Mobile Gaming | ifography

Worlds in the Palm of your Hand

A guide to enjoying & creating IF on mobile devices

With the power of computers, adventurers can explore nearly anywhere an author’s imagination can take them. One surprising fact to know is that the original astronauts – adventurers for real – landed on the moon using a guidance computer with a 1MHz processor and 4kB of memory, which is possibly less memory than some robust Inform 7 extensions. Most everyone who carries a smartphone has more processing power in their pocket than the early space shuttles.

Gaming has exploded on portable devices, as smaller devices encourage different types of games without triple-A requirements and budgets, shorter development times, and smaller teams of programmers. Mobile gaming blockbusters can be created entirely by one person with a great idea and a little know-how.

Interactive fiction, with story games with minimal requirements and its use evocative text to take the place of extensive graphics and mechanics, should fit well here.

The stumbling block for IF ironically turns out to be its unique feature: extensive written text. Phones and tablets haven’t always been great devices supporting extensive typing. Choice-based narratives would seem to have an advantage here with the option of tappable hypertext, but unless authors are web-savvy and aware of mobile display options, even the most beautifully arranged text can become mangled, so that the story just becomes plain unreadable and the game unplayable.

Mobile interactive fiction gaming is just beginning to solve these problems and connect the two halves of the bridge between author and player in a variety of different ways.

Many of the resources listed are for authors to create and distribute their work, but links will also be provided for players searching for interactive stories to play and read. What follows is by no means an exhaustive list, but some of the current best options in a field that is constantly expanding.

By Hanon Ondricek

Twine (http://twinery.org/)

Twine is in a period of adjustment. Twine 2.0 is currently having the bugs worked out, but its default Harlowe output is a lot friendlier for mobile devices (and visibility in general) with nicely-sized book-like serif fonts and text that word-wraps for individual screen size.

Much of the published Twine, however uses the old Sugarcane format which can be dreadful on a small screen due to hard margins--if the text is scaled up on a small device, that means zooming into the screen and panning back and forth (that’s if your phone can scale a Web page).

Savvy authors have accommodated for this; Porpentine always supplies nice big readable text, and Lynnea Glasser worked some magic for her Twine remake of Coloratura in Sugarcane to remove the static left bar and let the text wrap readably onto any screen.

With the new version of Twine presenting a sea-change to hardcore users, and an alternate branch of Twine called Sugarcube that is highly popular, Twine remains easy to pick up and use, but can be a bramble-search to create something innovative and completely user-friendly, especially for mobile play.

inklewriter (http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/)

Another option is to use a development system specifically designed to optimize mobile display. Inklewriter is easy to use (created by the designers of "80 Days" and "Sorcery!" and ostensibly part of the base code for these offerings) providing authors an online GUI for creation of short to moderate-length texts, and an ultimate static URL for distribution.

Though not as flexible as Twine (no color choices, no inline links to the story), hosted images and external Web links can be part of the text. The output on a small screen is comfortably readable like an e-book, and the buttons for choices are large and nicely tappable.

I like the idea that the stories are hosted and created all on one website. Even though authors can’t extract the game and put it someplace else, the URL inkle provides can be used as a direct link on IFDB or any page. Also, development is in-browser on the website, so writing is impossible offline.

Creating stories is free, but inkle also offers a special option for a small fee to convert an inklewriter text into a Kindle format which does become an external file that can be sold on the Amazon store. Due to the process involved, certain features of inklewriter (extensive variables, story looping) won’t work in the conversion, but this is one route available for authors to actually sell their work.

Choice of Games (https://www.choiceofgames.com/)

Choice of Games is one of the more successful publishers of longer novel and novella-sized choice-based works, and it's actually got a working business plan. Authors may submit completed works to them for hosting on app stores, or query the company to get commissioned to write for its banner Choice of Games label.

The Choice of Games titles have a very established house style that authors must adhere to, but hosted games are much more open to what can be accepted.

The ChoiceScript language has perhaps a tiny speedbump to get started, since code must be written in a text editor and compiled, but tools developed by their community make this much easier, and I was able to export an HTML from an online tool in a snap.

