On a fit of inspiration I’m trying to see if I can write a short piece of parser IF in an obscure dead language. So far, most of the technical obstacles are coming apart nicely before me.
But…for this language, we don’t actually know the words for “north”, “south”, “east”, or “west”. Or in any related language. Or in any other language spoken in the vicinity, in fact! As far as I know, they didn’t use compasses to navigate, and didn’t divide up the directions the way we do now. (Not even using the stars or the directions of sunrise or sunset, it seems?)
This makes a lot of classic parser IF puzzles kind of difficult.
I can think of a few different things to do in this situation, but I’m not sure which is most appropriate.
Have the whole game be situated near some landmarks, and navigate that way: south is always “riverward”, for example
Derive some new words from combinations like “sunrise-ward” and “northwind-ward”
Just make up some new words and acknowledge that they’re not historical; after all, I’m making up characters and places too
Assign the directions to whichever letters are most convenient, and acknowledge that they’re just part of the interface rather than part of the game
Find some way to do navigation without compass directions, and hope that getting used to this on top of a whole new language isn’t too much for players to handle
If you were trying to play a simple piece of parser IF to learn a new language, which of these would you prefer?
I like the idea of making things up. There was an IF game waaaay back in the 80s called Xenos that had its own directions at one point in the game. I think it’s a great idea!
Of course right after posting this I finally find an instance of direction words-ish in an especially archaic text. “Ish” because it’s written in logograms—glyphs that represent entire words instead of sounds, so I know the meaning but I don’t know the pronunciation.
Literally the logograms here mean “from the god of the sun”, meaning “east”—that is, “from the direction of the sunrise”. (“Whatever territories ‘from the god of the sun’ = in the east revolted, I defeated them all.”) So I’ll call that a vote for deriving words from “sunrise-ward” and such.
Given that the vocabulary I can use is very, very limited, it’s a lot easier to write functional puzzles if I can work with multiple rooms. But I can probably get by with fewer than a full complement of directions—I’m not planning to use the intermediate ones (northeast, southwest, etc) at all.
Some problems/thoughts…If you don’t know North,South etc how do you know northwind-ward?
Also, if you use prominent landmarks, they would need to be referential to your current position.
So I’ve opted for making up words.
Going with the landmarks idea, something like this would probably work well:
You are standing near a fountain. Several yards away is a stand of willow trees, and
somewhat to the left of that, a small pond. In the opposite direction you see a white
house.
>go to willow trees
<<Trying to resist the temptation to run off and implement it!>>
English is actually a bit of an outlier in deriving the names of the winds from the names of the directions—in many languages it’s the other way around! Latin borealis as in aurora borealis comes from boreas, the north wind.
The idea would be that they’re far enough away that your position relative to them doesn’t meaningfully change during the game. For example, the Akkadian word for “east” is šadûm “mountain-y”, since no matter where you go in Mesopotamia, the mountains are always generally east of you.
A bit less limited than that, thankfully!
Yeah! That’s basically what I mean by the fifth option, ditching the compass entirely. Dialog does something like this for its choice-based mode already, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to make rooms work the same way: no directions, just adjacency, and give the name of a room to go to it.
Or even not adjacency: Castle of the Red Prince is probably the most traditional (has items, feels like it has a map) of the go-to-any-unlocked-location games that I’ve played, but there’s also at least Toby’s Nose and Lime Ergot. I feel like there’s another big one I’m missing but
After the initial exploration, you do lose a lot of the feel of traversal between places, but I think that’s usually not too critical and I think you can still do most kinds of traditional puzzles…
Hmm. I guess the difficulty is then each room needs to have a unique name that doesn’t collide with an object. Which might be a problem with a very limited vocabulary? Dunno.
To be honest, it really depends on how meta the game is anyway, but the point is that I think either GO TO or like, RIVER itself is good enough. Give me a command and I’ll grow into it.
A variation on this would be to use arrow keys or another set of keys that are arranged roughly in a compass rose shape on the keyboard. Or allow the player to assign keys to the directions.
So far landmarks seem to be winning the poll. Based on the words we know in this language, I think the game is going to take place in between a river (H), a plain (T), a forest (W), and some cliffs (P)—those seem like they could plausibly surround a city and each start with a different letter.
Then “examine” starts with K, “look around” starts with A, and “possessions” starts with…A again, but “things that have been taken” starts with D…
Or, since this is about language learning in the end, I just won’t worry about abbreviations for anything except directions.
This had already been done in Trials of Rosalinda. Apart from compass directions, there was also a GO TO LOCATION option. Locations that were not unlocked yet will not be visible.
