When I was plotting out my own run, I gave all the rooms names, some of which were better chosen than others. Here are my current suggested names for them, in case it helps with discussion of strategies. Some of this makes reference to Kjorteo's map (https://www.speedrun.com/the_story_of_jonah/guide/ari1g), though it should be comprehensible without it.
There are three major areas: King's Court, Market, and Alley. (Rationale: “Marketplace” is too cumbersome and “Market” is very similar in flavor, while “Court” or “King” are too far from the in-game labeling to be easy to remember. This is the same light modification used in Kjorteo's map.)
The interface consistently presents the viewpoint character as facing in the same direction; you cannot turn. We call this direction north (again the same as in Kjorteo's map), resulting in west and east being to the left and right sides of the screen and south corresponding to the reverse arrow.
Each of the major areas has a stub entrance at the south with only a north exit, followed by a three-room corridor from south to north with several other exits along the sides. These are all called ‹Area› Entrance, South, Mid, and North. Market North and Alley North also have north exits, but those lead to rooms with a substantially different visual style. Market South may also be known as Red Fez due to the prominent NPC with a red fez, red clothing, and gold tooth.
The Color Maze is effectively part of King's Court topologically but is useful to consider on its own. Its six rooms are all named Maze ‹Color› aka the ‹color› maze room. The colors form a six-color rainbow in counterclockwise order: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet. The exit is east from the yellow room.
A “short” room takes up one cell on Kjorteo's map. A “tall” room takes up more than one cell from north to south; there are no wide rooms.
West of King's Court South is a two-room group containing Rug 'n' Mug to the south (scattered colorful rugs, sitting NPC holding a cup with green stalks sticking out) and Passerines to the north (colorful small birds on the ground).
East of both King's Court Mid and King's Court North is Blue Shawl aka Shawlbeard (NPC with blue shawl, large dark gray beard, and shadow over face).
East of King's Court South is the Elemental Zone, a four-room square containing Bowls to the northwest (colorful bowls on the ground), Fireplace to the northeast (stone enclosed fire, fire sounds), Muddy Blue Guy to the southeast (NPC with scruffy beige hair, blue hat and apron, prominent mud stains), and Water to the southwest (water sounds, two apparent north exits of which only the northwest one is valid).
West of Market Mid is Purple Rug Lady (NPC with golden nose ring and blue hoop around neck carrying a bright purple rug with golden trim, window with fake sheep, trouble stairs west).
East of Market Mid and Market North is a two-room group containing Crumbling Corner (short, trouble bricks with hole east) to the south and Teal Lady (round NPC with teal dress, cane and closed eyes) to the north.
North of Market North is the Blue Marble Zone, a four-room square containing Blue Marble Northwest (growling dog, owl), Blue Marble Northeast (owl), Blue Marble Southeast (bare), and Blue Marble Southwest (“King's Court” sign, golden figurine). These all have blue textured walls.
East of Alley South is a three-room cycle containing Locust Junction to the west (thin round-faced NPC with green robe and belt), Locust Corner to the southeast (ceiling joists, curtain north), and Locust Stairs to the northeast (the iconic locusts, window north, trouble stairs east).
West of Alley Mid is Chained Redshirt (NPC with shackled wrists holding a long stick-like object (possibly a broom) that extends off the bottom of the screen, curtained window).
East of Alley Mid is the Tunnels, a five-room group with prominent frog sounds. The main four-room inverted-C shape contains, in clockwise order from northwest, Tunnel Ladders (ladders north and west, trouble hole west-down), Tunnel Guy (NPC with sparse, white, pointy facial hair and pale green loincloth, carrying a red sack), Tunnel Rats (black rat north, white rat and trouble exit east), and Tunnel Grate (grate west). North of Tunnel Guy is the stub room Tunnel Leaves (scattered leaves on the ground).
East of Alley North and north of Tunnel Ladders is Shining Door (door north with light coming through), which is the first room of a dead-end three-room L group containing Shining Door, Brawl (shouting sounds, angry NPC partially through north trouble door), and Crone (NPC with pale purple shawl, light green shirt, and folded hands, dark window north).
North of Alley North is Peeking Orange (thin NPC with orange clothing and white beard leaning out of a curtained trouble passage west, direct view of home).
Between Market South (west) and Alley South (east) is a two-room corridor containing Parrots to the west and East of Parrots (“Market Place” sign) to the east.
Between Fireplace (west) and Market Start (east) is a two-room T junction containing Produce Passage (the room that must be passed through, “King's Court” sign, trouble hole) to the south and Produce Storage (stub) to the north. These both contain boxes of some kind of fruit or vegetable.
Between the Yellow Maze Room (west) and King's Court North (east) is a two-room corridor: Orange Hats Guy aka Maze Guy (NPC near camera with elongated face and two orange hats) to the west and Safe to the east. North of Safe is Golden Hall (several trouble exits).
West of Blue Marble Southwest is a long outlying passage with the western exit. From east to west, these are Back Entrance (“Market Place” sign), Prim Redhead (small NPC with blue and white hourglass dress, poofy red hair, and feet pointed apart), Patio Corner (long, view of home through bars north), and Grass Corner (direct view of home, no floor, grass extends to bottom of screen); Grass Corner connects south to the Golden Hall.
West of Alley North is a two-room corridor containing Goat Corner to the west (direct view of home) and Goat Corridor to the east, both with visible goats (Alley North itself also has a visible goat). Goat Corner connects south to Teal Lady.
Thank you so much for referencing our map when coming up with all of this!
