Sorry for a mini-necropost, but this didn’t really deserve its own thread. Following on from the discussion of how to make parser-based text adventures more user-friendly, I have finished the first pass on my ‘gameified’ hint system, with the aim that people don’t refuse to look at hints because they think that’s cheating. I would rather people flowed through at least the main path of the narrative without too many blockages. I also took up the suggestion made somewhere to have the location test permanently viewable on screen. Link should have a time-stamp to that.
I think I might have overcomplicated the user interface somewhat, and I might be paring that back after some feedback from my current testers. But this is a ‘high water mark’ on the gameification, I think.
I am totally leaning into stuff I can do in this engine - am prototyping item and location images next.