43 ms·

Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]

195 points by krykp 2y ago

killion 2y ago
I loved the first and last page... [first] "This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." -Winston Churchill [last] "To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you!"
- krykp 2y ago
  It is honestly one of my favorite documents. With the thought put behind it, it is of no surprise the game was such a well crafted masterpiece. Most software work tends to move away from this kind of ... I don't want to say documentation, we have better documentation tools than ever, more-so a level of writing in general that is more 'human', be it written documents at length or well commented code. Another one is `The Sims` https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064273 I recall a Warcraft III one I once saw, that went into technical details on the tooling/scripting packaged with the game. That was another great document too, but I don't have it :)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - protocolture 2y ago
    I got to ogle a game design doc for a Sonic the Hedgehog game that was never produced. And yeah its very similar, except it had way more visual layout. Absolutely everything sonic could do was amazingly visualised and described.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    I feel a game like FF7 which came out in this era didn't have a document like this. OR if it did, it was put together AFTER the game was finished.
jmacdotorg 2y ago
For a bit more historical context, see the 2008 blog post that originally accompanied this PDF: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/grim-fandango-puzzle-design-do/ http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/grim-fandango-puzzle-desig...
- soneca 2y ago
  > ”We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline.”
roenxi 2y ago
It is interesting to look back on the genre given that, as far as I know, it either died sometime in the 90s or grew into something unrecognisable. I suspect there is a hint in the name of the document. I can't tell how these "puzzles" are meant to be puzzles and to this day I never figured out how people were meant to solve them in the context of the game. The Discworld series as I recall were terrible for this, but these puzzle structure diagrams just don't make sense to me. What is the player being challenged to do? Grim Fandango is trying to tell a story but it won't reveal what the story is until after the player has already figured it out through telepathy and brute force clicking. For all these games were landmarks it was an era where it wasn't obvious what a computer game could or should do to be interesting and entertaining. Something like Return of the Obra Dinn captures the intent of these games (storytelling through close inspection) much more cleanly.
- wishinghand 2y ago
  Perhaps I’m biased because I played the game when I was 14 and had much more free time to dedicate to it, but it’s my impression that Grim Fandango was known for having few of the rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-it type of puzzles. As for your question about “what is the player being challenged to do?” I had to sit and think for a bit. I think the most straightforward answer is to just think abstractly and make connections in the context of a humorous noir story. You certainly aren’t being challenged to solve a mystery, but I’m not sure it really matters. I’m not sure if you mean it like Chess challenges you to vanquish your opponent and The Witness demands color/pattern/maze analysis.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > I think the most straightforward answer is to just think abstractly and make connections in the context of a humorous noir story. I can't easily reconcile that with the linked puzzle document. If I pick on something at random (page 16, Puzzle #12: Get Starter [0]). I don't see any particular advantage to abstract thinking or even superficially understanding the scene. It looks like the player is expected to brute-force solutions. The situation overall is pretty entertaining and we learn a little bit about the world; but the actual puzzle - even with the design docs - doesn't give any hints about how players are meant to come up with that solution thoughtfully. The design doc doesn't seem to think that clues, hints or the like are important. If the symbology of using spiderwebs as sling-shots with bones is a standard trope then I suppose maybe I'm just out of it - but I don't think it is. That isn't how spiderwebs work. It seems logically suspect even in the game's own context - if the scythe can't cut the web, why can't we use it to slingshot? Or if not getting the scythe stuck is critical, why do we need the scythe at all? Manny can just grip the bone. It isn't bad as such; these puzzles can be solved and I enjoyed a bunch of these games with walkthroughs in hand. But it is easy to see why the market for point & clicks evaporated - the gameplay loop is weak and the puzzle aspect is also weak. [0] And we can see what that became in the game here - https://youtu.be/jIoSL-uSwfs?t=4223 https://youtu.be/jIoSL-uSwfs?t=4223
curtisszmania 2y ago
[flagged]
dunham 2y ago
This game was one of my favorites. And many years ago I was pleased to learn that the lobby in the game was inspired by my Dentist's office (450 Sutter St in San Francisco). https://www.doublefine.com/news/450-sutter https://www.doublefine.com/news/450-sutter
- makmanalp 2y ago
