@AmandaB,
In my unhumble opinion, and having read everyone’s ideas,
What do newbies want/need when your game starts: A tutorial mode and/or the ‘Play IF’ card. Maybe a way to see a list of basic commands (biased to your game) during the game. And they might want/need a map later.
What do veterans want/need when your game starts: About two lines on command changes / special commands unique to your game, and a way to be reminded of them again later. That’s all they need.
You don’t have time to add a specific tutorial mode to your game now. You can try the vanilla version of the one in the extension by Emily Short but (a) it’s too dangerous to add this close to IFComp, and (b) you’ll find your dissatisfied with a vanilla one. You’ll need to hack it or roll your own. This is the fate of those who care!
The tutorial be a long term project for your game, or the next one. The IFComp audience don’t need it. Having played your game, I can say they will be more than fine with what you already did (that proviso about ‘so-and-so commands don’t work’)
I’ll tell you how I’m doing things in my WIP, which has had the luxury of much time spent:
Game boots. It says do you want Tutorial Mode (for those new to IF) on or not? Next, the game starts. Tute people start getting the tute advice (which only operates for chapter 1). They’re told how to turn it off if they want. It’s very specific to this game and monitors what the player has done, etc. Everyone else gets one line: “Type SPECIAL to see Andromeda Acolytes’s special commands, or type HELP to see basic interactive fiction commands.”
So SPECIAL summarises just what’s different or special in this game, command-behaviour wise.
HELP summarises the core IF commands, but sneakily lets you know of a COMMANDS command which is triple the size and shows you tons, including all the meta commands. And (in an idea probably used before Color the Truth, but which I essentially took from Color The Truth) a person can see the COMMANDS list in 3 parts (COMMANDS1, COMMANDS2, COMMANDS3) if they don’t want any of it to scroll off the screen.
So this is a mixture of telescoping info only as people request it, and making sure nobody has to read any major text dumps that might not suit their situation.
Including an Exit Lister in the status line (e.g. Eric Eve’s) helps absolutely everyone.
…If you want an in-game map, a reminder that the extension Automap by Mark Tilford can solve all your map problems. It can create a live ascii map of your game on-screen that may require very little setup by yourself. Again, probably a future addition.
-Wade