It’s very easy to accidentally try to create too large a text adventure. My first attempt was way too ambitious, and would have taken months to finish. I still love the idea for that, but it had to go. I picked another idea that was much smaller in scope, but it, too, grew too ambitious. I restarted one more time, from an idea that was even more pared down, and I was actually able to finish that game. With the minimalistic scope it took maybe fifteen hours of active work to create most of the game, and then almost as much time again to fix the 57 problems I received feedback on from beta testers.1 This is a large time investment for me, which makes it unlikely I’ll create another one any time soon, even if I’d really like to. Scope in text adventures is complicated, because there are two dimensions along which scope can vary: breadth and detail. A broad game might have many locations, items, and events, but each is relatively sparsely implemented. Actions get generic responses, and items are mainly generic scenery without interesting interactions. This is the style of some of the earliest text adventures; they had to do it that way due to technical limitations of the time. A detailed game might have few locations, items, and events, but those that do exist are modeled in high detail and interact realistically with each other. Modern development tools afford insane levels of detail, and it’s up to the author to set a reasonable limit to the detail included. Lockout is in the narrow-but-detailed category. Making a broad and detailed game takes a huge effort, so for the hobbyist it boils down to finding the right tradeoff between breadth and detail. For better or worse, the community encourages detailed games, and among modern games, a text adventure that is broad and not detailed stands out as lacking in implementation. A useful comparison to study this difference is The Plot of the Phantom: a newly released game which was designed in the 1980’s, but implemented using modern tools. It contrasts with Lockout in that it is mainly in the broad-and-sparse camp, as the following interactions illustrate. CAVE ENTRANCE You stand at the base of a sandstone cliff, at the mouth of a large cave. Behind you to the south, a misty Appalachian forest stretches in all directions. A weathered sign made of pressure-treated lumber and painted in the style of National Park signage stands to the right of the cave entrance. The cave entrance is to the north. Oh, wow, what sort of cave is this? > look at cave You can’t see any such thing. Huh. Well, what can I find in the direction I came from? > go south You can’t go that way. Why not? I suppose what remains is to enter the cave. > enter cave You can’t see any such thing. Oh right, the cave doesn’t exist in the world, only in the description. Maybe I have to go inside. > go in You can’t go that way. I could have sworn … I guess I’ll go north to enter. > go north LARGE CAVERN You step into a large open space, a cavern created by seeping groundwater dissolving the sandstone over many decades. The sandy floor is strewn with rocks and the damp ceiling hangs low, just a foot or two above your head. You’re not the first to find this place. Crumpled beer cans and cigarette butts are everywhere, and the cold, blackend remains of a firepit sit in the cavern center, and the eastern wall is blanketed with a remarkable amount of multicolored graffiti. To the north, a passage disapppears into the rock, while to the west you can see a hole just barely wide enough to crawl through. I’m worried about the safety of the ceiling. Can I get more information? > look at ceiling You can’t see any such thing. That’s odd. Let’s take some stuff we found here before we move on. > get beer cans and cigarettes That’s hardly portable. This goes on for the rest of The Plot of the Phantom. There are a lot of things that appear to exist, but when the player tries to examine them, they aren’t really there, or they behave in unexpected ways. Don’t get me wrong! I finished The Plot of the Phantom and I had a lot of fun with it. You can make sparse games fun. However, this sort of sparsity does tend to annoy modern players. One of the reasons is that when there are four hundred objects mentioned in the game, but only forty of them actually exist in the game world, the player can easily miss vital clues because they stop examining things, having grown tired of the stock “You can’t see any such thing” response.2 Another common example of beta testing criticism is when the player is given e.g. a matchbox and is somehow able to stuff something like a keyboard inside it. The matchbox is technically a container and can contain things, but a detailed world model will prevent the player from inserting large things into small things. A sparse world model will not care. Detailed world models are more fun for the player, but harder for the developer. The complexity of the implementation scales multiplicatively thanks to interactions. When we add another item, we have to account for how it interacts with everything else already in the game. When we add another action the player can perform, we now have to contend with the fact that the player might perform that action on every single object we already have in the game.3 My first attempt at making a text adventure included the ability of levitation! It’s a great mechanic that can be used creatively, but it can also be exploited to skip a lot of puzzles and enter restricted areas unless the rest of the game is very carefully designed around it.