Exploring a town without extraneous rooms

Hi! I’m currently in the early stages of writing a game that involves exploring a small town. I want several buildings to be available to explore, but I want the player have to enter each of them from the street (the buildings don’t connect to each other from the outside, you have to exit the bookstore to enter the cafe). I also want my map to be as intuitive and easy to understand as possible. The simplest solution from a coding perspective seems to be to create a “room” that serves as the street in front of each shop, but that will slow down play and be tedious to create. Does anyone have any ideas of how better to address this? Have you played any games that did something similar?

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I think having the street is a good idea, since it will probably make navigation easier and more intuitive, but I think you’re also right that it could get tedious if each shop had its own bit of street. Could you do something like having a Main Street (west) location where if you go NW you get to the bookshop, NE you get to the cafe, SW you get to the hardware store, SE is the grocery store, and E gets you to Main Street (east) which also has three or four shops branching off of it?

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Yeah, I would reduce the number of street rooms as much as possible, and connect a lot of buildings to each one.

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Especially because a single “street” room could connect to up to eight buildings (using in/out but ignoring up/down) and still also lead to another street if necessary, there should be no need to separate out the section of the street in front of each shop unless absolutely necessary, i.e. for a puzzle (although there are also simpler ways to get that granular with location for such purposes, like in the Recipe Book example “Further Reasons Why All Poets Are Liars”).

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You might dispense with directions altogether and prompt the player to > enter post office or > go library. Or offer a menu with numbered selections, perhaps in response to an unadorned > go.

Or instead of a “street” you could characterize it as “town square” and make it seem more natural that there are buildings to each ordinal and cardinal direction.

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Yeah. Don’t feel you need to simulate what doesn’t need simulation, if it gets in the way of the feel or the narrative… :wink:

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Compass rose directions allow for six building directions, which is a lot. Two or more street locations can be designated as west end/center/east end or similar. This is specially a good thing.

Depends on the town though. Is it a straight one street deal or are there cross streets? Unnamed cross streets would need some designation.

This is is all creative/authorial stuff. It’s entirely up to you to bring life and seamlessness to your descriptions.

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It occurs to me A Mind Forever Voyaging might be worth checking out as an example - the map is a big, relatively “realistic” seeming city.

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The “Easy Doors” extension might help. You can create as many doors in one location that you want that won’t use a map direction/connection, and if you name them appropriately the player can use commands like ENTER GROCERY STORE as if it’s a building even though it’s essentially a “door shaped object” that leads elsewhere on the map. Giving it an initial description can make it seem like an entire building instead of just a hovering door.

Grocery Store is an easydoor. "A grocery store is open for business here." It leads to Supermarket. Grocery Store is open and unopenable. The description is "It looks like they sell a lot of things, including lawn chairs. The doors open automatically when you enter, as Grocery Store doors do.".

You could even make a “directionless” game by creating easy doors in every location with names like “path to the castle”.

(Didn’t test, but this is the idea:)

A pathway is a kind of easydoor. A pathway is open and unopenable. Understand "path/route" as a pathway. Understand the command "follow [easydoor]" as going.

A path to the castle is a kind of pathway. "There's a meandering path leading to the castle that begins here." One path to the castle is in Outside Moat. One path to the castle is in Ramshackle Village.

This should allow commands like ENTER CASTLE, GO CASTLE, FOLLOW PATH TO CASTLE if I’ve done it right in my rusty Inform 7.

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My inclination would be to make “street” into a kind so that all the streets have a baseline level of description and interactivity that’s the same, and then create a series of street rooms with the same display name. So “City Streets (in front of the fire station)” might be west of “City Streets (in front of the post office)”, which is north of “City Streets (between the police station and the cemetery)”.

Thinking about it more, though, it might draw too much attention to the street-level rooms to have a mix of one-location and two-location street rooms. I’d probably stick with one-location rooms for simplicity.

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Maybe not as many locations branching off the main street, but Scott Adams’ Ghost Town had something like this too.(see the map on CASA.)

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How much do we need in this forum a system of multiple likes for answers like this! :smiley:

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This reminds me of some of the gotcha deaths from Space Quest.

-Enter escape pod
You must first open the escape pod hatch.
-Open escape pod hatch
Done
-Enter escape pod
Done
-Initiate escape pod launch sequence
Triggered by the launch sequence, the vehicle bay begins to vent out all of the air, sadly including the air in your escape pod through the open escape pod hatch. You are soon dead. Congratulations and thank you for playing Space Quest!

:rage:

-Reload Save…

-Open escape pod hatch
Done
-Enter escape pod
Done
-Close escape pod hatch
Done
-Initiate escape pod launch sequence
You feel the thrum of engines activating and you draw a deep breath, secure in your sealed escape pod. You are still ruminating on your clever forethought in sealing the escape pod hatch when you are thrust into your seat by the rear engine exhaust… …only to be promptly and painfully incinerated (mercifully quickly) as the escape pod leaps forward directly into the closed vehicle bay doors and violently explodes. You are already dead. Congratulations and thank you for playing Space Quest!

-quit
Are you sure? y/n
-y

Space Quest is fantastic just the way it is. :grin:

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I think gruesome and unfair sudden deaths, comically described, were by design part of the feel and narrative of Space Quest :smiley:

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This is the way many MUDs handle towns as well. It makes it easier on not only the builders, but the players as well. I suppose it makes sense to do the same in IF as well.

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