The game “The Master’s Lair” already took part in IFComp 2024 and achieved a breathtaking 58th place. Some technical peculiarities and problems were also responsible for this, so I have worked through these as far as possible.
“The Master’s Lair” was originally released as an app that you had to download from the Windows Store. That went down about as well as having to sacrifice your first-born child in order to play the game.
I have therefore abandoned the app version (currently) and built a web-based version. And you can find it here: The Master's Lair (Tadaaa)
There are also some changes compared to the IFComp version:
There are a lot of corrections to the text, especially the English one. Words appearing in the text and then not being recognized should no longer occur.
New UI elements such as a graphical menu for layout selection, a compass rose and simplified multiple choice directly from the TreeView lists
AI-generated illustrations for each location. Since AI art is not uncontroversial, I have left it switched off by default. Personally, I find the illustrations quite inspiring. However, they are not a fully-fledged part of the game.
If anyone else would like to take a look, I would be very happy to receive feedback.
Keyboard flip problems: What exactly happened on your device? Maybe I can fix it.
To be honest: On a mobile device I would never type, because multiple choice works much smoother. Voice input is even better, apart from the fact that people on the subway might look at you curiously.
Running in desktop browser, everything is working great. Very nice layout adjustments on resize etc.
Android mobile browsers;
Firefox on android, when you tap on the text entry box, the system keyboard pops up and then unpops back down again. So you can’t type anything at all. However, i did for a while get this to stay up sometimes on a pad. But then it started flipping up and down again.
Chrome on android, cannot get the game to load. Sits in the “loading” screen forever.
I have had enormous problems with controlling the system keyboard on mobile browsers. I wasted so much time on it. The problem is that the browser is always changing and there are so many browsers to support.
In the end, i finally threw in the towel and wrote my own mobile keyboard designed for IF. Here’s a shot. I have 4 rows and only “.,-” and punctuation. Pressing shift gives numbers and other punctuation. You don’t need upper and lower case for game input so this saves space. The IF keyboard take approx 25% of vertical space instead of around 40-50% for system keyboards.
Alternatively, you could disable the text input feature on mobile. As you point out, you don’t need to type anyhow.
So that’s an interesting question as to why it’s different for you.
(and it’s not hard to see why I suggest not to activate a complex UI layout)
Your keyboard solution looks great. I don’t think the idea of building your own keyboard is far-fetched. At least then you have full control over the behavior.
30 seconds is not ideal, I saw that much faster on mobile devices, both with WIFI or without.
With Chrome your keyboard issues are completely fixed?
In my opinion, you’re absolutely right about one thing: you shouldn’t trust soft keyboards on smartphones. Perhaps the next keyboard component will come around the corner tomorrow, which may behave completely differently.
Yes, it looks like you’re good at the moment on Android Chrome. But the problem i had is that it doesn’t always stay that way. Not sure what your underlying tech is but the problem i had was having my own input widget. This confused the browsers.
In any case, your system is looking really good. There are a lot of config options and layout alternatives. Are you streaming the pictures on demand or preloading them? Preloading will explain the long start up delay on mobile networks.
I highly recommend loading on demand for web and also have different resolutions. I load smaller/low-res images for web mobile and bigger ones on desktop. I discovered mobile networks aren’t really good enough for more than 1k pictures (ie 1024x?)
Great work and hope to see more games in this system.
In any case, your system is looking really good. There are a lot of config options and layout alternatives.
Thanks a lot. Still, if you have ideas how to improve it: I’ll give it a try.
Are you streaming the pictures on demand or preloading them? Preloading will explain the long start up delay on mobile networks.
Yes, I preload the pictures, but I was never able to reproduce such long loading time. Even at the moment, when I’m in Espana with a very bad WIFI it loads much faster than 30 seconds. So there’s probably another thing on your device that slows down loading. I don’t know, but I’ll try to remove preloading on mobile for a test.
Great work and hope to see more games in this system.
Wow, the game is working really well! So many options to personalize the gaming experience are very comfortable for browser experiences! Two things are outstanding. Multiple instance detection and the way the game state persistance is handled. Fantastic
The recognition of multiple instances of the app in the browser was simply necessary because the game saves would otherwise be overwritten. It is not actually technically very complicated, but the process probably has a few loopholes.
What I actually find much cooler is the autosave when you close the browser tab, or the entire browser, or even when you refresh the page. The game returns to the start page, but the autosave is usually still completely available and is then loaded automatically. It is almost impossible NOT to save an autosave. This great feature could also be realized with a little JavaScript code.
