Yeah, but GONEAR is for hacking. I mean to do certain kinds of genuine testing, the test player needs to walk the route, running through all the rules and every turn programming that could intervene. Or if using GO TO, they are testing GO TO in the process, which incorporates walking the route. (Well, unless you program GO TO to be like a teleporter.)
PS - Actually I forgot – in Inform anyway, if you use the Approaches extension as is, you’re not teleporting, but you ARE ignoring time and every turn rules. I had to alter that for my WIP.
On maps, I don’t hide that I have a if/doc/sol/map/welb directory, and this alone show my high esteem of Welbourne’s mapping and of his ideas on IF maps.
on the PC being familiar with geography/layout, as is already known, one of my WIP has a PC familiar with the geography and layout, but with a sort of amnesia, and the work is around gradually recovering from said amnesia.
on in-game teleports, another of my WIP involves the final exam of a witch (in the sense of female wizard/mage) around trials whose passing opens new areas, and one of the trial is creating/activating teleports, trial convenienty placed approximately around the point in the game where map traversing could start to became an annoyance for player.
Also, both WIP’s maps have a logical layout, (I hope…) so, player can , in theory at least, roughly but correctly guess what lies ahead.
I’m late to this convo, as I’ve just been starting to ask myself the map questions for my game too. I’m glad to hear that there are people on here that, like me, enjoy finding the possible exits… my exit lister began by only listing directions the player had tried so far, but it wasn’t received well, so I changed it. This conversation has emboldened me to still leave some exits unlisted until discovered…
I’m also glad to hear there are people on here that eschew pre made maps, even when the option is provided… but I too will try to provide the option to reach a larger base of players.
To me there’s a difference between discovering the map and discovering the exits. If I’m in an unfamiliar place, it might take me a while to get a sense of which door goes where. But I’m certainly not going to need to walk face-first into every blank wall to discover which ones have doors in them.
I do love when authors provide a dry “You stub your nose against a doorless wall.”-response. For example, it’s quite integral to the humour in The Bible Retold: Following a Star . (along with falling off your camel and trying to get on again…)
I would add that the need for an actual map is related to how memorable the setting and geometry is. A building with 4 wings is easier to navigate than a random collection of rooms.
My map spreads over a whole realm plus outlying wildernesses, so even though the main/obvious travel routes are listed, it seems reasonable to me that a player could try to wander other directions (based on the description of what kind of topography lies there) and discover that you can sometimes reach an unadvertised location… the key being that the room description somehow piques the player toward the direction without overtly declaring it. I’m not saying there’s any merit in putting an unlisted, undescribed, unclued door randomly in the northwest corner of a square room…
A miscellaneous thought: I like to shorten GO TO as GT. The point being that if something is 3 rooms away, GO TO X takes more keystrokes than GT X. This isn’t a critical distinction, but GT probably won’t be used for anything else.
I’ve also found little problem with conflicts implementing it as GO TO [room] or GO TO [thing] … if something is out of play, I note it.
One really touch with GOTO (I think) is to remind players why they can’t go back to a certain room.
And if you really want to make things detailed, you can have an option to block off rooms as they’re finished.
a room has a rule called is-it-done rule.
check gotoing a room:
abide by is-it-done rule for noun;
check going:
if room gone to is not nowhere, abide by the is-it-done rule for the noun;