  God I loved that lobby and the art deco + mexican combination art style. I found a high res version of that mural as a wallpaper at some point but am coming up short for the link right now.
- diegs 2y ago
  That's wild. My dentist was in that building for quite a while as well.
  - kridsdale1 2y ago
    Probably the same one?
vibhurishi 2y ago
What a blast from the past ! Thanks for sharing this.
mwidell 2y ago
Perhaps my favorite game of all time. I liked all of the Lucasarts adventure games, but this one was special to me. Completed it 3 times since it came out. I think it is something about the characters, the story, the world and the ambience in it. I wonder how this document was used? Did they write all of it before implementing the game? Or was it written in parallel to making the game, as a reference?
- bmogilefsky 2y ago
  It was all written at once, during the pre-production phase. We had daily meetings to brainstorm settings, characters, goals, puzzles, etc. The next day Peter Chan would come in with sketches or storyboards. Meanwhile I tinkered on making the engine work. Once the doc was done (and some locations/puzzles/characters were cut out to reduce the production cost estimate) and the engine was able to display one character walking around one temporary room, we went into production, where the team size ramped up and we churned through the document building locations, modeling, texturing, and animating characters, etc. This doc became foundational for anyone joining the team to learn what the game was supposed to be like.
  - mikhailbolton 2y ago
    There was a GDC presentation by the iMUSE team (Michael Land, Peter McConnel and Clint Bajakian) in like 2000 or 2001 that I wish I could relive and share. They showed some of the iMUSE interface and how they would mock up the interactive soundtrack. They started with cornering Tim and getting him to describe each area/room, including the soundscape, and then they would temp in music and sound effects and then went and got a lot of SF street musicians to record a lot of the music. I remember them showing a build of the game that had Tim describing each scene instead of the final audio. It was amazing to see behind the curtain.
  - mwidell 2y ago
    Wow, didn't expect an answer straight from the horses mouth :) Thanks for making one of the best games of all time!
  - 2y ago
mikhailbolton 2y ago
First time a video game moved me emotionally. Lola getting sprouted. It blew my mind.
- test1235 2y ago
  makes me think of Final Fantasy 7, which came out around the same time
derriz 2y ago
A fantastic game in terms of atmosphere, artwork, characters and story but I found the puzzles to be too difficult and/or illogical and gave up pretty early into the plot. Overall I remember being somewhat disappointed because of my struggle to make progress. Maybe my expectations had been too high - I was a recent convert to point n' click at the time and of course LucasArts being masters of the genre, meant my anticipation had reached fever pitch.
- jstimpfle 2y ago
  Can relate, I was too blockheaded to get most of the clues. Played it on a Pentium 150, 32 MB RAM and there was a lot of idle time waiting for the rooms and places to load, which added some more frustration. But at some point I followed instructions to complete the game along to the end. It's probably fair to say that following the journey of the game is one of the fondest memories of my life. I highly recommend the remastered version from 2015 on Steam. I bought it and did another playthrough. It brought back so many emotions, and getting insight from the developers let me really connect with them.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ksynwa 2y ago
  Same. I played until the part where we get to a forest and watched playthrough after that. Watching the playthrough confirmed that I made the right decision.
- ARandumGuy 2y ago
  The puzzle design in Grim Fandango really isn't anything to write home about, and if that's the only reason you play adventure games, you're going to be disappointed. But the characters, writing, art, and sheer style are all so good that it makes up for it in my opinion. Grim Fandango is probably even better now, since you can easily look up solutions to some of the more frustrating puzzles. The remastered version is also very good, changing just enough to make it play well on modern systems, without fundamentally altering the experience.
- pingohits 2y ago
AndrewOMartin 2y ago
This It shone, pale as bone As I stood there alone And I thought to myself how the moon, That night, cast its light On my heart's true delight, And the reef where her body was strewn.
mattlondon 2y ago
Off sick from work - quite by coincidence I decided to start playing the remastered version after hearing many good things and people saying it was the best thing they've ever played etc etc. I must say, it has not really grabbed me. It sadly suffers from the common problem of these sort of games where you have to combine seemingly random items to make any progress. There are so far very few actual "puzzles" that you can solve, but instead mainly you just need to brute force the combinations of items to find that One Weird Combination that does something - most recent example: use a piece of coral on a rope so you can then climb the rope... wtf?! This is made even worse by the sheer tedium of having to walk backwards and forwards across the screens and trying everything on everything. Please game designers if you are forcing me to walk around aimlessly please at least make it quick to move around!
michelb 2y ago
The music in this game..wow..I still listen to the soundtrack many times a year.

