Good 
The ability to support a wider variety of game designs will keep the medium alive and well! 
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Though people have different opinions I am under the impression that most prefer that only visited rooms are revealed, which is why Quest and Adrift auto-mapping does this. Revealing the full map contains spoilers in the general case. Spoilers should only be given if the player prefers it, sort of cheating in the general case, whereas auto-mapping is just a tool. Giving the player the option to choose is of cause even better.
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Exactly. Players who want to cheat are going to, and there is no stopping that. Sometimes a player will only engage to use cheats and exploits because thatâs how they have fun, and thatâs okay. Players who want to break your game are always going to, so thereâs little use worrying about it; you will sooner ruin it for good-faith players than stop game-breakers.
Players who will take your game seriously and engage with it as intended deserve your priority and dev time, because theyâre the only ones who will have fun while playing your game according to your design. Anyone else will have fun by breaking it.
Itâs better to simply let the player approach the game however they want to. Maybe theyâre doing it âwrongâ, but you need to make your peace with that when you create in an interactive medium.
Someone recently told me that they cracked open I Am Preyâs game file to find the secret dialogue strings. Thatâs okay. If thatâs how this player derives fun, then Iâm happy they found this opportunity in my game, even if itâs not how I intended for those strings to be experienced.
Cheaters can and will do anything, so itâs not productive to withhold features from good-faith players based on what cheaters are capable of.
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I wouldnât call anything a player does in a single player game cheating. People have finite leisure time and doing things to shortcut an authorâs intent via viewing a map or walkthrough, asking for hints, or even disassembling a game are all valid ways of managing that time. Someone who is stuck may have a choice between taking a shortcut or never playing the game again. Some people will do it for fun, others for curiosity or countless other reasons.
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That is the exact essence of the point I try to make, yes. Itâs singleplayer, itâs in someoneâs own time, so putting a lot of effort to prevent âcheatingâ is already framing it in an unproductive way, and super ill-advised.
I only used the word âcheatâ here because the counter-argument I usually get is âbut thatâs cheating, so theyâre doing it wrongâ and the rest of my point falls on deaf ears, so I tried getting ahead of it this time around.
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I was pretty impressed by Trizbortâs (desktop) functionality where you could feed it a transcript and it would create a map inferred by the playerâs movements. It wasnât always right when the map was tricky or included teleportation. I think it was basically just watching how if the player went south and the room they ended up in is called âLabâ it would update the map direction and label it accordingly.
In fact, I think you could specify a transcript filename you were creating in real time as you played and it would make the map as you go.
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I fully agree. We just have to make sure that players donât see spoilers when they donât want to.
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