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Six pages and I didn't look to see if I already posted here, so forgive me for being lazy at 9 on a Sunday morning <grin>
As Sanvean said in the first page, invoke all the senses in descriptions.
However, don't tell the player what he hears, smells, tastes, feels - or how he reacts to those stimulii. Instead, tell him what is available for him to hear, smell, taste, and feel. Let him decide if he actually hears, tastes, smells, and feels it, and let him decide how, if at all, he will react to it.
Tell the reader what exists. Let the reader do the thinking and deciding about it. This might sound confusing to a new builder, or a builder who has little experience in prose (as opposed to mechanical or spec writing). It isn't really, you just have to get used to doing it and eventually everything clicks.
As for the quips about forest writing, I say booya! A 20 room forest area can be daunting, but I assure you there -are- 20 different ways to say the exact same thing. Further - if the forest is 10 rooms long by 4 rooms deep, the view from the westernmost room is going to be much different from the view on the east. Consider the horizon line. What's there? A mountain range? A valley? An ocean? A desert? There's -something- out there, even if it's just "the end of the world." In each room in the forest, the reader has a different vantage point of that horizon.
In object-oriented code, IMBED! Imbed objects in each room description! Since I'm on a roll with forests, we'll stick with that. If "this" room has an unusual bush that bears a rare flower, imbed a bush object. Make it sniffable. If it has thorns, make it so that if you try to pluck the flower you get pricked! If "that" room is less dense of trees than most of the other rooms for some reason, perhaps add an imbedded "grass" object that people can sit on, picnic on. Include a few dozen atmospheric echoes of ants running in and out of a tiny anthole, or the sound of small animals scurrying through the distant wood. Maybe a squirrel (or whatever cute thing that could possibly be feral but for now is just cute in your game) peeks out from behind a tree, takes a furtive sniff, and scampers back up and out of sight.
That brings me to atmosphere echoes: If you're going to include them, include as many as possible. The "tick" of the game that makes these things show up are going to annoy the heck out of your reader if they're stuck seeing the same 2 or 3 over and over again. 20 echoes -per room- is not unreasonable, even if half of them are repeated in conjoining rooms. If you can't think up that many, just don't do it at all. Your readers will thank you.
That's all I have for now, as I read the first page and most of the people there covered the other things I would've mentioned.
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