Has this been done before? Input suggestions

Authoring Inform 7
1

Imagine you have an Inform game that, for the sake of getting the player started, makes some suggestions on the first turn:

Assuming a player who’s new to IF, they might think “look at yourself” is quite a long command to type but not realize “x me” also works. So here’s what I came up with:[code]Table of Protips
snippet tip
“look at” “‘x’ (for ‘examine’) is much shorter than that.”
“yourself” “‘me’ is shorter.”
“take inventory” “Just ‘inv’ or even ‘i’ is shorter.”
[your suggestions here]

After reading a command:
let C be “[the player’s command]”;
repeat through the table of protips:
let X be “[the snippet entry]”;
if C matches the text X:
say “[note style][bracket]Protip: [tip entry][close bracket][roman type][line break]”;
blank out the whole row; [so we don’t give the same protip twice]
break;
[/code]This gives us:

Of course, a veteran can just ignore the suggestions and type in shorthand from the get-go. Possible extension idea?

2

Bronze has a mode that suggests possible commands to do next, and Ultimate Quest did pretty much exactly the kind of shortcut-suggesting you describe, though I didn’t make an extension out of it.

I think I might make the advice slightly more specific, though: if you say “x (for “examine”) is much shorter than that”, it’s not necessarily clear to the novice that you mean “use “x” instead of “look at””. They might try it instead of the whole command, or instead of just look, for instance.

3

Something like this then? "Instead of 'look at <thing>', you can also write 'x <thing>', short for 'examine'."