I wanted to have my character run a dojo in Linseria, so I had a friend help start it up and I just finished it, would love to have it linked to the Commercial District… could a builder help me? here’s the ID for the room #cdhgqae9gbrgopj4se6g
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Mikenike684, has talked to me about it, and I personally gave my approval, but I am not a builder, so my opinion doesn’t matter much.
It’s an interesting idea but it will need a bit more work to be opened to public. I think the biggest gripe I have right now is the descriptions; but let me elaborate.
You enter the djojo and you see:
It’s a super brief paragraph about the dojo and it explains what it is. It would fit nice as an area description but it doesn’t give a sense of location. Standing there I have no idea how to feel (unless I dig through my memories and remember an actual dojo visit). You want to focus on delivering your location to the paserbys so it is interesting to explore.
But let’s move on.
I know the common rooms are common because they are just generic but this is where the question rises: do you even need a common room if it’s this common?
There are always ways to make it interesting though. Here’s a quick example:
A huge TV screen occupies the wide wall, sitting between two thick wooden supports. A heap of beanbags rests against the far corner, but even from there the black surface intimidating. A flick of the switch, followed by the soft buzz of a console’s cooling fan and the screen comes to life, sucking the attention like a massive portal.
A smell of herbs spreads through the air; someone left sage in the diffusor and its aroma weaves into the soft breeze coming from the window.
In here I only emphasised the size of the TV screen, making sure that anyone visiting would actually focus on that, and then added a bit of smells – it’s a familiar smell, known to everyone, and yet it’s a bit out of place for the room, making the visitors wonder why does the room smell like this.
I have the same issue with the cafeteria (but also – who’s yours truly? As a visitor I’d have no ide who runs the place), and the training room.
Try working on more detail. Looking up photos of real places and studying them helps, especially if you’re able to then weave in those tiny specific items into your descriptions.
Apart from that, you seem not to like punctuation much (there are many periods missing in the ends of sentences everywhere); and there’s no area set up (make sure to teleport academy and look up the helpful guides on that!)
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Helpful info here Shin!
I have updated all of the rooms accordingly, thanks to some help from a friend, if you get the chance, please do look over it once more
Sorry, this slipped past me and I forgot to check it again!
There’s still a bunch of work to be done, I’m afraid. Easy stuffs is goign through your exits and making sure all the sentences end with a period. Trickier stuffs are e.g. the common room (the description left unchanged since my previous visit), and newly added typos:
Feel free to poke me in wolfery when I’m around and I can go room by room with you and suggest some specific rewrites, if it helps!
What’s your character name? I’ll ping you when i see you
I took another look at it and there’s still a bunch of technical thingies that really need cleaning up. Every exit message line should start with a lowercase letter (because it’s prefixed by the character’s name) and end with a period. The room names should be properly capitalised. The area description and, more importantly, rules are still missing. make sure you looked through the builder’s academy (teleport academy) for the best practices on those.
I promised you some feedback on the writing and I made a little case study for the main room. I hope it will be useful.
Let's have a case study based on this room's description:
A dojo for people who want to learn the ins and outs of sumo wrestling, the room is large with ring in the center, the walls and ceiling are carved magic ice, made to look like wood, styled in to look like a traditional Japanese dojo, while the floor is actual wood, covered with a mat.
There are several exits, each door is a traditional Japanese sliding door
All this factual information and description and whatnot is cramped into a single sentence. Let’s see if removing and separating things will make it sound smoother:
The walls smoothly curve into the ceiling. They are cold to touch: the ice was forced into the intricate shape, textured to feel like wood.
With this we covered the walls first and foremost, as they are the most interesting part of the room: they are ice but are made to look like wood so they will atrract the attention. There’s no point in explaining about sumo wrestling in here – that would be a much better fit for the area description.
styled in to look like a traditional Japanese dojo, while the floor is actual wood, covered with a mat.
Many people have no idea how that looks, time for research! I went over pinterest to find some ideas. It seems that they pretty much follow the typical architecutre patters for Japan, there’s nothing surprising in there. It’s all about long hallways.
Armed with that knowledge, we can re-work the entrance room further now:
A long hallway opens to a series of doors. The sunlight reflects from the low celing; even though it’s masterfully textured to look like wood, it’s still made of ice.
