Multiple doors in one room

Hi, I’m new to inform, and I have been making a story. I am a bit stuck because I am not sure how to make multiple doors in one room, like a hallway. I am making an apartment block, and i need to put lots of doors facing the same direction. Can anyone help?

You can’t really have multiple doors facing in one direction–it wouldn’t work in the game. Say you could have a hallway with three doors facing north. When the player types “north,” the game wouldn’t know what to do.

There was a discussion about this a little while ago. One possible solution was to use an extension called Easy Doors by Hanon Ondricek, which allows you to put lots of door-like objects in a room with no directions (so you’re not limited to, say, one door to the northeast, one to the north, one to the northwest). Then the player could type “enter door 4C” to go in one of them.

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Thank you, I think that would be useful. I want the player to be able to go in door 201, door 202, etc. so I think that would work.

You could do it like this if having the hallway split up in multiple rooms is not a problem:

The hallway start is a room. The hallway middle is north of the hallway start. The hallway end is north of the hallway middle.

The A reinforced door is west of the hallway start and east of the A apartment. The A reinforced door is a door.
The B reinforced door is west of the hallway middle and east of the B apartment. The B reinforced door is a door.
The C reinforced door is west of the hallway end and east of the C apartment. The C reinforced door is a door.

That is a good idea thank you. I might try and use that. :smile:

Some game design advice from experience! I had this exact scenario a few years back, with multiple numbered hotel rooms along a corridor.

The first attempt was to put multiple doors in the same compass direction, but it doesn’t work for reasons already mentioned.

The second attempt was to make the corridor one location with the exit in one direction and one room in all other directions, seven in total. The practical problems there are communicating the directions to the player, and extra cognitive load. For the former, how do you tell the player where the rooms are?

The door 101 is to the north, door 102 to northwest, door 103 to west, door 104 to southwest, door 105 to south, door 106 to southeast, door 107 to east and the exit is to the northeast.

That’s just an exhausting list and hard to scan. For the latter, it’s not very easy for players to map directions to numbers in their minds. It’s somewhat easier to remember that the garden is east of driveway and the kitchen is south of living room but it’s hard to remember that room 103 is west and door 106 is southeast. And if you don’t remember, you have to find it in that block of text.

What ended up working best was to not map doors to compass directions at all, but just say that there are doors numbered from 101 to 107 and let the player do >OPEN DOOR 102 or >ENTER ROOM 107. That turned out to be easiest for the players during playtesting.

I didn’t try to extend the corridor into multiple rooms, but I suspect moving along the corridor looking for the room you want would have been more tedious than having everything accessible from one place. I only had one actual door that could be opened and the rest just props, so the long corridor approach might work better when all or most of the doors lead somewhere.

You can see the relevant parts of the final implementation here and here. There’s also some code there to handle disambiguation better, feel free to borrow whatever seems useful.

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well, dunno in other countries, but in this case I will have used the Italian house numbering scheme, even on one side, odd on the other side, and partition the corridor in three-per-side sections, thus, for example, along a N-S corridor, the east, northeast and southeast rooms get even numbers, the west, northwest and southwest rooms get odd numbers. (I suspect that this also ease procedural map creation, but I prefer avoid encouraging IF language abuses :wink: )

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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