Adventure Creation Tips for Newcomers

[MikeDesert]

I will not however focus more on coherent posts.

[shauneq]

Just started creating my own I.F. after playing it for decades. There is a lot of good advice here. One thing I would personally take caution on is the room descriptions. Yes a more descriptive interpretation is good to fire the imagination, but for me I hate descriptions that go on and on for many sentences with irrelevant information. I definitely want to feel like I am IN the scene but I am here to solve a puzzle, not read a novel. When I see a long paragraph come up, unless something exciting just happened, I think UGH, I have to read through all this. I guess there's just a fine line between sparse boring descriptions and long winded descriptions.

Sort of on that point, I DO like objects worked into the description as opposed to an appended "Also here is a bell cord".

[Lazzah]

Sort of on that point, I DO like objects worked into the description as opposed to an appended "Also here is a bell cord".

The objects listed in the appended "Also here is a bell cord" will be dynamic objects that the PC can pick up and manipulate. Objects "worked into the description" are usually scenery (i.e. static) objects which the PC can examine or read, etc, but they cannot usually pick up.

[ralphmerridew]

There is also a tradition that dynamic objects are worked into the room description initially, but are displayed in the "Also here is ..." part after they've been moved.

[Bukibuki]

I guess almost most of us came into designing how to make text adventures by finding out while playing them first. There is a wide list of quite annoying works out there which I tried to play. Basically if I hadn't dropped so many of them do to various reasons that made them unplayable I would know quite less of what to avoid on my own. So they did help me in some way. The worst of ALL things to me is having to guess the EXACT command for doing something. No alliases. THAT'S lazy. You can't even tell what's there for show and what not.