Guild of Writers

• I would like to see a visual distinction between “look” links (that pop up the description box at the bottom) and “go” links (that take you to some other place). I would often click on a link and be taken by surprise when it took me somewhere else, thinking “hey, I didn’t want to walk away yet, I first want to look at everything in this place”.
• Several places have multiple links (in close proximity) that pop up the same detail description. Is that intentional? What’s the purpose of that? I would like the links to change color when I’ve visited them, so that in such a situation, all the links would appear “visited” after I used the first of them, so that I know that I don’t need to bother clicking on the others because they won’t reveal anything new.
• When one detail box leads to another, I would like to have a “back” button that takes me to the previous box I was at, because in some cases it can be unobvious or complicated to figure out how to reach that box again in order to continue exploring where you left off. Or maybe the boxes should appear stacked, so that closing the topmost one will reveal the previous one. (Some of the boxes have a back link in their text, but it would be nice to have an “external” back link that is always there (unless maybe there is a gameplay reason why you shouldn't be able to go back), visually distinct so you can spot it without having to search through the text, and automatically takes you back to where you came from rather than up to a fixed ancestor box.)
  (Now that I think about it, this would be good for locations as well. In fact, I have occasionally had this problem of it not being immediately obvious how to get back where you came from even in the graphical node-based (not real-time-3D) Myst games: You pop into a new location, maybe it turned you a bit, and when you turn around you see nothing or multiple things that look approximately like where you were before. This is an unrealistic, out-of-character problem, an artifact of the discrete world, because when you can move continuously, you also have a contiguous way back in your mind, so I think an equally artificial back button would be an appropriate solution for it.)

Christian Walther wrote:I would like to see a visual distinction between “look” links (that pop up the description box at the bottom) and “go” links (that take you to some other place). I would often click on a link and be taken by surprise when it took me somewhere else, thinking “hey, I didn’t want to walk away yet, I first want to look at everything in this place”.

Several places have multiple links (in close proximity) that pop up the same detail description. Is that intentional? What’s the purpose of that? I would like the links to change color when I’ve visited them, so that in such a situation, all the links would appear “visited” after I used the first of them, so that I know that I don’t need to bother clicking on the others because they won’t reveal anything new.

When one detail box leads to another, I would like to have a “back” button that takes me to the previous box I was at, because in some cases it can be unobvious or complicated to figure out how to reach that box again in order to continue exploring where you left off. Or maybe the boxes should appear stacked, so that closing the topmost one will reveal the previous one. (Some of the boxes have a back link in their text, but it would be nice to have an “external” back link that is always there (unless maybe there is a gameplay reason why you shouldn't be able to go back), visually distinct so you can spot it without having to search through the text, and automatically takes you back to where you came from rather than up to a fixed ancestor box.)
(Now that I think about it, this would be good for locations as well. In fact, I have occasionally had this problem of it not being immediately obvious how to get back where you came from even in the graphical node-based (not real-time-3D) Myst games: You pop into a new location, maybe it turned you a bit, and when you turn around you see nothing or multiple things that look approximately like where you were before. This is an unrealistic, out-of-character problem, an artifact of the discrete world, because when you can move continuously, you also have a contiguous way back in your mind, so I think an equally artificial back button would be an appropriate solution for it.)