989. Magnetic Scrolls introduced their clunky UI-assisted parser with Wonderland circa 1990…what a mess that was!
Dizzy games for ZX Spectrum (1987-1992) had looking/talking/giving/using/getting/dropping all on the same (fire) button.
Myst: Reduced to a single action.
Riven: It added two more actions. Pick up the solutions manual, and Burn the solutions manual and forget it all.
Concatenate is not an MS-DOS command, but COPY had it as a special function: copy a.txt b.txt c.txt d.txt abcd.txt
I am personally a fan of fewer options, LB2 is my preferred due to the interrogation symbol. I find the Lucas style clogs up so much of the screen and is slow and clunky. (I played Thimbleweed Park on the switch, for real)
Hilariously, though, from memory is the 'hit-pixel' of the KQ5 hand icon is in the middle of the palm (great for pixel hunting), not the logical finger tip. I'm currently trying to play Gabriel Kinight 1, and my brain hits a wall every time remembering the symbollic difference between the *2* hand icons, a set of gears, and a swinging door!
Yeah, the hotspot for the Hand icon took a while to get used to. At least GK1 had that little diamond shape that indicated where the cursor's hotspot was!
I think Altered Destiny, the lil sierra style knock off by Alcolade from 1990 had some interesting inclusions that get slept on for parser design. Still all the same issues you're describing, but in trying to figure out the item you want, lets say 'Look Item' it will then bring up a list: 'Do you mean the X item, the Y item, or the Z item' which basically informs you of the correct nouns. So then you just need to type look Z item and the problem is solved. Really nice stuff.
I never played Altered Destiny but that does sound very interesting. Have you played the Snail Trek games? They used stuff like auto-complete and spell checking to ease players into using the parser.
@@spacequesthistorian You should totally give it a look, its def inspired by SQ and is a really quirky lil game. JP and his popcorn explore an alien world. I haven't played Snail Trek but now I have to so thanks for the rec ^^
I would LOVE a follow up to this video it was great!
I never played LSL7, but I was pretty happy with the UI for LSL6. I guess now I need to find a copy of 7 and break out DOSBox.
Would love more videos discussing these UIs. Recommend you check out Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Judgement Rights - they share a unique UI
There's a lot to choose from! I was a TNG kid so I only played the TNG game "A Final Unity."
@@spacequesthistorian another classic! Spent many hours playing that too.
I'm not sure Ken & Roberta can be trusted to provide accurate accounts of their company history. I've never, ever heard either one of them give an honest and candid reflection of the mistakes they made, or regrets they had, or how other companies improved upon their work. They seem instead to only be interested in cementing the legacy of Sierra in an entirely positive narrative. That's really unfortunate because there's a lot of really interesting gaming history that they were witness to, which we will never hear about.
If I made a text parser game, I wouldn’t allow the verb “use” to actually accomplish anything, but also program in funny messages about the character trying to use the item in some nonsensical way. Like “use key on door” would make the character tap a jaunty tune on the door with the key.
The game shown at 11:24 is a jam game we did called All Demons Must Go to Hell where we made the UI as confusing as possible - but we purposely didn't include a "Use" verb.
Oh, damn, now I really want to see a LSL sitcom.
IMHO, the best interface was featured in my beloved Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Legend Entertainment.
I still think you should give Quest For Glory some time. With the exception of the grinding of skill points, there is a decent story good humor and forgiving gameplay.
Definitely. The big thing about QFG is that for better or worse, the class system gave you multiple ways to approach and solve puzzles. It's fair to dislike the grind, but that flexibility is a strong point.
Great video, dude!
Thank you!
more please! :D
When Roberta Williams decided to change from the parser based interface in 1995 to point and click, my strong interest for adventure games started to decline rapidly.
IF adventure games will come back with a parser, now powered with tech like LLM, I will certainly give adventure games a new try.
What the heck was that "demons dust go to hell" thing???
That was a jam game I did with my friend TorpedoBear. We intentionally tried to make the worst adventure game of all time - overly complicated UI, a maze with a roamning monster, and tons of dead end puzzles. You can download and play it here: gamejolt.com/games/demons/618553
Quest for Glory mentioned, I'm happy. ;3
Troels. I desperately need you to play through Spud!, which has an elf-based lament configuration interface, and its even worse sequel The Quivering, which replaces the gnomes with imps - both of which are limited resources that must be sacrificed to save the game, in a game with deaths.
Lucasarts kind of had a "4 icon" think doing on in Full Throttle
Yeah, it's kinda weird that they went for a more Sierra-style UI in their later games.
I agree with the conclusion, Leisure Suit Larry 7's interface is great. It's the best of both world.
Yes, I had actually forgotten about it and how genius it ended up being.
The discussion with Al Lowe in the end was also very interesting
Sierra's interface may not have been in response to Lucasarts, but Lucasarts' interface was definitely in response to Sierra.
I have not watched the entire video but I prefer the text input / parser interface far above the point and click. I learnt a lot of english through Sierra games.
1:05 - No no, clearly the correct spelling was "IFNKOVHGROGHPRM".
Well, yes, but the reference is to the fact that they misspelled Rumpelstiltskin, which made the puzzle even harder.
Did you ever play a Legend Entertainment adventure? The 90s ones have a point on text and image system that is quite unique. I can recommend Eric the Unready for humor and the Gateway games for scifi.
I played about five minutes of Eric the Unready, which had that very peculiar (and somewhat overwhelming) parser/point-and-click combo UI. I also played - anf somehow finished - a later game of theirs, Companions of Xanth, which greatly simplified the UI but still tried to stay true to their parser roots. Definitely a strange transitional time for point-and-click games.
