World Layout

'Do you have a suggestion? Discuss this topic on the forums !' Like most online text games, Tohm simulates a world where players may move around freely by linking "locations" with detailed descriptions together. Players typically use a command like "go" or "travel" or "move" to navigate around the world, exploring at their own pace. For example, several locations might be linked together to represent a street, with some of those having additional links to shops, houses, and other streets.

Region Labels
All of Tohm's locations are grouped into a hierarchy of "regions". Regions could be continents, cities, neighborhoods, buildings, forests, etc. The location title always includes the region name, to provide some additional context and help players understand where they are. For example, "Anrema City - Zolfan Way", or "Anrema City - Outside the Dizzy Pony Inn".

Named Transitions
To help players' awareness of their surroundings, "major" navigational transitions like moving from inside a building to out or into a city from the neighboring forest can have non-directional names. Instead of a simple "East" to wander through the city gates, a player may have to type "go gates" or "walk through the gates". In addition to helping navigational awareness, this also prevents players from accidentally wandering into a dangerous area from a safe one. When a player takes one of these transitions, other nearby players see custom text like "Risa goes into the Tavern" instead of "Risa goes Tavern".

Dynamic Locations
Tohm's location descriptions have the potential to change with weather, time of day, and season, which means a player can spend a lot of total time in a location before he's experienced all the content it has to offer, keeping the world fresh and new. This goes way beyond just adding "It's raining." to the end of location descriptions - breezes sigh through gently waving green canopies overhead, snow slickens the red brick path and quietly crunches underfoot, and tiny rivulets of rainwater meander down the tiny statue of Alexander to your left.

Detailed Locations (Not Yet Implemented)
It's important for any online text game to balance total text with level of detail. Many make the mistake of either putting way too much text on the screen, or not providing enough content detail to give players a good exploration experience. Like most, Tohm will allow players to further examine nouns mentioned in the basic location description to get more detail when they want it, which is a great way to balance quantity of text with level detail.

Unlike most, Tohm will take this a step farther by allowing players to additionally touch and smell objects. Descriptions of touch and smell sensations are an opportunity unique to the text gaming genre, because they must be communicated via text - in a primarily visual game, a text description feels awkwardly out of place and sometimes disturbing to the overall player experience - but in a text game, it fits right in.

Instanced Locations
In Tohm, every location is instanced. This means it has a maximum number of occupants, and when it fills up, a additional copies of the location are created to allow more players to use it. This ensures even the most popular locations never get overcrowded (which can load to too much incoming text or "noise", which forces players to move). When there's more than one "instance" or copy of a location, Tohm tries to place players in the location where he'll encounter the most other players, encouraging socializing. Eventually when player friendships and player grouping are implemented, those factors will also be taken into consideration when deciding specifically which players a new arrival will be placed with.

Wait Time with Basic Travel
Unlike most other games in the genre, Tohm includes a small wait time alongside basic navigation to promote socializing amongst players. In other games, players move so rapidly that it's almost impossible to new arrivals (thereby striking up a conversation) before they're gone again - Tohm's wait time gives players an opportunity to say hello, and it also encourages players to take the time to read the detailed location descriptions which are a major part of memorable text gaming experience.

Autopilot (Not Yet Implemented)
Tohm's wait time for basic travel can be a problem when there aren't any passerby to chat up, when the player is laser-focused on accomplishing a task, or when the player has travelled the same route many times (note that Tome has dynamic location descriptions, so descriptions change with time of day, weather, and season, extending their appeal beyond first impressions). In these cases, players can feel the wait time is just getting in the way. It's our plan to offer an autopilot-style travel command which will automatically navigate the player to a location he's visited before. During the automated travel, he'll see short versions of location descriptions befitting passing-through, like "You pass three young boys laugh and chase each other around in the dirt in front of a busy inn." These are unique compared with the longer location descriptions, and also benefit from the dynamic changes mentioned above, making automatic travel a unique experience which delivers fresh content. Since wait time still applies to automatic travel, players still have the opportunity to stop and talk with other players they may encounter.

Content Considerations
Many online text games try to give players a sense of distance by creating lots of rooms with very little content in them. This works because it slows players down by making them take longer to navigate from A to B, but players miss out on location descriptions because not bothering to read them actually gets them to their destination faster - this is a waste of building effort, and a missed opportunity to give players an immersive experience that makes them feel like they're navigating a detailed, living world.

Our guideline for Tohm world building is to build fewer locations, where each location is both very deep and very dynamic, and where the bulk of locations have 2-3 exits (preferring N/S/E/W). This means players spend less effort navigating but still get lots of content to explore, have more opportunity to socialize without the possibility for overcrowding, and given the simplistic layout and smaller total location count, find learning the lay of the land much easier.