I’m working on my first text adventure game in Inform 6, and I was wondering, since my earliest influence in text adventure games was Thy Dungeonman, how explicit should the possible exits out of the current location be made?
In Thy Dungeonman, after the location description and the list of objects in that location are printed, it explicitly states the possible directions out of the current location, but I’ve seen other games like Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure, where the possible outbound directions are less explicit, and are part of the location description.
This is mainly a UX question, since the game I’m working on is a demake of Half Life 2, so the target audience includes people who may not be as familiar with standard text adventure conventions. Would explicitly stating the possible exits be seen as too obnoxious/hand-holdy?
It really comes down to the atmosphere of the game you’re going for. Fluent elaborate prose can incorporate the exits in many different wordings, while terse, to-the-point descriptions might benefit from a separate list under the main text.
There’s also the possibility of putting available exits up in the status bar. This can even free you from incorporating exits in the game-text at all.
Second place in this year’s IFComp went to a game that explicitly lists the possible directions instead of mentioning it in the room description, so I think it’s a perfectly fine approach. It just comes down to, what do you want for your game?
Just my opinion, but I think it’s nice to offer exits. In particular, I like a practice that I’ve seen, to reprint the directions list when a player tries to use a direction that’s not available, something like:
> go north
You can't go that way, but you can exit to the south, east, or west.
Another thing I like is to mutate the exit descriptions depending on whether the player has visited the room the exit leads to. For instance, after visiting the Carnival Grounds:
You can go north, south to the Carnival Grounds, or west.
If you’re worried about being too hand-holdy, it’s also nice to give the player the option to enable/disable exit printing.
I have one of those too, though I think of it as a backup to the text descriptions, so players can decide which thing makes more sense to them. It’s informative, but less informational than the text descriptions. This one is graphic not text, but it’s clickable and accessible.
I did consider putting it in the status bar, but I’ve already implemented my own replacement for the standard library status bar routine to add health and HEV suit (when equipped), and I worry that adding too much more text to it could make it look cramped, especially on smaller screens.
I also did consider putting the list of exits in the “You can’t go that way” messages, but one potential issue in this case would be when a location is marked as dangerous (like when the player is under attack). The location sets off a turn-based timer, and when it gets to 0, something bad can happen, up to and including the player character being killed.
It’s pretty amazing what people can pull off on systems with limited resources. It’s one of the reasons I love the demoscene (which of course is its own rabbit hole).
