Initial Appearance of a Room

[Jeff_Nyman]

Probably not at all what you are looking for but I was playing around with “Description Decay” a bit here:

[I7] Room Descriptions That Slowly "Decay"

“Slowly decay”? What does that mean? Okay, so here’s what I’m trying to do and I’m curious to hear thoughts about how to do it well. I have a setup wherein you’ll visit a room and you’ll get the normal extensive description: Palace Gate Long description about the room here. > A subsequent view of that room will provide a much shorter description. Palace Gate Summary description of the room here. > Note a subsequent view of the room, meaning the player just walks in to it. I’m not ta…

I made an extension for myself called “Description Decay” based on this and it kind of goes along with my idea of descriptions that contextually shift:

Contextually Shifting Descriptions in Inform 7

This perhaps goes more in general design discussion but it’s also specific to Inform 7. So I’ll put it here and see how that goes. There is an Inform 7 implementation question here, which is why this felt like the better place. In my latest classes that use text-based IF, I find a lot of people really want to do what I would call contextual knowledge descriptions for locations. As an example, consider a slightly modified example from the game Reliques: Longwall Street is a room. “Almost overg…

I have an extension I wrote along those lines for myself as well. Again, not sure if this is at all even in the ballpark of your thoughts but your post got me thinking about this stuff again.