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yeah any kind of addiction or even habits are tough as shit to break. i don't have the smoking problem, but i've got some problems of my own and it is so easy after a couple of weeks to forget why you made a change in the first place and just fall back into old patterns.

the only advice i guess i can offer is watch out for that. watch out for making deals with yourself - just one more etc - and watch out for forgetting about what it was that made you quit.

i can say these things, but i haven't had any extended success with it yet. you've got to want something different, i think, and you have to actually be able to get it. why quit something if there is no better alternative? smoking's a bit different, but i'm assuming the psychology of most addiction is similar.

I guess there are a few minds about this and there isn't really a correct answer.

One point is that if there are one or two rooms which are "pointless", then it is probably just going to confuse the person who is playing because everything else in the game has a purpose. It depends on your design techniques, I guess. Like, if there were loads of rooms in your game and only half of them actually served to advance the central plot or were critical to do so then the player would probably pick up quite quickly that your game was one where exploration was encouraged and not everything had to mean something.

That could get confusing, or a bit overwhelming but when I play adventure games I am mostly looking to soak up all dat atmosphere, you know the walking around looking at backgrounds and listening to music etc. I'm not always in a huge hurry to move onward, although it sucks getting stuck or lost and the more optional rooms there are the more likely that is to happen.

So I think the best thing would be, if you were to put in any amount of optional rooms at all, have some kind of marker for rooms which are necessary, you know, like a map where plot necessary rooms have exclamation points or whatever over them.

Or the optional rooms could provide alternative ways of achieving goals - this is the most complex and time consuming optional, and of course that means it's the most interesting and probably best for the game.

Also, you don't need to make a separate room for like, shop fronts. Why not just have an animated background where you can see inside the windows and get a glimpse of the activity in the shop? That kind of thing can give you little chills if it's done right, like in Broken Sword II down at the docks? I love those backgrounds, with the little spots of light darted around, just hinting at life and activity and not showing you it up front. That stuff can be pretty uh, titilating, I guess!