How would we fix the now geocentric universe? What would that change about our lives?
Sorry, but that dispatcher must have been an idiot, or?
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…or they thought it was a north-south highway.
In that case asking for left/right is still stupid. I mean on most roads there is two “lefts” and two “rights”. (Only exception would be a one way road.)
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I wish there were some way that “choices” might be presented, where the player would know exactly what they could do at any time. Hm… Maybe if the player could even just click on the direction they want to go… Like if you had your room description, and then a bunch of listed choices after that, there wouldn’t need to be compass directions like, “Go to the Living Room” or “Open the bathroom door” or even “Go to work”. Which would be cool: if there wasn’t an exit to the south, the player isn’t shown a choice for that, so it would prevent them from needing to try everything and run into walls trying things the author doesn’t want them to do…
[/s - sorry Amanda, I’m just kidding! 
]
Also, if instead of text the game could actually show the room as an image that would be navigated by this stick or d-pad. Maybe even the room could then be rendered in 3-D and could update in real time based on the joystick/d-pad presses almost like the player could move around in real time!
[/s Sorry, again, sorry, I woke up on the sarcasm side of the bed, I apologize.]
Actually I know two games that felt like 3-D rendered IF:
One is What Remains of Edith Finch where the environments are lovingly detailed and stand up to physically EXAMINEing every book on a bookshelf or the items stacked on a desk (without a button-press interaction - the art and environment is that detailed that you can literally walk up to each picture on the wall or document on the table and just look at it if there’s no button prompt that causes narration) and often words the narrator says float into the environment and interact with it in a tactile manner. Like the subtitles for “I walked up to the gate” float in along the gate, and when the gate is moved, the letters separate and float away like leaves. Literal text interaction.
The other I don’t remember the name of, but it was a simple 3D environment that was navigated, but when you approached and looked closely, every environmental element had words on it, like if you approached a wall, you would see close enough the wall was made of of the word “brick” over and over. The handle of a torch was made of the word TORCH and the flames from it were the letters in FIRE that flickered appropriately. It had a tactile sense of examination - if you didn’t understand what you were looking at, you approached and physically examined it. In fact, from a distance you might detect that one section of the brick wall looked misaligned with different words, and as you got close instead of BRICK that section of the wall read SECRET DOOR and you could walk through it once you understood what it was by getting close enough.
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I did kind of walk into that one.
But seriously, in traditional parsers I don’t think there’s a better option than NEWS.
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I agree, but have always thought it would be neat to use Hybrid Choices to kind of make a “tutorial mode” at the beginning to adjust the player to commands where they can make choices but are subsequently instructed in the correct command format in the process.
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That is a very awesome idea indeed. IFComp is only 3 months away. Get cracking!
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The interesting thing about the landmark solution–which I think is the best–is that it might introduce an expectation of seeing things in other rooms (scope changes?). Or deciding which things one might see in other rooms, and if that might change with proximity, and so forth.
I actually started working on a system for that, but got distracted by… learning about scenes, I think. But there’s a WIP on the back burner that will need it.
Anyway, I like the idea of creating a world that feels contiguous in that way. I think rooms in Inform feel very discrete, and for good reason, but moving and orienting based of observable features (rather than exits) seems cool
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I’ve been working on one too, and gotten sidetracked into a general system for seeing one place from multiple vantage points, and all kinds of other issues. Most recently indicating in the room description where you can go. Bolded in general, but I want to add pictographic indications as well, to indicate whether a bold word is somewhere you can walk to, a door you can go through , a building that can be entered, etc. And that’s led me to an emoji extension (web only of course). Anyway, big rabbit hole.
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