Accident of history, really. Those are just the sounds that those particular words start with.
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You know, after reading Mike Russo’s Guybrush’s Heirs at The Rosebush I keep thinking of ways to simplify input. That lead me to something I’m not sure interactive fiction has done a lot of: gamepad input.
Every gamepad in the world has an axis stick, or at least a d-pad. This would furnish the player with a natural set of cardinal directions that would be understandable to nearly anyone who sat down in front of a computer, no compass rose required.
I’ve thought a lot about this, but it requires that everyone who plays the game have a gamepad.
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I don’t have a gamepad, so that rules me out.
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Gamepad input has been done. Numpad input as well. And we just had a recent discussion about unicode icons and buttons.
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The Venn diagram between people who own gamepads and people who really dig interactive fiction is not a vast overlap. Yeah, I’m not sure this idea is worth fighting for.
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Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I think this may not be worth building a game around.
How many movement actions do you know in this language?
In Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince I used movement verbs to link rooms together.
So you’d WALK in location A to get to location B.
WALK in location B and you get back to location A.
CLIMB in location A and you get to location C.
Climb in location C to get back to A.
WALK in location C and you get to location D.
And so on.
If you pick four main movement verbs you can plan a normal-ish map, even if the connections are behaving a bit differently.
How many people have keyboards with cursor keys though? I’m sure someone recently made a game where you play with single key presses? (I thought of doing a game like that once, but never finished anything.)
I think you’d want to start with key presses and then add gamepads as an option. Probably not too dissimilar to how non-text-based PC games are put together…
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Colossal Cave Adventure allowed you to navigate using the names of locations, even if you weren’t in their immediate area.
IIRC, the “go” part was optional, so you could just type “building” or even “build” to enter the brick building. Compass directions were recognised, but it didn’t always describe the exit directions for each location.
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In fact, the last game I made did this.
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Arthur DiBianca’s Skies Above often uses just the letters, no enter, which was interesting, although the game itself is a pile of minigames which are (probably intentionally) somewhat tedious once you solve the puzzle of each. Also, @Draconis, this might be an interesting example of going to locations instead of having directions, though I gather you’ve already found something that works for you…
Also Kara’s IF D-Pad thread where she made an AutoHotKey script that sends N<enter> etc. when you hit the keys on the numpad. Handy convenience if you’re on Windows (AutoHotKey is Windows-only, unfortunately).
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I actually really enjoyed this aspect of the game, and would enjoy seeing it used in the game currently under discussion.
As for the gamepad conversation, I remember Where the Water Tastes Like Wine was criticized on release for very slow walking animations, so the game developer added a whistling minigame to go faster. The problem is that he assumed everyone played with controller, because he did personally, so he didn’t actually tell the player the controls, assuming that they would just mess with the buttons and figure it out organically. According to Valve around 10% of people use controller when they play Steam games, so I think he really missed the boat there.
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I encourage you to find ways to make your world navigable in a way that’s authentic for your story. I understand that compass directions are entrenched in the minds of most players. There’s nothing wrong with making them work in parallel with whatever navigation best suits your story.
Adventure required compass directions only once you make it a couple rooms into the cave.
Outside, you can navigate in terms of the terrain (“downstream”, “upstream”), landmark (“building”, “forest”, “grate”), and spatial relationship (“up”, “down”, “enter”, “exit”). The descriptions of the outdoor locations don’t even mention compass directions.
If you want to find the entrance to the cave, and if you happen to know that most caves are carved by running water, following the stream (“go downstream”) would be a wise way to search for it. If you limit yourself to compass directions, you’d have to explore at random. (I never knew the cave entrance was west of the building until I saw someone else’s map. To me, it was always just downstream.)
Once you’re two rooms into the cave, descriptions start including compass directions. At that point, if you try to use ambiguous travel commands (e.g., “go in”), the game will suggest using compass directions. This is a conceit to the fact that there isn’t a reasonable way to distinguish every passage within the constraints of a two-word parser. (Even in the cave, though, you can refer to some passages by the name of the adjacent location.)
