Another feature that might be beneficial for playing with something like this is the ability to preview a Picture with other palettes (either from a selection of PAL resources, embedded palettes from other PICTURE resources, or importing a new palette). SCI Viewer can already do this natively, minus the imported palette option. I see that Companion can already preview in the editor with other palettes.
Can you describe in a little more detail? What I can see doing is to have the same functionality in the pic editor as there is in the view editor, where you can choose the palette to display the picture in. The list consists of the embedded palette, and all the pal resources in the game. Would that suffice?
Extracting palettes from other pics is probably not something I can do in UI-time (so I'd need to do this in the background or something), so having those in the list would be more difficult.
Regarding all the extra "demo" content for the template game, I think we should keep the template game as cut down as possible. Even remove the current screens and keep it as simple as SCI0's template game; a blank slate. Black title screen and an all white empty first room with basic interactions. Any feature/tutorial content we can rename the current template game into Demo Game, like Brian did for SCI0. But a starter game should always be a blank slate. Just a thought.
I agree with this. Once the template game is "finalized", I can make a final version with all the cruft removed.