Readability
Paragraph breaks are great.
No really. Being able to easily find and read the sections of a large chunk of text can be the difference between someone reading it and someone not. Recently, I did some refactoring of the numerous layers of code used to draw the all important 'look' command that gives you the nice pretty display of whats going on in a room.
The weather has been moved from the bottom to the end of the main description (often the first paragraph), keeping it with the more static nature of this part of the room's description. At this point, seats and who might be sitting at them have been combined with the last paragraph, keeping all the people in one place to make your targets easier to find. And finally, to keep the people aspect in that last paragraph, the people you might see in a neighboring location have been merged into that last paragraph as well.
The result ...
Fuller Street
The familiar crunch of glass and garbage beneath your feet is almost drowned out by the cacophony emanating from the establishment to the south. A flashing, neon light above the door proclaims [The Black Drome Bar] in gaudy red letters. People of all shapes and sizes seem to gather outside the place, the thick crowd moving slowly. To the north, an ancient radiation sign hangs from the doorway, [The Fallout Shop] spray painted across it. Through the bulletproof windows you can make out a strange mixture of wartime propaganda and electronics. A Customized HondaMitsu Cruiser 250 is parked here. The walls have been daubed with colorful graffiti. Dense foggy wisps seem to flow like currents of water, the lights above dimming for the night.
You see a cigarette.
Sculpted whores, trussed up in their business suit erotica, flaunt their bare flesh at the passing traffic, touting their carnal pleasures while the massed crowds pass behind them. Berenike is pacing back and forth, shouting that this is SNAKE turf. Chukwubuikem is yelling gang slogans at the top of his lungs. Kensuke is shouting that this is SNAKE turf. Zenigra is a towering figure. Jawwad is trying to blend in, but failing miserably.
The street continues west. There is a bar to the south, a shop to the north and an intersection to the east.
posted by Johnny at
7:50 PM
3 Comments:
Hrm, glad you posted that. I was having a hard time trying to figure out what it would look like from the forum post about it and I haven't had chance to drop in and check it out.
My 2 pennies, for what it's worth...
The weighting of a few things doesn't feel right.
Vehicles, I presume they end up at the bottom of the location description because they're using the object->desc integration feature. To me, they're not part of the location, they're part of the ambience/population. They'd sit better right after the ambpop message, just before the actual characters.
"You see a cigarette." - That looks horribly out of place. The truncated basic object list really only reads as a kind of footnote to the description. Since ambpop and pop reads like a paragraph within the overall location, I reckon it'd look cleaner with the object list shunted to the end, just before the exits.
Static description, paint the scene.
Ambpop/pop, breathes life into the scene.
Object list + exits, notes for interactive purposes.
I dislike the highlighting of individual characters, but that was a split decision when I did the ambpop stuff originally anyway. I'm fairly sure you supported blending them in for realism purposes originally, but I suppose the game changes.
I'd personally lose the double-line space mid-way through and favour a double between locations (if that's not already the case) for cleaner seperation between locations.
Aww man, the captcha for my last comment was "douche"... even your blog doesn't like me.
Aww, someone is taking the piss... this time it was "testie".
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