Re: Gareth's competition comments


21 Oct 1995 02:34:07 GMT

In article <3088012E.1973@bud.com>, Jon Drukman <jsd@bud.com> wrote:
>David Baggett wrote:

>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.

Personally, I never liked the old Infocom's layout. Not enough whitespace
for my taste. Without whitespace between paragrpahs, and separateing the
room title from the room description, it's very hard to read, to my eyes at
least.

>when they use textual effects like boxes, font changes or menus, they are
>simple and effective.

I confess I despise the text boxes. But like you, I prefer simplicity.

>[in the bad games] 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.

I don't take it as a flame, but I do find it puzzling. I went to some
trouble to reformat all the text in our games to make paragraph spacing and
indentation optional. (You control it with the SPACE and INDENT commands.)
And I went to an *incredible* amount of trouble to make WorldClass'
contents lister produce much more natural text than any other adventure
game I've seen; certainly a far cry from "Things here: ..." More natural
text and layout were two of the main goals I had for WorldClass, in fact.
(It may sound like a triviality, but it's a lot more of a pain than you'd
imagine.)

>there's so much stuff to read at the beginning that i just get turned off
>immediately.

I can see your point, and others have said the same thing, but is this
still a layout issue? The text telling you who wrote the game, that it's
copyrighted and shareware, etc. is mandatory as far as I'm concerned, for
legal reasons.

>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.

Long introductions are another point of contention among IF fans, but,
again, this seems to have little to do with layout. (For the record, I
aimed _Legend_ more at those who like to read than those who like to play
games, so it's perfectly understandable that the latter group may find it
wearisome on the basis of text density alone.)

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

How come you don't capitalize anything, then? :)

Dave Baggett
__
dmb@ai.mit.edu
"Mr. Price: Please don't try to make things nice! The wrong notes are *right*."
--- Charles Ives (note to copyist on the autograph score of The Fourth of July)