QFG1 SCI1 had the mouse interface even when you were multiple-choice choosing what to talk about, which was disappointingly spoilery. Give me a parser any day for QFG.
New school baby love the one click interface
You missed the absolute worst point and click adventure game interface, that of "Armaëth: The Lost Kingdom" - fortunately it also has a parser, but the icon bar has 10 icons, many of which have a different action on left-click or right-click, and if you thought that was bad... the icon bar also has two additional rows of 10 icons, so it's a total of 30, of wich only 10 are shown at the same time. There is some duplication, but a total of 34 distinct actions. How distinct? Well, there's "talk" and "greet" as separate actions, "eat" and "drink" are separate, "climb up" and "climb down" are separate, "light torch" and "extinguish torch" are separate. Each of those are individual icons! And there's even an icon for washing an inventory item in water (you can't just "use" the inventory item on water, as there is no "use" icon at all).
Always preferred text input over point and click.
I could never get into Lucas Arts. Having to slowly move my mouse to the action I wanted, and then slowly move it over to the object I wanted to click on was so boring! I just wanted to type like in Sierra games. It was so much faster.
I think there were hotkeys you could use to avoid moving the mouse to the verbs, at least in Fate of Atlantis
@@jarnalyrkar They were in all of them. In the older ones it's by position (e.g. Q is the top left verb), in the newer ones it's the first letter.
Also, don't forget about the highlighted most common verb you could use with the right mouse button, introduced in Monkey Island.
I grew up on Sierra games, so I'm decidedly a bit partial to having a screen-filling background not visually constrained by a persistent HUD, but I do remember attempting to play a game with a Lucasarts/SCUMM style interface and noting that when I clicked on an action type then hovered my mouse over various targets, the simple fact that it popped up a text description (e.g. "talk to person") made me ask "then what's the point? why not just offer a text parser?" (especially if the target was something moving quickly / difficult to actually click on)
A game whose text parser _includes suggestions/autocomplete_ would be a lovely design idea to see, now that I think about it.
@@kpanic23 Quite certain it was reversed: the older games (ie Last Crusade) had it by first letter, and later ones (Fate of Atlantis) were corresponding keys Q-C, which was a _whole_ lot easier to use without looking down.
Space quest iv nailed it for me
Some of the worst were the Kyrandia games and KQ7 I never had a clue what half the stuff I was playing with even was.
I have to be on the side of buttons with text. No ambiguity, easy to understand what each button does and if you don't know what the word means (if you're not a native English speaker), you can consult a dictionary.
You say that the verb "swallow" is used only once or twice in the game and takes up space. Well? The same applies to any inventory item: it's used once or twice in the game and takes up space. Why don't you make the same criticism about inventory items? Perhaps because the inventory is scrollable, so an item is not always visible? But then, the verbs just need to be scrollable, and the problem is solved?
In my opinion, the fact that something (verb or item) is used only once or twice in the game is not a problem. On the contrary, this is exactly what the game is. The game _is_ figuring out that _now_ is the right time to use that verb, or that item. It’s right that it is used only once or twice, otherwise there wouldn't be a game.
Inventory clutter can be it's own issue (for some players), but it's not as much of an issue as a cluttered or unclear verb menu that you're constantly using to interact with the world. I don't think it's as simple as making the verbs not all fit on one page - maybe if you had all the common ones on the same page, but I expect some players would forget alternatives exist and get stuck.
Space quest 1 taught me how to spell geyser
The interface has to die
With each UI there comes a different design idea. SQH pointed out a lot of the reasons why the ideas changed, but there's a slight shift in game design that lead to radical different forms. The change in technology and taste produced different stories that produced different manipulation methods. I think the manipulation aspect of interaction with the game world is fundamentally determined by the narrative.
The linear approach implicates more actions than the explorative. If the player is in one situation at a time, he has to have lots of options to manipulate that situation, so here the parser comes in handy to give the illusion of freedom, even though there are very limited correct actions. As the story progresses to the next situation, the player has to adopt to that and might get more creative to use the parser. This creativity is overwhelming when many situations are already open to the player.
The more exploration is an integral part of the game, the less linear its narration could be and so the focus lies less on problem solving. Text adventures often overwhelm with an illusion of things to do, while the number of puzzles to solve the games are relatively low. In early graphic adventures this still is the case. Progress is made by narrowing the problems down. Gradually though this idea comes to its limits. The explorative game introduces more and more problems that would be overwhelming if the method of manipulation was just as complex. To have an enjoyable experience though, complexity has to be interesting. Here it comes again:
The narrative shifts to another form of exploration. While the manipulation method itself was the creative field of exploration in before, the discovery of different situations now becomes the center of interest. The player merely wants to discover all the graphical world has to offer, not the vocabulary of the parser. The consequence is a change in methods of manipulation.
If the game even drifts away from the exploration of the game world and gets more film like in nature, the narrative again shifts into another form which has to be reflected in the UI. In simple terms: If the interface kills the story, the interface has to die.
You should post this on Medium or something. It's a very interesting write-up.
Worst UI: Return To Zork
ua-cam.com/video/Q_vJ8b2BycU/v-deo.html
There''s TOO. MANY. ICONS. Even the verbs have verbs.
The SCUMM interface was cool and smart for it's time, but all those verbs were to much and took away to much from the screen.
OT: Al Lowe 🤗
"this is a completely unusable thingamabob" is my favorite negative feedback.
That from Sam and Max?
Yes, indeed!
My personal favorite is from _Quest for Glory 1_ (mainly its VGA remake) where if you go outside town and start clicking the "Look" cursor on the background (trees/rocks, etc), it will randomly select a response from a small library of negative responses. (Was that the legendary "Money Tree"? Where?)
The Sierra text parser is the best UI.
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Jk
Chopsticks