I personally enjoy choice stuff for phone, but Frotz for iOS is very nice app with some surprising features.
When I (briefly) taught at the local university, I had lots of low-income students. They couldn’t afford a computer or a laptop, but they all had phones. Since there’s a socio-economical consideration, I personally think mobile support is important whether I use it or not.
I’m using firefox. I tried that link and the disappearing/reappearing keyboard and flashing still happens.
This is definitely truer during the start of the pandemic. Even in Indonesia here, people don’t own PCs, but they definitely have some Android around in order to buzz in for access to malls and other avenues. I think if people are interested in getting a wider audience, especially younger and poorer people, some consideration should be made for smartphone users.
The keyboard is meant to be hidden if a full text update couldn’t appear within the space that is left above the keyboard. If the response to the user’s input is short then the keyboard should stay up though.
But I haven’t tested with Firefox as much as with Chrome or Safari. It might have some quirks.
It doesn’t…
I think Fabularium would be fine for me if I could use my own keyboard. I don’t have an iOS so no Frotz app for me, which is a shame because I remember it being great when I had an iphone 4. Fabularium also hasn’t updated in 5 years.
I think a lot of game and web design thinks about “mobile first” experiences nowadays and it is frustrating that parsers haven’t really caught up with that expectation to the necessary degree, as far as I’m aware, on the platform, design, or interpreter ends.
Ah, I’ve just tried it in Firefox, and can see that yes it does bring up the keyboard distractingly each turn. I don’t know if this will be easy to fix. Web browsers really don’t give you much control over the soft keyboard. It’s very frustrating.
Thanks to those that mentioned Fabularium. It seems like the best answer with it’s custom keyboard and double-tap feature. That’s quite brilliant, actually.
I wasn’t planning on building an engine for distribution so much as a rudimentary parser game / pet project. I’m working on it as a browser page and figured I might get some perspective about the mobile scene. However, I do see the advantage of making a notepad and drawing pad that can be hidden and shown over top the existing game. Good call on the aspect of scribbling notes and such.
I’m reminded of the mapping feature in Ultima Underworld and just being able to write your own notes right on the map that was drawn as you traveled was so useful. Even writing simple things like, “come back here”, “tough enemies” or “lever puzzle” was invaluable.
I love Firefox too, but it’s apparent that Google has assimilated the internet. I suspect you won’t have any issues if you run it in Chrome, Edge or Opera… they all use Chromium for their rendering.
This is interesting. I know that smart phones are extremely popular, but I never saw them as a replacement for a computer.
I suspect you are right. I don’t think your opinion is an outlier either.
That said, mobile friendly efforts will only grow the genre. I think that’s what most are rallying for here.
When I created this topic, I expected to have to somehow find the right font size to screen ratio and change the layout a bit to make a parser game mobile-friendly, but there is so much more to digest.
Thank you all for your input thus far. I hope more people chime in with further insight. Amazing comments so far!
probably not, but I simply do not want to be assimilated.
I knew I was going to complain about the keyboard disappearing every turn, but I’ve checked both versions of this game and it seems not to happen with the newer Parchment (on the latest iOS anyway). Well done with that. For me, that keyboard thing made games unplayable.
I think it’s nice to try the first few turns on the phone on the move, to get a feel for it, but I’d never sit down to a big game unless I had a computer screen, pencil and paper.
I like and feel very comfortable inform games, but in order to play glulxe format games I have to do some tricks if I want to make a transcript.
Tactile screen and predictive text are great to play text games.
Some beta programs let me use speech as text input.
Fabularium for Android and Frotz for ios are really the best programs, although I use often Hunky Punk and Thunderword under Text Fiction in android.
Someone mentioned earlier the idea of a custom mobile keyboard;
This is something I’ve considered several times. It would be a game specific keyboard for mobile designed to take up less space. it would be the basic alphabetic key set, probably three rows (no numbers except on shift).
I have the feeling most people are very attached (and familiar) with their mobile keyboard and won’t like it much at all, even if it were to save significant screen space. What are people’s reaction to this?
Would you like it or hate it?
Like with Dvorak keyboards, even if it’s more efficient for people as a whole, it’ll be less efficient for me if I have to work against my muscle memory. It’ll need to save a lot of space to overcome that hurdle.
My experience with games and custom keyboards is that they usually have some features that are nicer for the game than my usual keyboard, but are a little worse in other ways. It’s kind of a toss-up.
If you can make it an option then the users could choose. But you still have to choose which keyboard would be the default, and most people probably wouldn’t change from it. Make the custom keyboard the default and people might be too annoyed to continue playing. Make the native keyboard the default and so few people might choose the custom keyboard that it might not be worth your time developing it…
fabularium has a custom keyboard with no way to switch it to an outside keyboard while keeping functionality and I really dislike that.
This is what i thought.
The real problem is, despite a custom keyboard, there would have to be an option to switch to the system one. And, in that case, the UI would still have to work well enough to play (ie not be super annoying).
And if that were true, there would be little point in a custom keyboard.
In Fabularium you can use the built in keyboard, create a custom one, the Android one or a Bluetooth one. The custom one brings up a lot of possibilities, even assigning commands to some keys. I have some problems with the “ñ” and some other commands when creating a custom keyboard, but still this is a good improvement.
Additionally in Text Fiction, you can program a bunch of icons with some text as commands, a batch of text, etc.
The android keyboard in fabularium is “usable”, but using it means (at least on my system) I am unable to backspace.
Text fiction is smooth but hasn’t been updated since 2014 and I can’t figure out how to play games that aren’t in its existing library.
I Betatest every Game in glulxe format in Text Fiction under Thunderword which does good transcripts.
If the Game is packed in z* format I use Son of Hunky Punk
Works for me (for what it’s worth) – my stock Android onscreen keyboard has a backspace key on it, which works as usual in Fabularium.
