Level Atlas

Near miss

Ron Gilbertdraft

Designer of Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island. Gilbert wrote the rules that made adventure games fair and the chart that made their puzzles plannable.

Born
1964
Nationality
American
Active
1985 to present
Studios
Lucasfilm Games, Humongous Entertainment, Terrible Toybox

Why it matters

Gilbert misses the ten because his lessons are bound to one genre, but inside it they are law, and the fairness rules travel further than they look.

Lessons

  1. 01 · audience

    No dead ends, no sudden death, no time limits

    Gilbert's 1989 essay is a list of ways adventure games cheated their players, with a rule against each: never let the player reach an unwinnable state without knowing, never kill them without warning, never make them replay to beat a clock. Under it is one principle: the player should always be able to trust the game. Monkey Island was built on the list and the genre adopted it.

  2. 02 · process

    Chart the puzzles before you write them

    A puzzle dependency chart is a graph of every puzzle and what it unlocks. Gilbert used it to keep several chains open at once so the player always has something to try, and to spot the bottleneck where a game funnels into a single puzzle. It is still the standard tool for the genre.

Known for

  • Maniac Mansion1987 · designer
  • The Secret of Monkey Island1990 · designer
  • Thimbleweed Park2017 · designer
  • Return to Monkey Island2022 · designer

Levels in the atlas (0)

Derived from level entries, not maintained here.

No level entries credit this designer yet.

Sources