I didn’t get any XYZZY bumps either. I’d post my stats except they’re pretty much like Nils’s. My number of ratings for WHHoGG jumped precisely 1 after the XYZZYs.
I have no idea who the current IF audience is outside of this forum. Almost no one in my real life plays. But they do play touchscreen IF-- I’ve had great success with getting people to play IF on iOS. I’ll just keep banging on this drum until a coder person gets sick of hearing me and tries adapting some IF to touchscreen-- there’s a market and an audience for it if we translate it to a medium that doesn’t require typing or a mouse.
Right, and things like Choices are huge, I gather? Are you thinking of adapting parser-based work to mobile? Because I’d expect a large fraction of choice-based pieces just work, though I could be wrong about that.
So something like Gruescript, or the way Dialog can let you click links instead of typing commands (e.g. Pas de Deux)? Or…what are you thinking, here?
Almost all choice-based IF would be naturally suited to be adapted to touchscreen. Something like The Bones of Rosalinda would kick ass in touchscreen format.
And some parser IF would be very amenable to translation, I think, particularly works like Art DiBianca’s which have such a limited command set. Touchable words in text blocks, touchable nouns and inventory, very moderate text/color effects to pay a little lip service to being a “video” game. I actually think Counterfeit Monkey could be translated brilliantly, since you could have a representation of the letter remover (like a little wheel with the alphabet) and a place where you dragged a word to be modified. I have no idea how amenable Emily or Art would be to such an experiment, but I think it could be done without sacrificing the text-based nature of the games at all. Just sacrificing the parser.
Edit:
Here’s a 5-minute mock-up of how DiBianca’s The Wand could be adapted in landscape mode. I would hope it would look nicer than this, because the idea would be to jazz up the text-only game with some attractive text placement. Because the only actions you can take in the game are with the wand, it’s a natural choice for adaptation. The wand has 3 color panels, so you get some color in there. There are some areas that are dark, so the screen goes dark there until you find the right spell.
I am only using this game for throwing-around-ideas purposes. Art has no knowledge of this and has not consented to such an experiment.
I guess… I’m curious what “adaptation” you think choice-based games need, beyond the authors keeping mobile in mind and testing there: don’t they already work on touchscreen? Obviously you have to design to not need a big screen, but I remember agat commenting about doing some things a particular way on Plasmorphosis because it fit better on mobile, and The Bones of Rosalinda’s page on itch says “Landscape mode recommended on mobile devices.”
Parser IF needs quite a bit of adaptation, yeah. But there have been enough experiments to know that it’s possible. Jon Ingold’s The Colder Light is playable completely without a keyboard, and then a few years later Robin Johnson started his whole journey of keyboardless parser-like IF with Draculaland. I’d do some interface things a bit differently, but it’s certainly possible.
I’ve been thinking for several years that it’d be fun to adapt Counterfeit Monkey, and it’s under an open license (CC-BY-SA 4.0) so it’s fair game. But it’s a huge piece of work. Ryan Veeder has given several people permission to translate Craverly Heights to other systems, so that would likely be a nice place to start. I just keep waffling between doing something with Vorple that’d be more manageable for authors to use with existing work, and building a new system that could avoid some of the things that personally annoy me about Inform (and could possibly be simpler since it wouldn’t necessarily have to support all the things that Inform already does).
I didn’t know this! If they’re already touchable, then people could put them on the app store as they are. I don’t think they’d make a fortune or anything, but I bet some of them would make some money.
I’m mostly interested in parser adaptations, because so many parser-based games (like CM) have such great stories and mechanics that it’s a shame that more people don’t experience them just because they hate typing. You’d probably have to limit the command set for a game like CM, but you could do some really simple text effects when you alter a word that would be really fun. I know a lot of parser purists probably hate this idea, but I think it would be fun to try. CM would be a big one to start with, though. Something like The Wand would be an easier choice for an experiment, since there aren’t any standard verbs other than EXAMINE, and since its mechanism readily lends itself to an easy visual format.
@robinjohnson 's GRUESCRIPT is probably the closest choice system that “feels” parser.
@lft 's Dialog is a parser-system that many like since the code does a lot to approximate functionality of Inform but with more straightforwardly code-like implementing which gives the author many options to make the game touch-friendly.
I’ve always wanted what is basically the SCUMM system with verbs in a grid. In games like Maniac Mansion you got your nouns from the image that took up the top 3/4 of the screen by clicking on [OPEN] (door in the picture) or by items in a visual inventory like [USE] (lighter in inventory) on/with (candle in picture). Except instead of a picture, it would be cool if there were a prose window where you could basically click any noun or word in the text to construct a sentence.
This has been approximated in Legend games like Eric the Unready (which had a still picture you could click on, but also endless scrolling lists of nouns in scope and sort of accomplished a bit in Texture and also experiments like Spondre.
Yeah, anything link-centric like Twine, InkJS, or ChoiceScript, is going to automatically work fine with a touchscreen so far as input goes. A specific game in any of them could solicit keyboard input, but probably doesn’t do more than, say, “What’s your name?”. And any specific game might work badly on a small screen, depending on the author’s CSS.
