The Craft of Adventure - part 6
                (Continued from last issue)

       Six articles on the design of adventure games
                      By Graham Nelson

5  ...At War With a Crossword (continued)

--- Writing Room Descriptions ---

First, a warning: it is tempting, when beginning to code, to give
rooms "temporary" descriptions ("Slab room." "Cloister."), and
leave the writing for later.  There is no more depressing point
than when facing a pile of 50 room descriptions to write, all at
once, and feeling that one's enthusiasm has altogether gone.  (The
same warning applies to making an over-detailed design before
doing any coding.) Besides, when testing the rooms concerned, one
has no feeling of what the game will look like except tatty, and
this is also depressing.  Also, writing room descriptions forces
the author to think about what the room is ultimately for, which
is no bad thing.  So write a few at a time, as coding goes on, but
write them properly: and edit later if necessary (it will be).

Size doesn't matter.  It is all too easy to write a huge room
description, rambling with irrelevant details: there are usually
one to three essentials to get across, and the rest should be cut.
(This is admittedly a hard-line view on my part, and opinions
vary.)

But even the most tedious junctions deserve description, and
description is more than a list of exits.  Here is 'Adventure' at
its most graceful:

     You're in a large room carved out of sedimentary rock.  The
     floor and walls are littered with bits of shells embedded in
     the stone.  A shallow passage proceeds downward, and a
     somewhat steeper one leads up.  A low hands and knees passage
     enters from the south.


     You are walking along a gently sloping north/south passage
     lined with oddly shaped limestone formations.

Note the geology, the slight unevenness of the ground and the
variation in the size of the tunnels.  Even if nothing happens
here, these are real places.

Flippant, joky room descriptions are best avoided if they will be
often revisited.  About once in a game an author can get away
with:

     Observation Room
     Calvin Coolidge once described windows as "rectangles of
     glass."  If so, he may have been thinking about the window
     which fills the western wall of this room.  A tiny closet
     lies to the north.  A sign is posted next to the stairs which
     lead both upwards and downwards.

a characteristic piece of Steve Meretzky from 'Leather Goddesses
of Phobos', which demonstrates the lengths one has to go to when
faced with a relentlessly ordinary junction-with-window.  The
sentence which the whole description has been written to avoid is
"You can go up, down or north."

Room descriptions are obliged to mention the obvious exits - and
it is certainly poor form to fail to mention a particular one
unless there is good reason - but there are ways to avoid what can
be a tiresomely repetitive business.  For instance,

     Dark Cave
     Little light seeps into this muddy, bone-scattered cave and
     already you long for fresh air.  Strange bubbles, pulsing and
     shifting as if alive, hang upon the rock at crazy, irregular
     angles.

     Black crabs scuttle about your feet.

     > SOUTH
     The only exit is back out north to the sea-shore.

In other words, the "You can't go that way" message is tailored to
each individual room.

Avoiding repetition is well-nigh impossible, and experienced
players will know all the various formulae by heart: "You're in",
"You are in", "This is", "You have come to" and so forth.  I
usually prefer impersonal room descriptions (not mentioning "you"
unless to say something other than the obvious fact of being
present).

As in all writing, vocabulary counts (another respect in which
Scott Adams' games, despite awful grammar, score).  If there is a
tree, what kind is it, oak, juniper, hawthorn, ash?  Then, too,
don't make all room descriptions static, and try to invoke more
than just sight at times: smell, touch and sound are powerfully
evocative.  Purity and corruption, movement and stillness, light
and dark have obsessed writers through the ages.

Above all, avoid the plainness of:

     You are in the Great Hall.  You can go north to the
     Minstrel's Gallery, east to the fireplace and down to the
     kitchens.

     There is a sword here.

So much for bad room descriptions.  The following example (which I
have not invented) is something much more dangerous, the mediocre
room description:

     Whirlpool Room
     You are in a magnificent cavern with a rushing stream, which
     cascades over a sparkling waterfall into a roaring whirlpool
     which disappears through a hole in the floor.  Passages exit
     to the south and west.

...seems a decent enough try.  But no novelist would write such
sentences.  Each important noun - "cavern", "stream", "waterfall",
"whirlpool" - has its own adjective - "magnificent", "rushing",
"sparkling", "roaring".  The two "which" clauses in a row are a
little unhappy.  "Cascades" is good, but does a stream cascade
"over" a waterfall?  Does a whirlpool itself disappear?  The "hole
in the floor" seems incongruous.  Surely it must be underwater,
indeed deep underwater?  Come to that, the geography could be
better used, which would also help to place the whirlpool within
the cave (in the middle? on one edge?).  And why "Whirlpool Room",
which sounds like part of a health club?  As a second draft, then,
following the original:

     Whirlpool Ledge
     The path runs a quarter-circle from south to west around a
     broken ledge of this funnel cavern.  A waterfall drops out of
     the darkness, catching the lamplight as it cascades into the
     basin.  Sinister, rapid currents whip into a roaring
     whirlpool below.

