Monday, 16:30 is another game with fluid actionable scope, so that you wind up moving around the inside of an office when you’re acting on different things in the room. The game prints command clarification breaks as you move around the office so the internals are a bit more transparent than Shade’s.
One of the issues with having time move independently of your actions (as opposed to having it lurch forward whenever you solve a puzzle) is that if your actions move time appreciably enough to affect the puzzles, you’re doing a “be here at this time or be screwed” kind of game (like I understand Deadline to be) which just drives players (me, at least) crazy. Either you have to devote a lot of effort to describing how time passes and make the player care about it even though it’s irrelevant to the gameplay, or you have to make it so a lot of interesting stuff is happening even if you’re not where the author expects you to be. Challenging. (Or I’m sort of trying to envisage something, set in Stately Gardens as it happens, where the NPCs just do all sorts of crazy stuff and you’re really not expected to be in control of what happens, at best you can start a lot of chain reactions. But I’ve barely started prototyping some of the NPC stuff.
Paul, I really want to see your project. Even the first version that you scrapped after testing.
And the issues with comfort with the existing set of verbs is definitely a matter of community formation, IMO. I tried Cold Iron on an IF newbie (up to the midpoint, when we couldn’t figure out how to press space to continue on an iPad browser) and though she got through a bunch of it with less prompting than I expected (through commands like “read the book” and maybe “walk through the door”), she was absolutely flummoxed when she had to enter a compass direction.