I always play in a tablet or an iPad, mostly offline while drawing and taking notes in a notebook with coloured pencils. Additionally if I am out of my home I play in a smartphone. I feel that more intimistic.
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Most of those samples were unreadable for me with glasses, and my optician says I have 20/20 vision. In addition, voice reading for long is exhausting for me.
I have a game engine (Ren’Py) that automates most of the things stated to be needed for mobile play (the only part it doesn’t do out of the box is line spacing), but on this sample actually testing it is going to be a pain in the neck. And eyes.
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I also am 56 years old and wear glasses to read, but I am more comfortable reading in my iPad than in my Pc.
I have tried also all the speaking programs to play IF but haven’t still found no appropiate one.
Finally I am interested in Renpy after your comment.
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Following these discussions because after writing a TALJ game for children I found that they are another group who often don’t have easy access to devices with a keyboard. They more often have access to a tablet or phone but a computer is likely to be a parent’s work machine and thus they can’t just dive into a game on it. I’m planning another children’s game for next year (tie-in / extension of a live show) and it would structurally work well as a parser game but I think unless I can find a really straightforward (for the player) way to make that work for mobile devices it’ll have to be a choice game.
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I’m working on adding a “larger text” option to the Dialog web interpreter, but at the moment, the best I can do is a checkbox (rather than anything more fine-grained). So if there’s just a single “larger” option, how much larger should it be for easy reading? 1.67em or so?
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double?
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Double is an easy option, I just worry it’ll be too much.
I remember reading long ago a piece of design advice which I think was attributed to Sid Meier: if you need to adjust a number and you have no immediate basis for determining by how much, always start by doubling or halving - firstly because it’s usually easy to do and secondly because we tend to underestimate how much change is necessary. It’s easy to waste time trying to decide whether x1.2 or x1.25 would be a better tweak only to try out it and discover that actually x3 or x4 is needed for the desired effect.
To add a couple of anecdotal datapoints to the original discussion in this thread: firstly, I’m of the generation that sees a mobile device as a convenience and a PC as needed for “real” work, but as a secondary school teacher I see on a constant basis how alien this perspective is to young people: many of my students refer to all desktop PCs as “laptops”. And secondly, despite my own preference for playing IF on a PC, I do much of it on a mobile phone anyway because I have young children and frequently have only a few minutes at a time to play and can’t count on being able to do it wherever my “real” computer is.
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“double” could be a lot. But it’s easily the difference between mobile and desktop - or even more. The DPI of a desktop is around 100 and for phones it can easily be 480. So that would need to be 4 times as big to be the same size. However phones are nearer to the face so you don’t need 4x. maybe 2x.
That was my thinking.
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