Navigation in game

Welcome! Navigation and working out where you are is meant to be part of gameplay. The graphical map was a late addition and I kind of reluctant to put it in. Our games have always been voice-first and we wish that to be the primary experience. We treasure the support of the visually impaired community and give your fedback the highest priority.

The original name of the game was "Companions of the Road", and the roads in the game are meant to be a central feature. They connect up the cities and towns and forts. Normally I stick close to the roads, and get a feel for how the roads connect the places. When I am happy with that in an area I venture off the roads, but generally try to keep an idea of what direction they are in, so if I get mixed up I can just head back towards them.

More recently signposts have been added to the games. At places along the road it will tell you if there is a sign post there. On Google Home you can say "read signpost", but on Alexa you have to know to say "more". That can help orientate you.

In the Beta play area, the world is divided into smaller townships. You are alerted when you cross over from one region to another. That can be helpful for keeping track of areas you have fully explored and what is nearby.

Based on your comments I have added issue #283, to add in a "where" command. This will let you ask questions "where is the nearest village" and stuff like that. I'll need to change the audio model for that to work, so it will probably take a few weeks.

It's a little harder to track where you have and have not been. The maps have quite a large number of positions. The system does track what features you have visited, so I can add in a message that says "Welcome Back" when you return to a location. (Created issue #284 for that.)

Thank you very much for your feedback and I'm very keen on any other ideas or suggestions you might have.

I'm glad you love the game and I'm happy to help!

There is no way, currently, for users to customize weapons or armor. This is a difficult feature to add, because the way the programs work, the vocabulary has to be fixed ahead of time. I did add a feature where specific instances of weapons and armor can be named. (That's how the divine weapons are done.) But accepting free format input from users doesn't work well with the current technology.

Deeds are meant for creating your own features. You can use an "entry deed" to found a castle in your current location. When you enter a castle you can use another deed to create that sort of room. It will ask you what direction you want to create the room in. It should look something like this:

A: You are in a castle entry. South leads back to the wilderness.
U: Use gallery deed
A: What direction would you like to add a gallery in?
U: North
A: Woosh. A gallery appears to the north. You are in a castle entry. North leads to gallery, south leads out of here.

This is a new and complex feature, so I am not surprised to hear there are bugs there. I'm having difficulty replicating some of the bugs. If you can tell me, step, by step, what you have done, I can try. Also, if you give me your party name, I can replace any deeds you have lost. (Say who and it will tell you your team and also your party name.)

Having slept on navigation, I think I will add in "longitude" and "latitude". I really like having exploration being part of the game. StarLanes would built around that. But the geography there was much more constrained. I think you are right. With coordinates users will have greater confidence to explore. I'll see about getting it into this week's update.

With the room creation you can create a castle, but it will always be branching. If you want to cross connect different areas of the castle, go into one room and use the mark permit. Then go into the room you want to connect to that room and use a door permit. That will then connect those two existing rooms together.

The one way door works the same, but just in one direction.

The low/medium/high level doors don't need the mark. You can use them to change an existing door to only let through low, medium, or high level characters. Be careful. It's possible to create a room trap with those! If you get stuck, drop me a line with your party name and I'll sort things out.

Yay!!! Thanks so much for that, now I can write down where I need to get back to when offroading.

Erk. Good catch. I shouldn't have missed that. Should be patched now. Let me know if I missed anything else!

No problem. I'll get to this tonight. I'd do it immediately but the system is giving me grief about finding your ident. I have to write a tool to do a clever search rather than the stupid search from Amazon's web interface!