Good point! I’ve gotten so used to Twine, ChoiceScript, and Ink that I’d forgotten that there’s also plenty of choice-based IF that’s not played in a web browser. I was going to say the best practice would be to just assume the user has their browser configured in a way that works best for them, and not override that setting—but of course if you’re making a Unity game, that’s not helpful.
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Very true. Ren’Py, the IF engine I use, doesn’t run in a browser or attempt to auto-detect user preference in fonts. At this point, I’ve got 6 fonts in my UI font selector, including a serif font for each of Latin and Cyrillic (3 and 1 sans-serif respectively).
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I thought Ren’Py ran in the browser. The documentation says it does, but with limitations. Is there a deal breaker limitation when it comes to browser support for you?
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By default, Ren’Py runs in its own executable, which out of the box can be made for several platforms. Web is treated as one of those platforms (effectively converting it into an executable that can be run from a HTML wrapper). Since it’s only treated as a platform choice at the end of the process, it doesn’t detect anything in the browser beyond the fact it’s in one (and, possibly, whether the browser is on a mobile device). As such, even browser-based support has to have things like font choices added as an extra. It’s a different philosophy of creation than an IF engine developed primarily for browsers such as Twine, where downloadable versions are simply put through the same conversion as would happen for any other saved web page, making zero difference to the author by default (because the necessary changes between the web and download version get written at the IF engine and browser levels).
(At the time the Budacanta demo was written, the web version of Ren’Py didn’t exist, although it was under development. People who started Ren’Py games later may well release web-only, especially if it was since the more stable version 8 got released, but they still have to put in font selection manually if it is desired).
I’m hoping to sell the IF I’m producing, and there is one sale pathway I’m thinking of where a web version would help, but at least some of the pathways I’m expecting to sell in expect a downloadable, installable version. So it’s more of “I need all the versions and must configure UI options accordingly” rather than “web can’t be one of the versions”.
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Indeed. You could make a web demo version which makes it easy for people to try it without the effort of download & install.
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