195 points by krykp 2y ago

I loved the first and last page... [first] "This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read." -Winston Churchill [last] "To protect this document, please restrict your fallen tears of joy to this box. Thank you!"

krykp 2y ago
It is honestly one of my favorite documents. With the thought put behind it, it is of no surprise the game was such a well crafted masterpiece. Most software work tends to move away from this kind of ... I don't want to say documentation, we have better documentation tools than ever, more-so a level of writing in general that is more 'human', be it written documents at length or well commented code. Another one is `The Sims` https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43064273 I recall a Warcraft III one I once saw, that went into technical details on the tooling/scripting packaged with the game. That was another great document too, but I don't have it :)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- protocolture 2y ago
  I got to ogle a game design doc for a Sonic the Hedgehog game that was never produced. And yeah its very similar, except it had way more visual layout. Absolutely everything sonic could do was amazingly visualised and described.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  I feel a game like FF7 which came out in this era didn't have a document like this. OR if it did, it was put together AFTER the game was finished.

jmacdotorg 2y ago

For a bit more historical context, see the 2008 blog post that originally accompanied this PDF: http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/grim-fandango-puzzle-design-do/ http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2008/11/grim-fandango-puzzle-desig...

soneca 2y ago
> ”We didn’t have the last puzzle designed when I wrote that document, so I wrote two nonsense paragraphs and then overlapped them in the file so it would look like the final puzzle description was in there, but obscured by a print formatting error. That way I could turn the document in by the deadline.”

roenxi 2y ago

It is interesting to look back on the genre given that, as far as I know, it either died sometime in the 90s or grew into something unrecognisable. I suspect there is a hint in the name of the document. I can't tell how these "puzzles" are meant to be puzzles and to this day I never figured out how people were meant to solve them in the context of the game. The Discworld series as I recall were terrible for this, but these puzzle structure diagrams just don't make sense to me. What is the player being challenged to do? Grim Fandango is trying to tell a story but it won't reveal what the story is until after the player has already figured it out through telepathy and brute force clicking. For all these games were landmarks it was an era where it wasn't obvious what a computer game could or should do to be interesting and entertaining. Something like Return of the Obra Dinn captures the intent of these games (storytelling through close inspection) much more cleanly.

wishinghand 2y ago
Perhaps I’m biased because I played the game when I was 14 and had much more free time to dedicate to it, but it’s my impression that Grim Fandango was known for having few of the rubber-chicken-with-a-pulley-in-it type of puzzles. As for your question about “what is the player being challenged to do?” I had to sit and think for a bit. I think the most straightforward answer is to just think abstractly and make connections in the context of a humorous noir story. You certainly aren’t being challenged to solve a mystery, but I’m not sure it really matters. I’m not sure if you mean it like Chess challenges you to vanquish your opponent and The Witness demands color/pattern/maze analysis.
- roenxi 2y ago
  > I think the most straightforward answer is to just think abstractly and make connections in the context of a humorous noir story. I can't easily reconcile that with the linked puzzle document. If I pick on something at random (page 16, Puzzle #12: Get Starter [0]). I don't see any particular advantage to abstract thinking or even superficially understanding the scene. It looks like the player is expected to brute-force solutions. The situation overall is pretty entertaining and we learn a little bit about the world; but the actual puzzle - even with the design docs - doesn't give any hints about how players are meant to come up with that solution thoughtfully. The design doc doesn't seem to think that clues, hints or the like are important. If the symbology of using spiderwebs as sling-shots with bones is a standard trope then I suppose maybe I'm just out of it - but I don't think it is. That isn't how spiderwebs work. It seems logically suspect even in the game's own context - if the scythe can't cut the web, why can't we use it to slingshot? Or if not getting the scythe stuck is critical, why do we need the scythe at all? Manny can just grip the bone. It isn't bad as such; these puzzles can be solved and I enjoyed a bunch of these games with walkthroughs in hand. But it is easy to see why the market for point & clicks evaporated - the gameplay loop is weak and the puzzle aspect is also weak. [0] And we can see what that became in the game here - https://youtu.be/jIoSL-uSwfs?t=4223 https://youtu.be/jIoSL-uSwfs?t=4223

curtisszmania 2y ago

[flagged]

dunham 2y ago

This game was one of my favorites. And many years ago I was pleased to learn that the lobby in the game was inspired by my Dentist's office (450 Sutter St in San Francisco). https://www.doublefine.com/news/450-sutter https://www.doublefine.com/news/450-sutter

makmanalp 2y ago
God I loved that lobby and the art deco + mexican combination art style. I found a high res version of that mural as a wallpaper at some point but am coming up short for the link right now.
diegs 2y ago
That's wild. My dentist was in that building for quite a while as well.
- kridsdale1 2y ago
  Probably the same one?