There have been various takes on offering buttons for common commands. I think this approach could work fine with a game conceived and written for that approach or even as an adaptation from many two-word parser games, but I think it would tend to be awkward at best to adapt most parser-based games to such a format.
I’ve had a little trouble with twine in the past on mobile, not always but sometimes text goes off the screen and stuff. I don’t think it’s inherently good for mobile, but can be. Chapbook seems to be a format designed for mobile.
Both impossible bottle and impossible stairs are parser games that can be completed using 99% links.
Harlowe can be squirrelly, but I also believe Sugarcube can play well on mobile if the author doesn’t customize the format too far beyond its normal specs. It’s got that side window that adjusts well.
Chapbook seems to have been specifically designed with more novel-like prose in mind, and aimed toward authors less inclined to do fancy colors or text formatting tricks.
That’s why I hedged with “so far as input goes”. The text going off the screen is a matter of CSS/HTML. (I don’t know how good the default CSS/HTML of any of them are at being responsive to screen size/orientation.) Many might do badly on a phone, but I expect most would be fine on a medium tablet and nearly all of them fine on a large tablet.
Yes, many games wouldn’t be a good fit for this. I’d think this would be most suited for games with mechanisms that translate to some kind of visual-- not full-on graphics, but things like the colors for the wand, or the letter remover, or some kind of text effect. Something simple that would be in the spirit of the original game.
People always talk about how IF isn’t commercially viable, and it certainly won’t make anyone a billionaire, but people like Abigail Corfman and Amir Rajan have certainly made some money selling IF games. Why not try and see?
But, but, but… that’s the fun part
(honestly you can do a lot of good customising, if you test it on mobile and add @mobile CSS rules
and the base Sugarcube is decent on mobile)
FWIW I’ve played almost all the choice-based entries in the various comps and festivals on my smartphone in a web browser - laptop time is at a premium for me these days - and most of the time it works seamlessly. The exceptions are some higher production value things where I think the custom css doesn’t work with a small screen - January I think fell into this category? - and I had some issues with a few of the Texture games where the drag and drop interface got wonky. But generally the default experience has been just fine.
Yeah, there’s nothing innately mobile-inaccessible about custom CSS, the author just has to put a little extra effort in to make sure it works. If there’s a lot going on on-screen, especially if there’s art, it might be less feasible, but for most Twine games it’s just a couple extra lines of CSS.
The way I found out about IF was utterly random and purely a serendipity - I read a book (Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library) that mentioned Colossal Cave, and after I googled it and played it online, I just fell in love with IF :))
Gotta say, it’s cool to see The Wand still being referenced. I missed a whole lot of new IF during my hiatus from the forum and that was one of the last ones that really left an impression on me before that.
And yeah, it would work great on mobile—a mechanism to highlight any object mentioned in the description to either examine it or magick it, and a representation of the wand’s colors. Tap them to cycle through.
This is for 5 games, all of them free to play, 4 in English, 1 in Spanish. My games are Twine-created, browser-based, gamebooks for Dungeons & Dragons, i.e. you choose your path through the game based off of dice rolls plus bonuses from your character sheet. About 60% of my traffic comes from D&D subreddits and D&D message boards, then about 30% from itch and about 5% from ifdb and 5% from other sources. The spikes correspond to releases of a new game or major updates of an old game. The traffic on those spikes is almost exclusively from reddit. The most popular game, The Saint’s Tomb, has just over 90,000 views and 45,000 browser plays since release in 2020.
From the looks of the thread I’ve got pretty typical choice author traffic. The numbers are a bit incomplete since Birdland and Known Unknowns have their own hosting and only got published to itch a couple of years ago. LTD views on those are roughly 380,000 and 60,000 respectively.
In my experience the best driver of traffic is a freak viral post on 2015-era Tumblr. But failing that itch.io tags also do quite well. You can see how all those tiny but steady streams of traffic add up over the course of a month.
The tail question is interesting. In my experience it varies a lot between games. Weirdly, Known Unknowns has had a very long tail. Its peak year was 2021, half a decade after the first episode dropped. Next strongest was 2022.
Seeing as folks are sharing itch.io stats - here’s mine from the past year. My games were ported from CoG/ChoiceScript (where I saw pretty decent engagement/popularity previously) to Twine for a number of reasons.
The spikes in the images can be attributed to updates/game releases, with the largest spikes typically being updates to Event Horizon, which remains my most popular project. Overall, I’m doing quite “well” when you consider that my games have only been out on this platform for less than a year, and I’m fairly new to IF as a genre in general. As far as the source of the viewers - most of them have been (since moving my blogs to private ) through other popular authors, the character customization tag (which can be misleading; lost birds has no character customization, save for the main POV character’s gender/pronouns), and the NSFW tag for each of the games’ respective genres.
) through other popular authors, the character customization tag (which can be misleading; lost birds has no character customization, save for the main POV character’s gender/pronouns), and the NSFW tag for each of the games’ respective genres.