Actual spelunkers exploring an unknown cave, carry a compass and map making tools, so it’s natural for them to navigate by compass directions. Our intrepid player character doesn’t actually have a compass in their inventory. Somehow they have an innate sense of direction that works through underground mazes of twisty passages but completely fails them when wandering in the forest. Exploring an uncharted cavern with compass directions works.
As the “text adventure” genre evolved into “interactive fiction,” the dominance of compass-based navigation disappointed me.
It seems out of place when I’m a detective searching a house for clues and suspects. As parsers got smarter, there was more opportunity for the player to feel like they were actually collaborating on a work of fiction. A description of a dining room that explicitly says the kitchen lies to the north (solely because the player needs to know how to get to the kitchen) makes it harder to suspend disbelief.
I have a vague recollection of playing games that used compass directions to move around an ocean liner and even a spaceship. That the implementer hadn’t even used port/starboard/fore/aft was disappointing.
Again, I think it’s okay to allow compass navigation for the players that prefer it, but I think a lot of stories could be improved by providing a less mechanical mechanic that better fits the fictional world.
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Could not agree more. I just wish there was a better way for exploring inside spaces. It makes sense to have “Go to tree/river/barn/etc” when you’re outside, but it gets awkward inside. For instance, if you’re in a room with door in all 4 walls, you could do left/right/forward/back, but those things are dependent on where you’re standing in a room. Going right or left might be a little better, but also might be confusing. I’ve been harping on the idea of taking directional words out altogether and replacing them with arrow keys, since modern players might be more comfortable with that. But even that causes problems with text description. It doesn’t look great to say “There are doors → and <–.” So I’d love to see all directional words get the boot, but I’m not sure how this could practically be accomplished in a way that actually functions better than NEWS.
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Midnight. Swordfight. uses past, future, clockwise, and counterclockwise. Like Max said, use what’s authentic to your game and we’ll grow into it.
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Why does this reminds me of Bitsy? I suppose if Bitsy ever be implemented in Inform (maybe using ASCII graphic), there’d be no problem with navigational issues. Not sure how the game would play, though. Poke and Super Poke?
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The dilemma is:
- It’s really hard to build a mental map with relative directions when you’re not actually moving around and getting motor input, and
- We (in the Western world) don’t really use absolute directions in day-to-day life
Interestingly, that second point isn’t universal, and most indigenous Australian languages actually use absolute directions (north, east, etc) for everyday things; you say “it’s due north” instead of “it’s straight ahead”, or “turn south” instead of “turn left”, and so on.
…but, sadly, the language I’m working with here does things the non-Australian way, with “right” and “left” much more common than “east” and “west”.
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We (in the Western world) don’t really use absolute directions in day-to-day life
It’s amazing to me how absolute directions aren’t used even when its makes a lot of sense. One afternoon, I was driving on a highway and saw a nascent grass fire along the edge of the roadway. I called emergency services and told them the fire was along the south side of Highway XYZ between the Foo Street and Bar Avenue exits.
The dispatcher asked me “which side of the highway?” to which I replied “the south side.” He then repeated the question and I repeated my answer. After a few rounds of this, the dispatcher clarified his question by asking me whether the fire was on the “left” or the “right” side of the highway.
He was completely flummoxed when I said that, for me, it was on the right side because I’m heading east. But if the fire trucks would be arriving from the east, it would be on their left side.
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I want to live in a world where Left and Right are absolute directions centered on me.
Also, the universe revolves around my bellybutton and the Greenwich Prime Meridian runs through my arsecrack.
Everyone else just has to shift their spatio-temporal frame of reference to Me.
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Okay that does it. Who is going to spike down Rovarsson in Greenwich with his arsecrack facing south to preserve our sanity?
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Rovarsson’s Prime Meridian would be the butt of a lot of jokes. 
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