Newbie question about release with an interpreter and a website--Game indefinitely loads without play starting

Hi all, I’m new to Inform 7 and pretty new to interactive fiction in general. I’d written a short story that I submitted to IFComp, but embarrassingly, I keep finding that the play.html page for my Inform-generated website never loads after you click the “Play In-Browser” link from the index.html page.

The loading symbol spins and spins and spins and never loads….. I only have this problem after I zip my Release folder and upload it to a website. If I open the index.html from within my file explorer and open the HTML page locally, I can click on “Play In-Browser” and it will open the play.html page and let me play my game just fine. Has anyone had this problem before?? Is there anything I can do to fix it? My inform code is super simple (new to writing Inform) so my rule for the interpreter is just “Release along with an interpreter and a website.”

I did use some text effects for my game, so I did edit the index.html, style.css, and interpreter.glkote.css files in the Release folder. I don’t know if that would cause the game to be unplayable online, or why the game might be playable if started from the file explorer on my local machine but not when hosted on a website. I’ve uploaded a short Inform game to itch.io using “Release with an interpreter and a website” before, and had that work fine.

This is the section of my index.html where play.html is linked in case anyone sees anything obviously amiss there?

<div class="links">
	<ul>
	<li><div class="download"><a href="Pure.gblorb">Story File</a> <span class="filetype">(Blorb,&nbsp;1.8MB)</span></div></li>
	<div class="auxiliary"><li><a href="play.html">Play In-Browser</a> <span class="filetype">(link)</span></li></div>
	</ul>
</div>

Can you open the browser’s dev console and look for error messages? If it gets stuck on the spinner, there should be some.

The IFComp “play on-line” page for PURE expects the javascript-ified form of your game file to be at https://3222.play.ifcomp.org/content/interpreter/PURE.gblorb.js and that just isn’t there (404 - Not Found). Any chance you accidentally left it out of your submission?

1 Like

“I bet it’s a case-sensitivity error,” I said, and I was right. The file is named

https://3222.play.ifcomp.org/content/interpreter/Pure.gblorb.js

The play.html file must refer to it with exactly that capitalization.

3 Likes

That was the fix! Thank you!