Now we don’t focus on the walls as much anymore. Instead we bring in the room geometry (it’s long) and point out the ceiling is ice – so it feels at home in the surrounding environment.
Now, that only leaves us with a short description. What can we add to make it better? Other senses! Whenever you enter a new room you want to focus on all the things you can experience in it.
Let’s roll with my favourite: scents. What does a dojo smell of? Unless you have one nearby, you can resort to google search again, but you can also apply some logical thinking. People train here, they exercies a lot, they sweat. Dojo would smell like a gym, even more intense! Let’s weave that in:
Even though both windows are open, there’s still a strong waft of people exercising and pushing their physical limits.
You don’t want to put it down more bluntly, ‘It smells of sweat’. Let the reader come up to that idea on their own! Notice how we expand on the physical descriptions further, now there are specifically two windows (and we know they are open becasuse of the sunlight from the previous part).
What else is there when you enter a dojo? Time for more research. This time I check youtube to get a better feel of the specifically sumo training. One thingy immediately stands out.
Sumo wrestlers don’t have the tatami mats on the floor! And indeed, those are for all the throws and moves of judo and the like! Sumo is greasy! This is a very useful learning point as now we know the original description is contradictory: you don’t do sumo and mats.
The video gives us one more sense: sounds.
Someone barks short commands from behind a door. Bodies slap together.
Now, this adds the sound design to the stage we’d set before. Now we know the dojo is actually occupied, there are people training in here! And of course there’s no need to show them, or make that specific room public, what we wanted to get is the sense of the place being busy (even when there are no player characters around). We can bolster that feeling further, though:
The training is ongoing.
On one hand this is the writer’s cardinal sin; any writing book you open will tell you ‘show don’t tell’. In here we just tell the reader and the visitor about what’s happening. And yet, let’s look at it in the context:
A long hallway opens to a series of doors. The sunlight reflects from the low celing; even though it’s masterfully textured to look like wood, it’s still made of ice.
Even though both windows are open, there’s still a strong waft of people exercising and pushing their physical limits.
Someone barks short commands from behind a door. Bodies slap together. The training is ongoing.
Now, that’s lots of showing and the final remark only reinforces the point.
Still, there’s something awkward about the description. It looked alright when we checked it part by part but it doesn’t hold as good when all parts are together. We get back to the point of the sentence length and here’s an old meme to illustrate how useful it is to vary it. More so, the repetitions of same structure (‘even though’) are now blatantly obvious! While it’s important to look at individual pieces, it’s crucial to have a look at the description as a whole, too.
The hallway is long, with a series of doors on the left side, and windows on the right. It’s cold, though, so only two of them are open, letting the sunlight in, driving the smells out – a waft of people exercising and pushing their physical limits travells across the hall. Sunbeams dance, heading deeper into the hallway. Someone barks short commands from behind a door. Bodies slap together. The training is ongoing.
Upon further investigation, the walls are textured like wood, but are icy cold. Masterful craft forced the ice into a shape of wooden planks.
How little is left from the draft! In fact, it took me four tries to shuffle the sentences and find the composition that is pleasant to look at. Don’t hesitate to re-write, that’s the way to learn.
An interesting experience was that the icy room that looks like wood is extremely hard to write. It must have reflextions, but how’d you get confused then? Ice is ice; polished wood is different to touch. That’s the answer, though – you write about the texture and let the reader think they actually felt it: ‘upon further investigation’ part in an implied action you cast on another character.
so, i updated the exits, and the room descriptions, hopefully it’s enough
I looked through it and it’s all good. I fixed a couple typos and made sure all the dojo rooms are added to the area.
There is one last bit left: you didn’t specify the area rules at all. If the Linseria rules apply then Combat is Forbidden applies too and I don’t think that works for the dojo theme. Please make sure the rules for your area exist and make sense and you’re good to go!
All done! Ready for it to become public now!
Thanks for all the amendments. The dojo is now approved and I mailed the North Pole owner to unhide the exit.
@Mikenike684: congrats! Please remember that owning a public location is a privilege. Make sure your area follows the rules. If you will do any major renovations (e.g. adding more than a couple new rooms), make sure you loop in a builder to assist with those.