Some of you may have seen my last post about file sizes and stuff. I just completed my initial code for exporting from my no-code IF engine, and I tested it with a simple COD game. According to the link download, it ended up being 234kb (I’m okay with this for now, most of that is the javascript built in for parsing). I’m looking for feedback on the design, the feel, simplicity/complexity, usability, etc. The file I’m linking to is the exported COD html file, this is what a user would be able to export from the software in order to send their game wherever they wanted (hopefully for free but I’ll never judge - it is all open source, but a lot of newer stuff still needs pushed to github, so refrain from downloading or pulling just yet - I’ll update the community when it’s in a stable place). Any and all feedback is welcome! The goal is to create a simple (but in-depth) no-code engine for those who want to write I.F. but don’t want to spend the time learning the languages or existing tools. This particular game (COD) is built in the classic version, meaning input is taken via an input bar… but the engine also supports “modern” and “gamebook” style games… where “modern” consists of directional buttons and action buttons, and “gamebook” only consists of direction buttons. Thanks.
Edit: file io only allowed 1 download for the link, so I made a new one using fastupload io… let’s see if that’s better.
Looks good to me. A couple of low-priority things:
The game does not differentiate between verbs it knows and it does not know, right? But that’s not really a UI thing, just thought I’d throw it out there for completeness.
The IFID could also be included like this: <meta property="ifiction:ifid" content="448E73DF-2D2F-47E7-A494-A46B40D4CFB3"> (as specified in the Treaty of Babel)
Maybe add a <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> for responsiveness?
Subjective: I’m not a huge fan of the high-contrast white borders and would maybe try going for something more grey. I’m also not even sure you need the outer border.
You could improve on the “confirm” by using a custom pop-up. (But confirm does the job.)
This is actually the only one I consider “wrong”: on a mobile phone in portrait mode the margin on the left and right is just too big. It wastes screen-estate.
Thank you so much for these tips! I actually can’t believe I forgot the responsive-ness line… that’s usually copy and pasted from all my boiler plate code in all my projects - but this engine is an old project so I might have just left it out back then.
If the author of a game does not include a verb in the creation of the game, then that verb is unknown to the parser (and it should be caught, hopefully, by the portion of the code that should print “This did nothing”). Of course, a player could easily find bugs by including the proper words in the proper order with a bunch of nonsense thrown about (e.g. for “Hang cloak on hook”, it would probably also work with “Hang tuesday’s cloak behind the grand canyon green aliens on the hook”). But the way I see it is, the parser is as logical as the player wants it to be - so I’m okay with this for now.
I just now fixed the margins for smaller screens with a media query. I’ll maybe change white to light gray in the near future too.
