Lumin wrote:There's absolutely nothing fun about traversing a featureless set of identical rooms with their exits swapped around.
I know Theo will insist Tingalan isn't a maze but I still think that's the right way to do it. I was lost in the forest with weird and terrible things and the trees were no help at all, but that was fine because dying in the forest over and over was fun and interesting.
Yep, I'm here to report that Tingalan is not a maze. You will always be able to go in each cardinal direction, and over short distances anyway you will be able to predict your path perfectly. Tingalan is,in fact, a Snerd, which is a new term I just came up with for what Tingalan is. You will find a semiSnerd somewhere in Six Silver Bullets, but it is not a full Snerd.
Having said that, I do like mazes, however, I know most people don't.
I made an ADRIFT game, long ago, which was a series of "levels" each of which had a "maze" scenario with a monster in it. One mechanic I had was that there was always some way to "PULL OUT" of the maze. That is, with a single command you could warp OUT of the maze, so you only had to solve it "one way".
Another way to make it interesting is to add features, just not necessarily features linked with rooms, so the player has something to see/experience in those locations. "you hear water dripping"/"dark shadows gather closer"/"you see motion at the edges of your vision"/"the wind moans through the mouth of the cave" etc. This is done very well in Sunless Sea. You can make this more enjoyable with the use of items on timers. One of the first games my friend made when we were just getting into text games involved a dungeon where you find an egg...at a certain point, the egg hatches. You got frequent updates on how the egg with faring and how other items (like your pet weasel) interacted with the egg. It made for a funny adventure.