I’m in the process of tightening up my upcoming game for IFComp, and that means beta testing!  I’ve had several transcripts come back so far, and among the game-breaking bugs and writing issues it’s uncovering, I found one issue that is tripping up so many people that I feel confident I can state it as a universal rule:

If you output text before the room description block, no one will read it.

It doesn’t matter if the person is an absolute IF newbie, or a seasoned veteran; there’s something about that boldface room name line that draws the eye and says “start reading here”.  I had several places in the game where I was outputting text using a “before going” rule, and in the transcripts you can always see the players flailing around for turns afterward without realizing what happened.

I’m guessing this is a side effect of the move to keeping verbose room descriptions on all the time.  Personally, I always did this anyway; from what others have said I think the preference for verbose mode is probably up over 80%.  But what it means is that you often reread (or quickly scan-and-bypass) the same room description multiple times as you move around the map, which could easily lead to the tendency to just skip over the real differences.

Most of the time, it’s easy to fix this type of problem.  Either shift to using a later point to generate the output (I use a custom specific action-processing rulebook called “post-report” for this type of thing, due to the nature of how the going action leads into the looking action), or do the text output but block the movement.  I’ve used both methods and it really seems to help with drawing attention to the text.