Even so: there is nothing man-made, nothing alive, no colour and
besides it seems to miss the essential feature of all the mountain
water- caves I've ever been to, so let us add a second paragraph
(with a line break, which is much easier on the eye):


     Blue-green algae hangs in clusters from the old guard-
     railing, which has almost rusted clean through in the frigid,
     soaking air.

The algae and the guard-rail offer distinct possibilities of a
puzzle or two...  Perhaps there are frogs who could eat the algae;
perhaps the player might find a use for iron oxide, and could
scrape rust from the railing.  (Herbalists probably used to use
rust for something, and an encyclopaedia or a chemistry text book
might know.) Certainly the railing should break if a rope is tied
to it.  Is it safe to dive in?  Does the water have a hypnotic
effect on someone who stares into it?  Is there anything dry which
would become damp if the player brought it through here?  Might
there be a second ledge higher up where the stream falls into the
cave?  - And so a location is made.



--- The Map ---

Puzzles and objects are inextricably linked to the map, which
means that the final state of the map only gradually emerges and
the author should expect to have to keep changing it to get it
right - rather than to devise an enormous empty landscape at first
and then fill it with material.

Back to atmosphere, then, because throughout it's vital that the
map should be continuous.  The mark of a poor game is a map like:

               Glacier
                  |
               Dungeon --- Oriental Room --- Fire Station
               (fish)      (megaphone)         (tulips)
                  |
             Cheese Room

in which nothing relates to anything else, so that the game ends
up with no overall geography at all.
Much more believable is something like:

           Snowy Mountainside
                   \
                Carved Tunnel
                      |
                Oriental Room  --- Jade Passage --- Fire Dragon
                  (Buddha)         (bonsai tree)       Room
                      |
                 Blossom Room

The geography should also extend to a larger scale: the
mountainside should run across the map in both directions.  If
there is a stream passing through a given location, what happens
to it?  And so on.  Maps of real mountain ranges and real cave
systems, invariably more convoluted and narrow than in fiction,
can be quite helpful when trying to work this out.

A vexed question is just how much land occupies a single location.
Usually a location represents a 'room', perhaps ten yards across
at the most.  Really large underground chambers - the legendary
"Hall of Mists" in Adventure, the barge chamber in 'Infidel' - are
usually implemented with several locations, something like:

              Ballroom NW  ---------  Ballroom NE
                  |      \           /    |
                  |       Dance Floor     |
                  |      /           \    |
              Ballroom SW  ---------  Ballroom SE

This does give some impression of space but it can also waste
locations in a quite dull way, unless there are genuinely
different things at some of the corners: a bust of George III,
perhaps, a harpsichord.

On the other hand, in some stretches, drawing the map leaves one
with the same frustration as the set-designer for a Wagnerian
opera:  everything is set outdoors, indistinct and without edges.
Sometimes an entire meadow, or valley, might be one single


location, but then its description will have to be written
carefully to make this clear.

In designing a map, it adds to the interest to make a few
connections in the rarer compass directions (NE, NW, SE, SW) to
prevent the player from a feeling that the game has a square grid.
There should also be a few (possibly long) loops which can be
walked around, to prevent endless retracing of steps and to avoid
the appearance of a bus service map, half a dozen lines with only
one exchange.

If the map is very large, or if a good deal of moving to-and-fro
is called for, there should be some rapid means of getting across
it, such as the magic words in 'Adventure', or the cubes in
'Spellbreaker'.  This can be a puzzle in itself - one that players
do not have to solve, but will reward them if they do.



--- Looking Back at the Shape ---

A useful exercise, towards the end of the design stage, is to draw
out a tree (or more accurately a lattice) of all the puzzles in a
game.  At the top is a node representing the start of the game,
and then lower nodes represent solved puzzles.  An arrow is drawn
between two puzzles if one has to be solved before the other can
be.  For instance, a simple portion might look like:

                        Start
                       /     \
                Find key     Enter garage
                       \     /
                      Start car
                          |
                       Motorway

This is useful because it checks that the game is soluble (for
example, if the ignition key had been kept in a phone box on the

motorway, it wouldn't have been) and also because it shows the
overall structure of the game.
Ask:
 -- Do large parts of the game depend on one difficult puzzle?
 -- How many steps does a typical problem need?
 -- How wide is the game at any given time?

Bottlenecks should be avoided unless they are reasonably
guessable: otherwise many players will simply get no further.
Unless, of course, they are intended for exactly that, to divide
an area of the game into 'earlier' and 'later'.

Just as some puzzles should have more than one solution, some
objects should have more than one purpose.  In bad old games,
players automatically threw away everything as soon as they'd used
them.  In better designed games, obviously useful things (like the
crowbar and the gloves in 'Lurking Horror') should be hung on to
by the player throughout.


A final word on shape: one of the most annoying things for players
is to find, at the extreme end of the game (in the master game,
perhaps) that a few otherwise useless objects ought to have been
brought along, but that it is now too late.  The player should not
be thinking that the reason for being stuck on the master game is
that something very obscure should have been done 500 turns
before.

@~To be concluded next issue










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