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When 'all' is essential

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Gareth Rees

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Jan 9, 1995, 1:46:18 PM1/9/95
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I think 'all' is essential for inventory management, that is:

get all
get all from container
drop all
put all in container
put all on supporter

Inventory management (that is, making sure you have the right objects in
your possession) is a rather tedious part of an adventure game.

Anyone who played "Adventure" in an authentic Fortran version will
remember some tedium the first time they encountered the Plover Room -
you had to drop each object by name before exploring the room, and then
pick them all up by name afterwards (and you had to do this each time
you had a new idea about the solution to the puzzle).

Having to keep dropping and picking up the rucksack in "Infidel" was
very frustrating too. It might be realistic, but 'realism' doesn't
necessary make a game more playable (thank goodness for the innovation
in "Curses" which automatically fetches things from your backpack and
puts them away for you when your hands are full).

An adventure designer has more than one choice of functionality for
'all'. The command 'take all' might try to pick up (i) everything in
the room; or (ii) everything that's apparently takeable; or (iii)
everything that's immediately visible; or (iv) everything that's
immediately visible and apparently takeable.

I tend to favour choices (iii) and (iv), because they avoid the
possibility of this happening:

Study
There's a small writing table under the window, positioned to catch
the best light in this dim room.

> take all
desk: Fixed in place.
papers: The stack of papers is much too heavy to contemplate taking.
folder: Taken.

when what the designer intended was this:

Study
There's a small writing table under the window, positioned to catch
the best light in this dim room.

> examine desk
There's a large pile of papers on the desk.

> examine papers
Buried near the bottom of the stack of papers, an orange folder
catches your eye.

> take folder
Taken.

One could argue the merits of this approach, of course (I think it's a
good way of providing text more slowly to the player, and making the
game more paced and responsive), but it would be a terrible shame if
because of the functionality of 'all', the designer resorted to coding
up the desk so that the papers didn't appear until the desk was examined
and the folder didn't appear until the papers were examined (which
really *is* nonsensical, and very annoying to players who play through
this section of the game several times).

--
Gareth Rees

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