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http://gamasutra.com/view/news/189817/Video_The_Myst_Classic_Postmortem_from_GDC_2013.php

Disagreements about whether or not "Myst" is the right kind of adventure game aside, there is an interesting thought on the design of the puzzles. Specifically, that Robyn felt the best kinds of puzzles in the game were the more organic and functional ones which appeared natural to the world. Also during the QA at the end someone asks about the Lucas Arts/Sierra style adventure games and how they might have influenced "Myst". Might that have been anyone from this community?

I've finally fulfilled a promise to myself to learn AGS (made so many years ago after playing 5 Days a Stranger). While learning the various ins and outs of the editor, I happened upon Vince Twelve's 'Why Your Game is Broken' entry on the wiki about how the player interacts with the game. Specifically, he notes that most interactions and verbs are fairly useless because most clickable areas have only a small selection of useful options. That is, there are very few items that you can both "use" and "talk to". He makes a pretty compelling argument for a two button interface. That is, left button walks/interacts and the right button looks (similar to what has been done in any number of games like The Blackwell Legacy or Resonance)

I went ahead and managed to implement something that is 60% of the way there with this in the on_mouse_click function of the global script:

Code: AGS

if (button == eMouseLeft) { 
   ProcessClick(mouse.x, mouse.y, eModeWalkto);
 } else if (button == eMouseRight){
   ProcessClick(mouse.x, mouse.y, eModeLookat);
 }

The obvious problem is that with this set up the player will walk to places and look at things, but it lacks the ability to interact. Changing "eModeWalkto" in the ProcessClick to "eModeInteract" fixes the ability to interact, but breaks the ability for the player to arbitrarily walk in the walkable areas. I can think of certain workarounds (for instance, making a hotspot out of the walkable areas and then adding a "player.Walk(mouse.X, mouse.Y)") but they all seem rather inefficient, time consuming, prone to errors or otherwise just the "wrong way" to do things.

Is there a better way I should be handling this to get the effect I'm intending?