{ "question": "How do Messed Up Dress Up, and the way it is being made, compare with the adventure-game engines and editors of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Sierra's AGI and SCI, LucasArts' SCUMM, and the Hugo games): what did they have that we have again, what made their making hard, which of those difficulties we meet again now, and which of ours are new?", "date": "2026-10-18", "game": { "version": "0.0.232", "versions": 232, "first": "2026-10-12", "pictures": { "run": "2026-10-18 09:49 MDT", "version": "0.0.203" } }, "engines": [ [ "AGI", "Sierra On-Line, 1984 to 1989", "Pictures stored as drawing commands (lines and fills), replayed onto a visible screen and an invisible priority screen at once; the priority screen in 12 bands (colours 4 to 15) saying what is in front, and control lines (colours 0 to 3, black a wall) saying where one may walk. 16 colours.", "A typed parser", "In-house tools; today's fans draw AGI pictures with Lance Ewing's PicEdit, whose priority view shows the bands and lines", [ "agi-pic", "agi-priority", "agi-making" ] ], [ "SCI0, SCI1", "Sierra On-Line, 1988; SCI1 from King's Quest V, 1990", "SCI0 kept the vector pictures (320 by 190) and the priority screen, and added a control image (white a wall). SCI1 brought 256-colour VGA and pictures painted by hand and scanned in, with an icon interface. King's Quest V wanted 640 KB of memory and 1.2 MB floppy disks; a 16-colour edition was made for weaker PCs.", "Typed (SCI0); icons and pointing (SCI1)", "In-house picture, view and room tools", [ "sci-pics", "kq5", "sci" ] ], [ "SCUMM", "Lucasfilm Games and LucasArts, 1987 (Maniac Mansion, on the Commodore 64) to 1998", "A scripting language and its interpreter (SPUTM), redesigned from one game to the next (again for Indiana Jones, again from scratch for The Secret of Monkey Island). Rooms with walk boxes; iMUSE (1991), music that branches and loops at markers to follow the player. Left in 1998 for GrimE, with Lua.", "Verbs and pointing; walking to a click", "FLEM placed and named the objects in a room and set clipping planes; MMUCUS compiled a room and its objects into one file, so scripters could change things without rebuilding the room; SPIT for fonts; BYLE, then CYST, for animating and scaling the characters", [ "scumm", "pagetable", "imuse" ] ], [ "Hugo", "Gray Design Associates (David P. Gray), 1990 to 1991, shareware", "Hugo's House of Horrors and its sequels: a graphic adventure with a typed parser, much like Sierra's AGI games; the DOS version free to share.", "A typed parser", "Its own engine (called Hugo in ScummVM)", [ "hugo", "hugo-scummvm" ] ] ], "footnotes": "Other engines of the era, named here from memory and not checked against sources for this report: Westwood's engine for The Legend of Kyrandia, Revolution's Virtual Theatre (Lure of the Temptress, Beneath a Steel Sky), Coktel Vision's Gob engine, Adventure Soft's AGOS (Simon the Sorcerer), and, later, Adventure Game Studio (1997).", "rows": [ [ "What stands in front of what", "AGI's priority screen, in 12 bands, painted with the picture; SCI's priority screen", "Every thing standing in a place is an object with a depth, and the friend is drawn behind whatever stands nearer than their feet (ticket 99); since today, what hangs on walls and lies on floors is an object too, always behind the friend (ticket 284)", "same" ], [ "Where one may walk", "AGI's control lines; SCI's control image; SCUMM's walk boxes", "Collision boxes for walls and what stands; the back line (refined in ticket 310); pits and trap doors that keep the feet out", "same" ], [ "Getting there", "SCUMM: walking to a click was in the point-and-click design from the start", "πŸ‘† Walk where you click (ticket 251) plans a path round what stands in the way; the controller on the screen; real game controllers", "same" ], [ "Rooms and what is in them", "FLEM placed and named objects in a room; MMUCUS made quick changes possible without rebuilding the room", "πŸ“¦ placing any thing in any place; πŸ”¬ Inspection's list of a place's objects; πŸ—ΊοΈ World design's grid of places joined by their ways", "same, but live" ], [ "The pictures", "AGI: drawing commands, replayed; SCI1: painted by hand and scanned (from 1990)", "Drawings written as code (SVG), as AGI's were, so every part of a picture can be a setting, an object, placed or hidden; the picture archive keeps every version", "AGI's way, taken further" ], [ "Music", "SCI0: a sound's samples at most 64 KB; iMUSE (1991): music that follows the player", "🎡 the music designer; the scenes' movements (swaying, flickering) kept in time with the tune's LFOs", "same idea, new form" ], [ "Slow machines", "640 KB, floppy disks, a 16-colour edition of King's Quest V for weaker PCs", "60 frames a second first (the black laptop, the iPad): a slow computer shows the places as still pictures while the friend moves (ticket 164); costly effects off unless switched on (βš™οΈ Advanced)", "same" ], [ "Many platforms", "Ports to the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, Mac, FM Towns", "Browsers, which differ: today's trap doors swung in Chrome and not in Firefox (ticket 322); computers, tablets and phones", "same" ], [ "The engine changing under the games", "SCUMM rebuilt for Indiana Jones and again for Monkey Island; SCI0 to SCI1", "232 versions in a week (0.0.1 on 2026-10-12), each live within minutes", "same, much faster" ], [ "Knowing how it all works", "Much of SCUMM undocumented; new hires spent a week at \"SCUMM University\"", "agent-instructions.md, kept in step with every change; the dashboard of tickets; this series of reports", "same need, written down" ], [ "Playtesting", "Testers, then players, months later", "The players are the designers: M and N try a version the afternoon they asked for it; checks run on GitHub's computers after each release", "new" ] ], "new": [ [ "The designers