Re: Gareth's competition comments


Fri, 20 Oct 1995 12:06:06 -0800

David Baggett wrote:
> >even the LAYOUT of it on-screen is important to me.
>
> That's a new one. Can you give some examples of good and bad layout?

sure. good layout is simple, clean and consistent - christminster and curses
immediately spring to mind as modern-day examples. most of the old infocoms,
for that matter. when they use textual effects like boxes, font changes or
menus, they are simple and effective. don't you get disheartened when you
load a WWW page and it's full of backgrounds and blinking text and gratuitous
tables that are just there for the pretty beveled borders? i sure do.

on to the bad... well, i hate to name names cos i don't want to discourage
anyone but a bad example that springs to mind is "the sound of one hand
clapping" - everything runs together, there are no line breaks... it's hard
on the eyes.

i don't want you to take this a flame - it certainly isn't intended as such -
but i've never been able to get into the adventions games for the same
reason. there's so much stuff to read at the beginning that i just get
turned off immediately. although i don't agree with everything in graham
nelson's "the craft of adventure", i do think his section about having a
short, sweet, punchy little hook at the start of a game is important.

(i'm a technical writer by trade so this stuff is important to me!)

-j-