Interconnection

In real life, space is continuous; in IF, it is discrete and comes in boxes. This often discourages authors from making use of grand vistas, which is rather a pity: I like games in which I can sometimes see from one room of the game to another. It may take some special programming to make this consistently behave right, but the rewards are considerable. Seeing far away objects before you are able to reach them (the sinister tower at the top of the hill) builds a sense of anticipation. It also deepens the sense that the setting you're moving around in is not just a movie set.

Presentation

Consistency

It's important to implement your game world with some consistent degree of depth. Implementing deeply and thoroughly (so that everything has a description, and the parts of everything have descriptions, and so on) is perhaps the best way: from a player's perspective, it's excellent to be able to examine not only everything in the description of a room but the subcomponents of the object. It deepens the sense of reality; it suggests that all is not cut out of cardboard and pasted together in haste for our benefit. Like this:

>EXAMINE DESK
The desk is an ornate contraption from the end of the last Empire. Its front legs are shaped like women carrying water, and there are drawers beneath the desk surface and an impressive collection of pigeonholes mounted above it. An inlaid mahogany door can be used to close up and lock the whole, but at the moment it stands open.

>X WOMEN
The women, now that you look at them, are wearing archaic dresses and carrying elegant fluted jugs. Their faces have been individualized a bit -- the cherubic girl on the left looks considerably sweeter than the veiled dowager supporting the right side.

>X CHERUBIC
With one hand she is lifting up her gown so that it does not drag on the ground, and with the other supporting her water jug. She seems not to notice the immense weight resting on the crown of her head.

You may not have time to implement deeply and in detail, however. Or you may want a deliberately austere feel for your game. Perhaps instead of attaching subdescriptions to your objects, you have all the subparts pointing back to the same thing:

>EXAMINE DESK
The desk is an ornate contraption from the end of the last Empire. Its front legs are shaped like young women carrying water, and there are drawers beneath the desk surface and an impressive collection of pigeonholes mounted above it. An inlaid mahogany door can be used to close up and lock the whole, but at the moment it stands open.

>X WOMEN
The desk is an ornate contraption from the end of the last Empire. Its front legs are shaped like young women carrying water, and there are drawers beneath the desk surface and an impressive collection of pigeonholes mounted above it. An inlaid mahogany door can be used to close up and lock the whole, but at the moment it stands open.

At least having the important nouns all be recognized is a nice touch, however. You can get away with doing either, but it's best if you do it consistently. What gets confusing and draws attention is when some rooms are implemented in excruciating detail -- packed with multipartite objects, with all sorts of optional rugs and light switches and irrelevant ceiling panels thrown in -- and then other rooms are half-baked, with only a couple of carelessly constructed objects in them.

Imagery

It's impossible to prescribe a methodology for creating evocative imagery, but it is, perhaps, possible to talk a little bit about what it is.

The evocative image suggests something beyond itself in the player's mind. It is a pointer to a hazy-but-fascinating reality that the player may only partly grasp.

An enormous stone head, broken in the desert. The bridge built to span an impassible chasm, with technology long ago lost. The scaffolding around the partially-constructed space ship, blocking half the sky of stars. A fragmentary thing evokes its whole; an ancient one, the lost world that created it; an unfinished one, the thing that it is supposed to become. And often those entireties seem more magnificent when they are alluded to than they could possibly be if the player were able to perceive them fully.

Think of it this way. A statue the size of a skyscraper is just... big. A single stone toe, lying on its side in the dunes, taller than you can reach with your arms extended -- it takes what is colossal about the first image and expresses it in accessible terms. People who play IF often have good imaginations, but their imaginings still work best in terms of lengths and sizes they can visualize easily.

Also striking are images that contravene our sense of how the world works, and make us wonder about the alternative reality that allows for it: changes of scale; processes that run more quickly than they do in life, or in the wrong direction, or that are frozen in the middle; doors that open on nothing, objects that hang in midair, inanimate things come to life.

And yet all the startling invention in the world can seem like a cheap carnival trick if it is not well described. Particularity is your strongest tool. Saying that something is "stunning" or "immense" impresses less than some more mundane but tangible evidence of size or richness. Magnificent attire is less interesting than a bejeweled costume, which is in turn less colorful than a lace cuff studded with rubies.

Note that this does NOT mean you have to describe everything down to the last merciless detail, or that you have to focus everywhere on the same aspects of things. Room after room of "You are in a narrow blue room, where the light falls from the upper left corner and the humidity is pushing 95 percent." -- well. It could pall rather quickly. The trick is to envision the most telling bits, and make them as clear in your mind as possible; the rest can be impressionistic. The player will fill it in.