What’s the prevailing wisdom on listing exits in descriptions? I get folks need to see or at least get a hint of where they can go, but what about reciprocal rooms, etc? Been replaying some old games to see how it’s handled and a lot of assumptions I think that maps are being drawn, which is fair, but I’m curious if there’s any more modern thoughts on this.
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Personally I think it’s good practice to always provide players with a list of exits (unless you have a diegetic reason not to), though, I think exit descriptions should depend on the context of state and progress. So for instance in a room you’ve never visited you might see:
You can see exits to the north and south.
But if a way is blocked or shut, that should be indicated.
A closed door leads north and a way south is blocked by a cave-in.
Then if a player has previously used those exits and visited the rooms beyond, it’s nice to offer that clarity.
You can go north to the cold room or south to the hot room.
A practice I’ve seen – maybe in one of Emily’s games? – that I really liked, was to offer a list of exits any time a player tries to use a non-existent exit.
> go east
You can go north to the hot room or south to the cold room.
Alternately to all of this, if you prefer to bake your exits into your room description, you don’t also want a list of exits to follow the main description, so there should be an author’s option to determine whether a list of exits is presented for any given room.
You appear to be standing at the equator. The ground
to the north is chilled by a light dusting of frost,
while the ground to the south appears to be baked dry.
(All of that said, everyone has a different opinion, which is why the game engine I’m working on allows these options to be be controlled by author’s preferences.)
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One of the things I have done is to provide different room layout options in the games setup. Only one of the modes doesn’t show a list of compass direction and exit locations; the others do. If something is blocking an exit, that also blocks showing an exit. I have to say though after reading this that having a layout where the exit locations are generated as text and appended to the location seems worthwhile. It makes a lot of sense for me because of certain mechanics. I allow the player to look at different compass directions that are passable to get a description into the adjacent location. This is unless that location is unlit. I allow looking because the player can also throw things to adjacent locations or through doors and windows. Looking east would show the location minus the text “you are standing at”. I was always impressed with Far Cry puzzles and the ability to make things happen from a distance. I’ve always thought there could be a a puzzle where you throw something through a window or into a location to either draw away a NPC or do something else. My engine goes overboard on exit possibilities; you can have 20 exits per location. Up to 10 passageways/doors and 10 windows. Windows serve as independent exit points and like doors, can also be locked. Windows and open doors can be looked through to see into the location they can possibly lead to or to provide more information. Unless prevented by author logic all windows can be looked through. In most modes I just give a list like “N The Driveway”, “S The Street” etc. There is one mode that does not do this at all. I really like the idea of generating that text to be dependent on visitation. I am thinking of a mode like what was described where the location is appended with auto generated exit paths that are generic until the location is visited, then filled in with the location after visiting. I’ll probably keep my first release the way it is but I want to really consider this because location description is one of the biggest pieces of currency in the game. edit - in my build of cloak of darkness you can throw your cloak into the cloak room from the foyer, nothing special had to be done to make that happen. You can also look into the adjacent rooms by direction or by location name.
In this case, some authors provide an EXITS command that explicitly lists where you can go.
My view is that trying to figure out which exits are available is not generally fun for the player. It’s a classic way to increase the difficulty of a game, and used to be very popular among authors—one particularly bad example is Jigsaw, where a particular room description actually does provide an exit list, but that list is missing one crucial exit. If you don’t find that unlisted direction during a once-only time-limited segment, you’ll be missing a key that’s necessary later on in the game.
Is that fun for the average player, nowadays? I would argue no. (I’m not sure it was fun for the average player in the 90s either.) As soon as a game pulls that trick once, players now need to try all twelve directions in every single room they encounter, and that’s just a slog.
I also believe that trying to list the exits in every room description doesn’t make for good prose. Some authors can absolutely pull it off, but most of the time it leads to descriptions becoming repetitive and mechanical. Every room now needs to convey what the author wants to convey (which might be setting, or plot, or character, or puzzle elements), and also convey a list of three to six compass directions.
I like building puzzles that depend on geography, which means I end up with lots of rooms and lots of exits, and my descriptions suffer for it. This may just be a personal problem, but I know I’ve also played games where the author is struggling to fit compass directions into their prose.
So if you accept both of those premises, where can we go from there?
My argument is that room exits should be conveyed by some kind of UI element that’s always accurate (don’t lie about this), unobtrusive (don’t get in the way of the prose), and frictionless to use (don’t require a lot of effort to read it). Think about the last parser game you played; can you tell me what its command prompt and status bar looked like? I would bet not. Their purpose is to convey some basic information and then get out of the way.
I’ve played around with various ways to do this, and my current solution is an automap in the top bar and an unobtrusive (automatic) list of exits before the prompt. This works well enough, but I’m always on the lookout for ways to improve it further.
