> I realized today that my problem is that I have a hard time figuring out where I am and where I am supposed to go - *not* what I am supposed to do. . . . even simple locations, movements, and directions are hard for me.

Ellie once told me almost the same thing.

The thing about text-based adventure games is that, with a few exceptions, they're meant to be mapped as you play. Mapping is "not cool" in computer games anymore, but Adventure Games Live is a bit of computer gaming nostalgia: it's a new spin on an old (by computer game standards) genre and was intended to show that they DO, in fact, make them like they used to, and the adventure games of yore are not dead but *live*.

What all that means is that mapping is really important.

In Murkon's Refuge, once you get some good navigation spells, mapping is not all that important. In Adventure Games Live, it's basically always important. I can *mostly* navigate my own games without a map because I spent so much time putting them together, but I would not have had a *prayer* at solving Brackly Hall, Akumos, or Trail of Anguish if I hadn't been making a map as I went. Nor could I even now go back to these games and get around, even though I've solved them. What I'm saying is, if you can't navigate AGL games without a map, it's not just you.

So here's what I do. Every "stop" in an AGL game gets marked with a dark, filled-in square. I draw paths around these stops to indicate where you can go. Whatever's at that stop, I write down in a word or two. "Library." "Cave." "Sailboat." One traversal of the world, and you've got a map, and then you spend the rest of the time using it to get around. For me, it's a pretty painless way to make a map, and the returns are incalculable. Of course, some people are going to dislike mapping more than others, and those that truly do not enjoy any moment that involves mapping probably aren't going to get much out of AGL games. But I also think some people have a premature aversion to mapping because it seems like it's more tedious than it is.

> I remember playing an old text-adventure game where you pretty much walked around in the same few area and did things. How feasible is it to have an AGL game like this?

Possible, but more difficult than it would be with an adventure game that uses text-based commands. In AGL, everything you can do at any given point is printed out on the screen. If you had a game with just four locations that you could move freely among, then in three moves you could get a complete list of everything it's possible to do, and you just pick whichever options look promising. If the same game took command line input, you don't know in advance what things you can do.

For example, what if a particular puzzle involved unravelling a rope to get three thinner lengths of rope, then tying those end-to-end, so you have one long thing rope. Then you lace the rope through the holes on a shower curtain, lashing it to a beam, and poof, you've got some lame kind of makeshift sail for a sailboat. This would work with command line input, but in AGL it would not be so tough. The availability of a "unravel the rope" option gives away the first step -- once you try it (because you try everything in AGL) and see that it works and makes a "tie the smaller ropes together, end to end" option, now the second step is given away. "Lace the rope through the shower curtain holes and around the beam" completes the spoiling of this puzzle.

To boil down all that, command-line adventure games are usually about "What can I do now?" but AGL, which gives you the answer to that question flat out, has to be based on something else, such as, "Where can I go now?" So AGL games, in general, need to be based more on moving around within the world than command-line driven adventure games need to be. AGL is well suited for having puzzles where doing things in one location changes the state of another; puzzling out these interactive relationships is where some puzzle-solving thought comes into play. The portrait/picture puzzle in GOAT is a good example of this, and I think it's my favorite AGL puzzle, because it involves the timed coordination of several separate locations, yet can be reasoned out, as all the individual components of the puzzle are logical and predictable. But you do have to know your way around.

Another good example of an AGL puzzle that is challenging because the entire game isn't given away the timely appearance of the proper menu option is a puzzle in Trail of Anguish that basically *assumes* you have a map in front of you. Essentially, you have to find the shortest possible way to visit about six different locations. If you don't have a map, you have to be really lucky or really good at spatial memory to figure it out.

Anyway, to make a short story long, that's why AGL games don't lend themselves to taking place in confined geography. It *can* be done, certainly, but it would be quite challenging to make a game whose solution wasn't self-apparent -- or which wasn't simply a series of Puzzle Games-like puzzles transposed into AGL.