Staircase in a light house

Authoring Inform 7
1

I am working on a story about a light house and it has 5 levels. I have defined each level (room) as an individual chapter to help me tell each level apart. I am using a staircase in the middle to allow the player to go up and down. I have used some text from a few different source code to come up with the following.

[code]A Staircase is a kind of door. A Staircase is fixed in place. A staircase is always open. A staircase is never openable. Understand “stairs” or “stair” or “staircase” as a staircase. Understand “upstairs” or “downstairs” as a staircase. The description of a staircase is usually “[The item described] leads [item described direction].” The description of the staircase is "Leading up and around you see a set of stairs that take you to the other levels of this lighthouse. "

Instead of climbing a staircase:
try entering the noun.

Understand “go down [staircase]” as climbing. Understand “go up [staircase]” as climbing.
[/code]

The only think I need to know now is how to use this so that the player can go up and down to each level.

My current levels include:

Ground Floor: “The Lower Level”
Second Floor: “The Food Store Room”
Third Floor: “The Bunk Room”
Fourth Floor: “The Living and Cooking Room”
Fifth Floor: “The Light”

Do I have to have a staircase in each room and say that one room is above and another is below? I am not sure how to word this.

Any help would be appreciated.

D.

2

Not quite. Given the way you’re implementing things you’ll need to name four staircases, and say which rooms they connect:

lower staircase is up from Ground Floor and down from Second Floor.

Because the staircases are between rooms, not in them, you’ll only need four staircases - and the middle three rooms will each connect to two staircases, which may make for some disambiguation issues.

(The alternative is to make a single staircase, implement it as a backdrop rather than a door, and redirect climbing/entering actions to going up or down. This is basically equivalent if you’re not going to make a big fuss about the opening, closing and locking of doors.)

3

Thanks for this. I never thought of using the staircase as a backdrop. Maybe I could just make the lighthouse a Region.

4

You could almost do this with assemblies (“Every floor has a staircase.”) except that neither rooms nor doors are allowed to be assemblies or parts of assemblies. That could be worked around, but it’s probably more trouble than its worth at that point.