Comment by projektfu
17 hours ago
It seems to often make it hard to get back where you were, like you go west and then east and end up in a different place. I don't know enough about z-machines to tell why.
17 hours ago
It seems to often make it hard to get back where you were, like you go west and then east and end up in a different place. I don't know enough about z-machines to tell why.
It has been a while since I've played interactive fiction, so I can't make a specific suggestion, but modern games seem to be better at keeping the directions consistent (or at least providing clues when they are not). As others have noted, older games broke directionality to serve as puzzles -- failing to acknowledge that some people have a sense of direction while following twisty paths!
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.
>Modern
Anything Non-Zork. Even Adventure from Don Woods was half-consistent in some places. But having an "odd" geometry matched perfectly the environment of a cave.
Nothing to do with the VM. The game was designed that way, navigation is part of the puzzle.
Perhaps you could try making a map.
Or in this case; just click on "map"
Not ZMachine related, not even with Inform6, where n_to, s_to and w_to e_to are pretty much self-explanatory. It's just that Dungeon/Zork/Zork-I-II-III were made that way.