vibhurishi 2y ago

What a blast from the past ! Thanks for sharing this.

mwidell 2y ago

Perhaps my favorite game of all time. I liked all of the Lucasarts adventure games, but this one was special to me. Completed it 3 times since it came out. I think it is something about the characters, the story, the world and the ambience in it. I wonder how this document was used? Did they write all of it before implementing the game? Or was it written in parallel to making the game, as a reference?

bmogilefsky 2y ago
It was all written at once, during the pre-production phase. We had daily meetings to brainstorm settings, characters, goals, puzzles, etc. The next day Peter Chan would come in with sketches or storyboards. Meanwhile I tinkered on making the engine work. Once the doc was done (and some locations/puzzles/characters were cut out to reduce the production cost estimate) and the engine was able to display one character walking around one temporary room, we went into production, where the team size ramped up and we churned through the document building locations, modeling, texturing, and animating characters, etc. This doc became foundational for anyone joining the team to learn what the game was supposed to be like.
- mikhailbolton 2y ago
  There was a GDC presentation by the iMUSE team (Michael Land, Peter McConnel and Clint Bajakian) in like 2000 or 2001 that I wish I could relive and share. They showed some of the iMUSE interface and how they would mock up the interactive soundtrack. They started with cornering Tim and getting him to describe each area/room, including the soundscape, and then they would temp in music and sound effects and then went and got a lot of SF street musicians to record a lot of the music. I remember them showing a build of the game that had Tim describing each scene instead of the final audio. It was amazing to see behind the curtain.
- mwidell 2y ago
  Wow, didn't expect an answer straight from the horses mouth :) Thanks for making one of the best games of all time!
- 2y ago

mikhailbolton 2y ago

First time a video game moved me emotionally. Lola getting sprouted. It blew my mind.

test1235 2y ago
makes me think of Final Fantasy 7, which came out around the same time

derriz 2y ago

A fantastic game in terms of atmosphere, artwork, characters and story but I found the puzzles to be too difficult and/or illogical and gave up pretty early into the plot. Overall I remember being somewhat disappointed because of my struggle to make progress. Maybe my expectations had been too high - I was a recent convert to point n' click at the time and of course LucasArts being masters of the genre, meant my anticipation had reached fever pitch.

jstimpfle 2y ago
Can relate, I was too blockheaded to get most of the clues. Played it on a Pentium 150, 32 MB RAM and there was a lot of idle time waiting for the rooms and places to load, which added some more frustration. But at some point I followed instructions to complete the game along to the end. It's probably fair to say that following the journey of the game is one of the fondest memories of my life. I highly recommend the remastered version from 2015 on Steam. I bought it and did another playthrough. It brought back so many emotions, and getting insight from the developers let me really connect with them.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ksynwa 2y ago
Same. I played until the part where we get to a forest and watched playthrough after that. Watching the playthrough confirmed that I made the right decision.
ARandumGuy 2y ago
The puzzle design in Grim Fandango really isn't anything to write home about, and if that's the only reason you play adventure games, you're going to be disappointed. But the characters, writing, art, and sheer style are all so good that it makes up for it in my opinion. Grim Fandango is probably even better now, since you can easily look up solutions to some of the more frustrating puzzles. The remastered version is also very good, changing just enough to make it play well on modern systems, without fundamentally altering the experience.
pingohits 2y ago

AndrewOMartin 2y ago

This It shone, pale as bone As I stood there alone And I thought to myself how the moon, That night, cast its light On my heart's true delight, And the reef where her body was strewn.

mattlondon 2y ago

Off sick from work - quite by coincidence I decided to start playing the remastered version after hearing many good things and people saying it was the best thing they've ever played etc etc. I must say, it has not really grabbed me. It sadly suffers from the common problem of these sort of games where you have to combine seemingly random items to make any progress. There are so far very few actual "puzzles" that you can solve, but instead mainly you just need to brute force the combinations of items to find that One Weird Combination that does something - most recent example: use a piece of coral on a rope so you can then climb the rope... wtf?! This is made even worse by the sheer tedium of having to walk backwards and forwards across the screens and trying everything on everything. Please game designers if you are forcing me to walk around aimlessly please at least make it quick to move around!

michelb 2y ago

The music in this game..wow..I still listen to the soundtrack many times a year.