Authors are free to use ChoiceScript for anything provided that they do not sell their work, but creating a commercial game means getting hosted through CoG or making alternate royalty arrangements.

The community is active and quite friendly; it’s like an American going to Iceland where everything is just a little different.

AXMA StoryMaker (http://sm.axmasoft.com/)

I’m a huge fan of AXMA StoryMaker, a Russian-developed, fully-enclosed choice-based development system that writes a lot like Twine, and has some features baked in, (real time clocks … sprites?) that Twine authors would need to find plugins for and fiddle with.

Version 3 has online and offline IDEs, graphic, sound and music support, and the developers are now tinkering with including sprites, I’m guessing for applications such as a world-map and movable markers on it.

For someone like me who doesn’t do JavaScript and has only a glancing understanding of HTML and CSS, this will produce a nicely formatted and readable story. Version 3 includes much specific improvement for mobile devices and text and menus scale and work spectacularly without fuss most of the time.

Authors can use AXMA for free; however, EPUB and direct export to HTML are a paid feature (for a one-time fee of approximately $45).

Paid users can also customize the exported HTML.

For non-paying users, AXMA provides an online library that is sparsely populated on the U.S. website, but has a loyal user base on the Russian side.

Potential players can be directed to this library to (and authors also can) download the HTML build from there.

StoryNexus (http://storynexus.com/s)

One of the more popular persistent online games, "Fallen London," surprisingly, does not work well on small mobile devices, consisting of an interface with tabbed menus and hard-sized boxes of text that require the zoom and pan method if the the text is too small in full-screen. It’s very surprising that Failbetter Games haven’t at least created phone-optimized app.

Its user creation tool, StoryNexus, fares no better, and has had the system for an author monetizing a world removed, making it a choice for creating "Fallen London"-ish games only if the deck-drawing storylet model works for the specific game a creator wants to make. Its IDE and the games created with it are also online-only, but quite accessible after a slightly moderate learning curve.

Squiffy (https://textadventures.co.uk/squiffy)

Squiffy, still in development, is a new, lightweight, choice-based authoring system from Alex Warren, the creator of Quest. It strips away a lot of Twine’s overhead and offers some intelligently simple text variation and tag-and-replace features, resulting in a plain HTML file with an eye toward packaging the resulting output as mobile or desktop apps.

For authors who aren’t looking for jiggly text but might wish to play around with presentation, it’s very straightforward.

Warren's latest innovation is a browser-based editor, which means users don't have to use the command-line interface anymore to compile their stories. We’ll be watching this as it develops.

Finding choice-based games (http://www.philome.la/ - http://ifdb.tads.org/ - http://www.ifarchive.org/)

For a player desiring mobile play, choice-based games are everywhere, and many are hosted directly on a website with no download required. These websites can be a bit scattered, but many are searchable via IFDB.

Philome.la is a great site for authors to host Twine games for free (requiring a Twitter account to log in) but does not have any apparent means to list out or search through all the existing games.

Similarly, the IF Archive offers direct search, but is more of a backend to host games (again, for free) and display them on IFDB.

Parser gaming on iOS

Most everyone who uses a smartphone that can run a browser and apps is accustomed to typing on their phone in quick bursts for text messages and email. To play a game with a full parser can be a similar experience, since many of the commands are reduced to abbreviations. The problem that arises is switching back and forth between lengthy text and touch-screen keyboard entry.

The ideal phone interpreter has probably not been created yet, but the closest I’ve experienced is Frotz on iOS.

For authors, all one needs do is have a game listed on IFDB with an IF Archive entry and it’s available to Frotz by tapping the blorb link.

I don’t use TADS, but my large Inform 7 game with images and sound downloaded and ran perfectly minus the sound. It seems most any modern Inform 7 game using the standard included features will work, however heavily customized games that go outside the parameters to do fancy tricks such as real time or java or object creation may not.

This may not be as much of a problem as expected, as I actually downloaded and ran the first bit of "Counterfeit Monkey" successfully and it included a zoomable (but low-res and unresponsive) map.

I haven’t gotten far enough so it might eventually crash and burn, but this is impressive from what I understand about how complicated the game mechanics are under the hood.