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The way a game handles player information (descriptions, things seen, exits, rooms visited) in large part dictates what playing a parser game is like. Deciding when and how to share exit information has a huge effect on the play experience.
In the course of testing multiple games, I have learned that players do not want to closely reread room descriptions for exits whenever they return to a room. For convenience’s sake, it’s best to place them near the end of the room description. I go a step further and format them differently, usually capital letters bracketed by asterisks (the asterisks are for screen readers to pick up). I like to capitalize the names of things, too.
However, it can get repetitive to gracefully mention exits in room descriptions. One idea is to only mention them when they’re interesting and leave the rest up to an exit list. That’s what I’m up to in a current work in progress, and I’ve taken the extra step of making the exit list out of hyperlinks. Why not?
There are other ways to help players find exits, like adding ASCII maps. These aren’t useful for screen reader users, but if steps have been taking to make exits audibly distinct, then there are still features everyone can use.
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Personally, I use listing the exits at the very end of the room description, in a prose consistent with the room description (consistency including bad english of course 
)
That said, I agree on Daniel on UI, but in my experience, is dependent to the parser support (I don’t hide that my ideal is having the exits embedded in the room description, and the UI gives a clear & standardised synthesis of the exit list) and I prefer not bind the player to specific 'terps.
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
It’s funny you mention Jigsaw, cause one of my spot checks was Curses which in my mind I consider the first “modern” game, which is probably a bad way to think about it.
Starting room lists the exits:
Attic
The attics, full of low beams and awkward angles, begin here in a relatively tidy area which extends north, south and east. The wooden floorboards seem fairly sound, just as well considering how heavy all these teachests are. But the old wiring went years ago, and there's no electric light.
Going north
Old Winery
This small cavity at the north end of the attic once housed all manner of home-made wine paraphernalia, now lost and unlamented. Steps, provided with a good strong banister rail, lead down and to the west, and the banister rail continues along a passage east.
It sort of alludes you are in the north, so the opposite is implied, but at the start of the game, you are only getting here by coming from the Attic. Stll, not explicitly stated.
But go east from the Attic:
Servant's Room
Once upon a time, servants in great houses lived in awful little crevices and excuses for rooms like this one. They must have been in permanent danger of suffocation, for there are no windows and only a doorway to the west. A bed is still kept here, and the sight of it brings on drowsiness in all this warm stuffy air. All you want to do is curl up and sleep.
It does let you know you can only go back the way you came, but is Nelson doing that because there are no other exits and would feel like you are trapped in a way if not noted?
And going south from the Attic:
Old Furniture
Scruffy old furniture is piled up here: armchairs with springs coming out, umbrella stands, a badly scratched cupboard, a table with one leg missing... You try to remember why you keep all this rubbish, and fail. Anyway the attic continues to the southeast.
No mention or hint of going north. you can only get here from the north, so its implied, while the southeast passage is still called out.
A secondary question, exits being at the end of description, or a separate paragraph, yeah or nay?
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I liked Emily Short’s little compass in the top right status bar of Bronze.
I only figured out most of the way through that unvisited rooms would show up red instead of the normal white, which is a nice detail, too.
i totally forgot about bronze!
Whichever makes them less obtrusive! Despite my complaints about Jigsaw, I admire Graham Nelson’s ability to work the exits into the middle of the description. I’m not good at that, so mine usually end up piled up at the end, and that gets clunky, so eventually I delete them all and put in an exit bar instead.
You know how there are whole books out there, full of replacement words you can use instead of “said” to spice up your dialogue tags? A good writer can make great use of dialogue tags to convey a bit of extra meaning without affecting the pacing, but in the hands of a less-good writer, trying to avoid “said” just leads to worse writing—often the way a line is spoken is less important than the line itself, and “said” nicely gets out of the way and doesn’t draw the reader’s attention.
That’s me with exit lists. Sometimes I can work them into the room description in a way that enhances the prose and reads beautifully, and sometimes nothing I try is working, and I keep messing with different permutations, and each one sounds worse than the last, and eventually I just have to step back and say—these exits are detracting from my text, and if I put them in an unobtrusive little UI element (even if that’s just an “Exits:” line above the prompt), then they’ll stop being in the way and I can write the description this scene really needs.
Sometimes “ejaculated” is the right word to use, and sometimes it’ll just wreck the pacing of your dramatic dialogue, and you should fall back on a good old-fashioned “said”. Readers will hardly notice it, and sometimes that’s the point!
In my toy engine I took it a step further. Any time you enter a room, it will walk all of the n_to, s_to properties and any that return a location number get listed. If you’ve visited a room already it will say something like “North leads to Library.”. All the rooms you haven’t visited yet are collected at the end: “There are exits north, south, west, and upward.”