Pointless porch

A pointless porch is a questionable design choice in a work of IF. A pointless porch is typically a room that exists between a building's interior and the road outside and serves no function except to display the building's description as a location's description.

For example, in the map shown, the location called Outside the Bank is a pointless porch. The location might have a door and a sign at the most, but otherwise the location is empty and useless—except to tell the player what the bank looks like from the outside.

Most games would be improved without such locations. Instead, create an scenery object called "bank" in the street location, and likewise move any exterior fixtures to the bank (like a door or sign) also to the street. Give the description of porch location to the new bank object. Connect the street and bank interior directly:

Simplifying the game geography makes things easier for the player, and avoids clumsy repetition of the bank's description on subsequent traversals of the area.