New point & click framework for Ink

Authoring Choice-based IF
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Hi! I know this forum is mostly for people who eschew graphics, but I figured I might as well share since there are Ink users here.

I’ve finally released a point & click template for Ink that I’ve been working on for a while. The philosophy is to support writing a fully text-based game in Ink and then “upgrading” it with simple graphics and point & click functionality, while still supporting text-based testing/previewing in Inky, as well as screenreaders (although I’m still having some difficulties with screenreader support).

If you try it out, let me know what you think (even if you just read the documentation)!

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Cool resource! It’s a bit outside my skillset to use, but I’m bookmarking it anyway, just to be on the safe side.

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appreciating “poink-and-clink”

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Hi. this is fantastic stuff. I’d like to encourage this sort of functionality to, at least, be on offer to IF.

I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while now (see my doctor who game). You can click on objects in scenes and the scene stack is made of layers with possible animation.

Some things:

  1. consider changing your areas to polygons (or even polygon sets) and implement point-in-polygon.

  2. consider highlighting the clickable regions on hover.

  3. give the areas a Z value, because they will overlap.

Best of luck.

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Supporting polygons is easy to add & will probably happen eventually. Currently, z order is just determined by the order in which the areas are added, which I feel is “good enough” for the applications I have in mind, but I might add more explicit controls for that in the future.

Unfortunately, the current setup (using html image maps) would not really be conducive to highlighting the areas. But the hover text accomplishes more or less the same goal (making it clear when you’re hovering over a clickable area).

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I understand. Also the “hover” backfires on mobile because you can’t hover with your finger and you’re back to “fishing” for clickables.

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I’ll go ahead and do my due diligence in testing this on all of my devices and screen readers, Windows with JAWS and NVDA, Android with TalkBack, and (if I can get around to it) VoiceOver on iOS. I’ll post here about problems and possible solutions, although I might just write one long GitHub issue to save you the time of having to hunt through my posts if this thread becomes too active.

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Ooh, that would be very appreciated!

In particular, in the demo game there’s supposed to be room description text that’s perceptible to screenreaders but not shown visually, but in my testing (in Orca) it stops being reliably navigable if there’s absolutely zero visible text onscreen, although I’m not sure whether this is partly due to me just not understanding screenreader navigation. Also, the text in the “interior” scene is often read out in a weird order in Chromium (but not Firefox) and I’m not sure why.

EDIT: Although, for the record, I don’t really expect it to work well on mobile (screenreader or otherwise), it’s mostly targeting desktop. I guess it should say that in the documentation somewhere.

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