Wow, thanks for the glowing review and thoughtful comments!
I'm really happy with the improvements over the Sandwich game - that was my first time using AGS, and had a very tight (self imposed) deadline. So going into this game I really did want to focus on improvements across the board.
The bugs you mentioned - I'll look into trimming the walkable areas in the lab. The journal check-marking system is definitely not triggering for the bucket, I think the powering one was working, but I'll check if I missed a trigger.
I'll patch those soon.
I understand the frustrations with the inventory. I was trying to find a balance of usability with it. I really don't like the "move the mouse to the top, auto opening" inventory style. So I wanted an intentional click, but I wanted to maintain the "it goes away when you move your mouse away" because it's pretty typical to select an item and then want to interact with the world. But yeah - I think I could adapt it so that it only goes away in specific situations that make sense. For example, only auto-closing when there is an inventory item selected and the mouse moves away. I also thought it'd be a good idea to leave it open during the blueprint sections... I really should have done that. Maybe I'll patch it in, if I can find the time to look into it as well.
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For each game I set some goals to focus on. The first was "learning AGS, and developing a production pipeline."
The Hamster game was a broad set of goals, but focused on "improving art, dialog and actual puzzle designs" to boil it down to a single sentence.
For the current game, I'm focusing on character interactions, animations and dialog sequences as well as maintaining interesting puzzle mechanics. But I'm not aiming to include such diversity in the mechanics (more traditional inventory and dialog based puzzles for the most part).
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Once I've completed the current game, I think I'll be able to focus on a larger project, having gathered all the tools necessary to produce a fleshed out well rounded adventure game that presents fun and challenge with humour.
Well - I guess that remains to be seen, but I'm pretty excited about moving onto the bigger project - the goal is to meet the scale of games like Sam & Max Hit the Road, DotT, Thimbleweed park, and that kind of thing.
Thanks again for the wonderful notes and feedback. I'm really glad to hear you liked the game. I'm excited for the future :D