Re: the "Short" versus "Tall" rooms, the way our map has them laid out mostly came about due to limitations with Grid Cartographer (in which the map was made): one simply cannot put more than one door/passage/etc. on a side of a single tile, so when you get something like those rooms that have three western exits and two eastern ones or whatever, the only real way to render those was to make the room at least (X) tiles tall or wide as needed to accommodate the (X) passages.
In fact, I came close to putting some sort of note on the guide there about how the rooms aren't necessarily to scale in a "1 tile = 1 screen" sense; rather, any single room on the map (four walls with space in the middle, even if it's like a 3x1 corridor or something) equals one screen in-game. In the end, I left that note out mostly due to space constraints with the rest of the legend and just kind of hoped that would be self-evident. >.>;
Re: Muddy Blue Guy: I think he's a pottery maker of some sort and the stains might be clay? That would explain why he's surrounded by pots and a room with a prominent (kiln? furnace? some sort of fireplace?) next to him.
Re: Teal Lady: I always thought of her as some sort of nun, even though that makes absolutely zero sense in a game that's supposed to take place in Old Testament Nineveh. She just looks like one, okay? Interlight art is weird.
Re: Crone: I always called her the Witch but your name is probably more accurate. >.>
Re: Tunnels: I always called them the Sewers, and the NPC in there the Hermit, especially due to one of his dialogue options ("Hey, I'm a hermit. That means I like to be left alone. So beat it." or something to that effect, paraphrasing due to poor memory, etc.) But your names are fine too!
I don't know how many of these names we're actually going to remember well enough to use in casual conversation when discussing locations and strategies and such henceforth, but I do love the mental image of being able to say "Where are you now?" "Oh, I'm in East of Parrots."
I like “Tunnel Hermit” as more specific imagery and will switch to that (I won't edit the above post for new names, but I'll edit if I turn this into a guide later). Your interpretation of Muddy Blue Guy feels compelling to me too, but I can't think of a good name to switch to OTTOMH; “Potter” has distracting pop-cultural connotations now. Maybe I'll think of something later. And yeah, I feel like the fire room is pretty ambiguous about whether it's a heating fire, a kiln, a culinary oven (food also goes in bowls, after all)…
I like “Tunnels” a bit better than “Sewers” because the default image of the latter in the 21st century has implications that I think you don't quite find in CD-i Nineveh and that aren't well-represented.
I think the tall vs short room distinction is actually relevant from a gameplay planning perspective! Even if they're all “one screen” in a purely mechanical sense, having multiple exits to the sides changes the effective navigational feel a lot, and it does fit the way you put them on a grid as far as the actual connectivity goes; I wouldn't be surprised if the game designers had drawn a similar map when making the areas. The only quibble I have with the distinction as made on your grid map is that you draw Market South as three tiles tall, whereas I think it makes more sense to merge the two trouble exits to the west and make it symmetrical with the other two major areas.
That said, headcanon names taking off certainly has precedent--in this very post you just posted here, you made reference to "trouble exits" (as in "The Trouble" for those evil glowy-eye things, "Getting In Trouble" when you go through the wrong passage and run into them, etc.) even though that's something I completely whole-cloth made up. I'm not sure they even have a canonical name, and so I likened encountering them to "getting in trouble" because most instances of them happen when you do something you shouldn't (touch the golden idol, get involved in whatever's going on in the Brawl room, go through the X colored doors in Y area when Z NPC has a warning specifically telling you not to, etc.)
The only other thing I can think to call them is the Thieves of Darkness, after a warning from the shepherd in the intro screen (when you're asked to choose your starting location) who urges you to get out before darkness falls, "or the Thieves of Darkness will get you." It is, however, never specified whether all of the Trouble Demons are whatever they are are in fact Thieves of Darkness, or only the hoard of them that appears when you run out of time and Game Over.
Hence, I just went with "Thieves of Darkness/"Trouble"" in our map.
Anyway, point is, the fact that you called them "trouble exits" in your post is evidence that my completely made-up headcanon name for them took off, and so we very eagerly and enthusiastically applaud your returning the favor with your name suggestions. :)
Hmm, “Goat Corridor” and “Goat Corner” are too close to each other, too. Goat Corridor and Goat Field, maybe?
"The only quibble I have with the distinction as made on your grid map is that you draw Market South as three tiles tall, whereas I think it makes more sense to merge the two trouble exits to the west and make it symmetrical with the other two major areas."
A valid quibble! It's a very... subjective, heuristic process to try to translate something as wonky as the in-game map of an Interlight game to something as rigid as Grid Cartographer. (You should have seen our first attempts to map the Story of Samson Riddler's Race game... the geometry in that one is just... argh.) I would have preferred to make one tile for every exit, period (in which case there would have been a few "wide" rooms) but they simply did not fit on the map, and so I had to make some ugly workarounds like drawing one trouble exit with a footnote about "there are actually two northern exits in this room but they're both trouble anyway, soooo" to like, fit everything together. When perfect consistency is perfectly impossible and unobtainable, the best you can do is kind of go by feel as far as which rooms to compress when some need to be compressed down but not others. It stands to reason that the decisions I made aren't necessarily the ones anyone else would have made if tasked with the same process.
Honestly, the fact that the Market starts one tile lower than the Alley and King's Court bothers me too! But if we compressed the room above, then... well, then you'd have a case of having another "just pretend this one trouble exit here actually represents two since they're both trouble anyway" footnote instead, and that wouldn't have been ideal either. In the end I picked the option that bugged me less, but, again, that's me, and there's probably no way to please everyone once you go down that road.
"Hmm, “Goat Corridor” and “Goat Corner” are too close to each other, too. Goat Corridor and Goat Field, maybe?"
The Inner and Outer Goat Rooms. sage nod
