When I move around in real life, I always keep a mental model of compass directions in my head. It isn’t always right, but it is always there. Weird?
Anyway, one thing I could see being useful in z-machine games is using terminating characters for each input. You could map function keys to exits or suitably remapped cursor keys to directions. Each would be a single keypress to navigate to. You could even map the number pad in this way to handle all compass movements (sucks if you don’t have a number pad I guess).
I want to say “No, never” except I live in a city that forces me to think about east and west. But it’s never intuitive. I constantly rely on the compass on my phone.
Compass directions are thematically relevant in The Bat. I still consider them clunky, but the game capitalizes on their clunkiness. They’re central to a few big puzzles.
In Eat Me, on the other hand, compass directions have nothing to do with the story. They’re a mechanic that doesn’t fit, only included by popular demand. I suppose I’m oversensitive, but it just felt really bad to program that game when the pieces seemed so disjointed and mismatched. I felt like I was making something ugly.
Do you use/think about compass directions in your daily life?
Never indoors. Never when walking outside.
Occasionally when driving, but that’s often not in a literal sense.
For example, the directions say to take westbound Highway 1234. I follow the sign, which sends me up an onramp that spins 270 degrees. Uncertain of which I direction I’m actually going, I glance at the GPS map and discover I’m heading almost due north. Highway 1234 runs mostly east-west, but this segment runs north-south for a few miles.
I think about them when I’m navigating with interstate signs while driving. Sometimes I have to remember whether I need to go east or west based on where I am, and in my brain I picture the highway map where up is North, right is East, etc. It’s helpful when driving to know you need to go “up” on the map so a sign directing you to 40 N is helpful.
It’s also helpful to know if you miss your exit for 270 West and turn around you follow signs for “West” instead of turning in the same direction you were before since you’ve rotated 180.
Text Adventure games helped me practice touch typing when I was in high school, and also provided practice for understanding map orientation and navigation in general.
I do occasionally have directional dyslexia regarding East and West. I’ve coded an entire section of map where I kept describing exits “to the left” on the map as East when it’s actually West.
I will but this is me always…