As my transcripts start coming in from a wider variety of people, there are some commonalities; things that trip everyone up, that I might have dismissed as unimportant if only one person complained. It’s unwise to dismiss any complaint, but it’s particularly unwise to dismiss repeated complaints.
For me, one root problem surprised me in how fundamental it was, and how simple: the geography of the map.
You’re a bird person, so the map was always going to be three-dimensional. But I really thought it was going to be simple! There are only five rooms: One up in the air, above everything, one down in the forest, below everything, and three in a triangle in the forest canopy: the aerie itself.
Logically, given that setup, you should be able to get from either ‘high above’ or ‘in the forest’ to any of the three middle rooms. So, there’s one main room that serves as the focal point: the Great Hall, where you can go in a straight line down from High Above to Great Hall to Forest. Then the Librum is east of the Great Hall, and the Gardens are north of the Great Hall. But you should be able to get to the Librum or the Gardens from High Above or Forest, right? So you can go up from either to get to High Above, and down from either to get to Forest. But there is no ‘upeast’ or ‘downeast’ direction anyone would type to get to the Librum from below or above it, so ‘east’ has to suffice. Similarly, ‘upnorth’ and ‘downnorth’ become just ‘north’ for the Gardens.
Writing this out makes me understand why this was hard for people to visualize. It all made so much sense in my head!
I made a probably-not-helpful map, where all the non-reflexive directions are double-arrows:
Alternately, imagine https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Trigonal_bipyramid.png but move the top and bottom vertices to be directly over one of the vertices in the middle.
The problem is that there are unintuitive-to-IF-players three-node loops all over the place. As @Sargent put it: "things like being able to go down to the forest, then north (which led up to the Royal Gardens), then down, then up (which returned me to the Landing Cradle) confused my poor brain. North/Down/Up is a circle? What?
I don’t have a good solution to this. I’m going to try adding ‘after’ rules as people travel diagonally up and down: “You head up and north to the Royal Garden” “You descend to the forest floor, angling south so you’re under the Great Hall again.” Or something. Maybe it’ll help!
Everything would be geographically more clear if I had a nine-room map. Three on the top layer, three in the middle, and three on the bottom, all directly above/below each other. But I don’t have enough gameplay to justify three different ‘in the air’ rooms and three different ‘in the forest’ rooms. So I’ll make due with what I have.