are the players.", "M and N ask for a thing (a moss, a boulder lever, a bubble that bursts into smaller ones), and it is in the game that afternoon. In 1990 a design was decided by a designer, built for a year, and met players on floppy disks." ], [ "The programmer works from their words.", "An AI (Claude) writes the code from what Matthew relays, in plain words, and releases it; Matthew decides. The cost of trying an idea is minutes, so ideas get tried rather than argued about." ], [ "The game is its own editor.", "FLEM and MMUCUS were tools beside a compiled game; 🏞️ Background and πŸ—ΊοΈ World design are the running game, and a change shows at once in the picture the player is in." ], [ "Nothing to install.", "The game is a web page; a release is a push, live in about a minute, on any computer with a browser." ], [ "Every thing is a thing.", "Since today, everything a place draws is meant to be an object you can see in πŸ”¬ Inspection, hide and place elsewhere (ticket 284); a picture's settings decide it exactly, seeds included (ticket 274)." ], [ "It is a prototype.", "Dress Up is where Hazel's user-defined livelits are tried first: what works here, as the best experience when nothing stands in the way, is then built in Hazel." ] ], "hugo": [ [ "How you play", "Typing (\"get key\", \"open door\") to a parser, as in Sierra's AGI games", "Pointing, walking, dragging; a game controller; no typing" ], [ "The places", "A haunted house, in EGA pictures", "Houses, a castle of rooms, woods, the sea and more, drawn with depth and movement" ], [ "A goal", "Find Penelope in the house, by solving its puzzles; an ending", "None yet: you dress up a friend and go where you like" ], [ "Things you carry", "An inventory, used on the puzzles", "None yet" ], [ "People", "Characters in the house", "Cooks, a smith, a witch, a healer, who work but do not talk" ], [ "Making your own", "No", "Yes: places, things, a world, music" ] ], "next": [ [ "Things you carry", "an inventory, and using a thing on a thing (a key on a door, a bucket on a fire), the oldest machinery of these games" ], [ "Puzzles from what we have", "levers, trap doors and boulders (ticket 323) wired to a goal in a place (\"get the crown out of the trap room\")" ], [ "Depth and walking, drawn", "πŸ”¬ Inspection showing a place's depths and where one may walk as Sierra's priority and control screens did, and 🏞️ Background letting a designer paint them" ], [ "People who talk", "the cooks, the witch and the healer answering, the player choosing what to say" ], [ "A beginning and an end", "a world with a goal and a way to finish it, set in πŸ—ΊοΈ World design" ], [ "Rules", "small scripts (\"when the friend picks up the key, open the door\"), in the game first, then as Hazel livelits, as SCUMM's scripts were to its rooms" ], [ "A world to share", "a world saved as a file another player can open, as shareware once passed from hand to hand" ] ], "unknown": [ "How SCUMM's walk boxes were drawn and stored: the sources found name them (ScummVM fixes them for the Commodore 64 Maniac Mansion) but do not describe the tools.", "Sierra's own scanning pipeline for the painted VGA backgrounds: the sources describe it only in general (a 2015 trailer; an art director's biography).", "The footnote engines above: named from memory, not checked." ], "sources": { "agi-pic": [ "AGI Wiki: Picture Resource", "https://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php/AGI_Picture_Resource" ], "agi-priority": [ "AGI Wiki: An Explanation of AGI Priority Screens", "https://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php/An_Explanation_of_AGI_Priority_Screens" ], "agi-making": [ "AGI Wiki: The Making of an AGI Background Picture", "https://www.agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php/The_Making_of_an_AGI_Background_Picture" ], "agi-visual": [ "AGI Wiki: Visual vs Priority (Vortex tutorials)", "https://agiwiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php/Vortex_AGI_Tutorials:_Visual_vs_Priority" ], "sci-pics": [ "Sierra Wiki: SCI Studio Tutorial, Chapter 6, Editing Pics", "https://wiki.sierrahelp.com/index.php/SCI_Studio_Tutorial_Chapter_6_-_Editing_Pics" ], "sci": [ "Wikipedia: Sierra Creative Interpreter", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Creative_Interpreter" ], "kq5": [ "Wikipedia: King's Quest V", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Quest_V" ], "bill-davis": [ "Wikipedia: Bill Davis (artist)", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Davis_(artist)" ], "scumm": [ "Wikipedia: SCUMM", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUMM" ], "pagetable": [ "pagetable.com: The Mansion, Technical Aspects", "https://www.pagetable.com/?p=603" ], "imuse": [ "Wikipedia: iMUSE", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE" ], "lucasfilm": [ "Wikipedia: Lucasfilm Games", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasfilm_Games" ], "mi2": [ "Wikipedia: Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Island_2:_LeChuck%27s_Revenge" ], "gilbert-hmh": [ "Handmade Con 2015: Ron Gilbert (talk notes)", "https://guide.handmadehero.org/hmcon/2015/05/" ], "hugo": [ "Wikipedia: Hugo's House of Horrors", "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo%27s_House_of_Horrors" ], "hugo-scummvm": [ "ScummVM Wiki: Hugo's House of Horrors", "https://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/Hugo's_House_of_Horrors" ], "hugo-pcg": [ "PC Gamer: Looking back at Hugo's House of Horrors", "https://www.pcgamer.com/looking-back-at-hugos-house-of-horrors" ] }, "editor_note": [ "Matthew", "2026-10-18", "I appreciate getting reminded that we don't have all of the ingredients of a game, or even a game maker, yet. We need more ability to script events, add special items with special events attached, and write a story that the NP[C]s help create -- they are still just standins for that. Thank you." ] }