The last time I tried mobile Frotz was on an Android device, and it worked passably, but was an ultimately disappointing experience. To my great surprise, the current version has a new host of conveniences. I tested on my iPhone 5c, so earlier versions or low-powered devices may differ in functionality.

The thing that makes Frotz vastly useful is that it connects directly to the IFDB website, allowing a player to browse and download games directly to the app.

It comes with a list of classic games built in, but many more can be added up to the limit of phone storage and memory.

Frotz allows saves and restores to be uploaded to a cloud or a Dropbox account to transfer them back and forth between desktop and device.

You could work your way through a list of comp games on a long commute (provided, of course, that they had entries on IFDB.) Typing is as good as expected depending on a specific device with a pop-up keyboard. The app does a good job vanishing and reappearing it intuitively.

Instead of the customary > prompt, the game shows a book icon. Tap that, and a list of common verbs appears.

There is also predictive text with autocorrect, as always good and bad. In a session of "Ad Verbum," which wants you to specify unique verbs, I had to fight with the correction a bit.

I did note that suggested words seem to be contextual and possibly derived from the source text.

Frotz even makes notes. Swipe right-to-left to access a notepad specific to each game that retains what is typed there. Even more impressively, I was able to switch between open sessions of multiple games and Frotz intelligently saves the game and the notes and remembers what turn I was on – even through a complete phone restart.

I’m sure there must be a limit to this which is probably dependent on how much memory the device has, but it almost makes me want to slot my phone into one of those Bluetooth keyboard contraptions for tablets and do all my parser gaming there, the switching is so instantaneous.

I haven’t used WinFrotz, but is there an interpreter for a much more powerful desktop environment that holds your place in multiple games at the same time? Why hasn’t this been invented yet?

As before, not every game will work on mobile – "Counterfeit Monkey" was a happy surprise – but there are enough good games on IFDB that you can while away hours with a handheld device and an internet connection or preloaded up for a long trip beforehand. This gives me no excuse to not start spackling in the gaps in my IF knowledge.

Are phones actually worth playing parser IF on?

Smartphones can be useful in their own way, but they have their annoyances too. Let's see how good phones are from my perspective using Android.

If you use an Android phone, you will be disappointed to find out that the apps on the market there basically only support Z-machine and TADS files.

The advantage of playing IFs on Android is that you can find more apps/interpreters on the market that can play Z-machine games.

On the I'm writing this, I found five different apps supporting IFs. The best one available, Son of Hunky Punk, supports both Z-machine and TADS games, as mentioned above, together with an easy-to-use interface and great saving capabilities. The rest only support Z-code games or lag during command input and are mostly slow.

Not unique to Android IFers is making spelling errors when entering commands into the parser.

To be honest, you will still encounter some slowdowns while typing if you attempt to rush through the game and typing too ferociously, like me. Just remember to slow down while you type.

Another thing that I've noticed while playing these games with phones is that puzzles are probably one of the hardest things to solve. I couldn't progress far at all during my first attempt in "Slouching Towards Bedlam."

For one thing, I was not able to quickly type in inputs to experiment with the puzzles. This is a slow touch keyboard we are talking about, not those plastic keyboards that you can type fast with.

Also, most phone) can only display one app at a time, and when if you are stuck at an area in the game, trying to look at a walkthrough using the phone's browser will really slow you down as you need keep rotating between the apps.

Also, entering a browser using a slower phone will take time, thanks to the amount of memory that these browsers take.

Your phone's home button will probably break in time if you keep exiting and re-entering apps. (On the bright side, you can use that as an excuse to get a new phone.)

To save time, I download an offline browser to save my walkthroughs in case I need help, and best of all, it doesn't take long to rotate.

Unfortunately, even the supported formats don't always work correctly.

Some games like "Shrapnel" just run weirdly on the Android apps. It's probably because they lack a feature that available on PC Frotz, so it's a strike-out. Z6 games are not playable on Android phones either, as they contain graphics and a special interface.

Despite the limitations of Android interpreters, I could finish "Anchorhead" while I was busy having a vacation in another country using a less-than-powerful smartphone.

Next thing on my list when visiting another country: complete "Curses."