I am all-in on itch.io - their platform stats are really useful. I’m not sure if I want to learn a whole new website as I’d rather spy on my game activity in one place!
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Personally, I’ve discovered many cool things I wouldn’t have otherwise solely because they were crossposted. I think I only became interested in your games because I saw and played Cannery Vale on textadventures.co.uk, for instance. I would never have found your games on Itch, which has awful search features, and even though I might’ve seen them on IFDB, in my recollection it was textadventures.co.uk that got me to play them.
I wish more people would crosspost, but also understand if people think it’s not worth the effort or want to finish a polished version before they put their work somewhere else. That last part is what I’ve told myself many times, though it usually ends with the polished version never getting finished and made.
I think the main advantage is portability. I’m often away from home, and play IF sometimes in places where I couldn’t bring my own personal computer with me, or take it out. But a phone is compact. I can bring out and use my phone while standing or doing chores like making food. And, of course, a great deal of people can only afford to have a phone and not a computer. Most people who have to get either a phone or a computer would likely choose the phone, since it’s far easier to make calls with it and take it with you wherever you go. It sucks that the state of accessible smartphones is so shitty, though.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the share of people who use phones versus computers to access the Internet. This random statistics site said that there’s about twice as much mobile internet traffic as desktop internet traffic. In the US and Japan, the ratio is relatively balanced, while in Nigeria and India, there’s about four times more mobile traffic compared to desktop traffic. I don’t know where these statistics are coming from, as a caveat.
The ideal, I think, is to create a website that works on all browsers on both computers and phones, adjusting for every possible screen width. Unfortunately, that comes with a lot of work and aesthetic compromises, and takes time. Accessibility issues are like this in general. The devs either don’t think about it, don’t have the time and energy to do all of it, don’t care enough, or any combination of the above. Many sites, apps, and games aren’t accessible to one or more of these groups: people who use screenreaders, people who don’t know the app’s main language, people who use phones, people who use computers… This is before we even get into geoblocking and censorship.
There’s also an imbalance to this, where larger organizations like big companies are more likely to be able to address all these issues, which means they get more of the traffic, which means the small apps and sites have even less of an incentive to work on accessibility issues. Google’s sites, like Youtube, automatically change languages depending on the region of the world you’re accessing them from, but IFDB is only available in English.
At the risk of digressing, there’s also another standpoint on phones that I feel deserves mention, which is the governmental standpoint. Governments love phones because they make people infinitely more easy to track. A world where people do almost everything through their phones is a world where almost every action is legible and traceable. A population where everyone brings their internet-connected phones with them, everywhere they go, is easier to control. But then, in today’s high-tech societies, mass surveillance is everywhere and the average person’s privacy is essentially dead. So maybe I should give up griping.
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Makes sense the mobile:desktop ratio would be even more skewed in less developed countries… Once mobile technology exists, it’s easier to build cell towers than lay miles of cable… Also, I suspect phones consume less power than desktops or laptops on average, so easier to keep a phone charged off a portable solar panel in the absence of a robust power grid.
Though, there are plenty of blind people using both android and iOS, I just never got the hang of using Talkback and I have no interest in Apple’s Walled Garden, so have never tried Voiceover. Granted, during the time frame I gave Talkback a try, I had no pressing need for a computing device I can use on the go, and if I did, I could just use a Raspberry Pi with a USB power pack. If I needed to learn to use Talkback, I might have been able to fight past the rustrations.
It is certainly interesting. For the upcoming contest, the Text Adventure Literacy Jam 2026, the rules say and strongly intimate that the game should be playable in the browser for maximum eyeballs but also need to be downloadable and playable for the archives. I have signed up for the contest and have rolled my own system that does both. I made a sample with my system in an earlier state here The Final Mask by Candy64 and it is a browser based game. The game also plays in a mobile player as well as the PC. I’m excited to be about to share my system with the community. In it you design your whole world complete with the rules to govern it. The visual designer, a windows PC application has an export to browser function. This creates a zip file that becomes a playable browser game on itch. If anyone is interested in learning more about my system I’d love to talk about it. It has been a labor of love and I have been working on it for over 15 months. The original code started out on the Commodore 64 ala emulator and I brought it to Windows and Android from there.
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I went to check out your demo game and I hate to be that guy but I found it basically unplayable because the page is locked to a fixed width/height that doesn’t fit in the browser window I have open for it. It took me a minute to figure out that there’s an input field hidden off the bottom of the screen. I understand that this is at least partly due to itch showing the content in an iframe that’s too large for the window at 960x900, and your inner content is set to 100vh which in this context is relative to the iframe. It would be good to adjust that if you’re able to.
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Thanks @Ivan That’s very good feedback. I will make those changes to it and it is a small change to make the adjustment.
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@Ivan I made a change to the page that should help make it playable. Thanks so much. I can’t say how much I appreciate the feedback. In this day and age it is so hard to get it and I take it very seriously and to heart.
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