For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Norbez. I’m the author of The Mouse in this year’s IF Comp, and I’ve been making IF for about 3 years now. Nice to meet you!
The Pippin Barr ‘GAME IDEA’ Game Jam has started, and I made a little IF for it. I’ve wanted to make a Twine with Wingdings for a while now, and now I’ve made one, called Your Edges Don’t Belong Here! Check it out:
Is there any special trick to get this game started? It stays at “Initializing. Please wait…” on Chrome while IE11 gives a heading “Curing Outlying Squares” with a subheading? - “PSA from the Roundtable Network” and a Restart button at top-right.
Nothing further happens or is clickable or anything.
Also your choice of blue on black in the text description below is barely readable. Highlighting it all to turn the text to white improves it considerably.
Finally figured out that it might be something to do with my ad-blockers / popup blockers. Switched to EDGE (which I don’t like to use) and I finally got it to load and play.Maybe its just me or my antiquity, but I didn’t really understand what was happening as I blindly clicked until I became a circle.( I guess this was the intended outcome.) Did notice that towards the end if I hovered over one of the choices, the second choice was also underlined. (design or bug ?) Guess I’ll just keep to the games that I can read. Although it was an interesting diversion, I can’t see too much use for this in a larger game, but I’m sure I’ll be proved wrong.
Not sure if you need to put a comment on the site about disabling blockers.
I played it on OS X (and with a blocker on) and it worked fine. Maybe it’s Linux that it’s unplayable on?
…and honestly, it seems pretty presumptuous to link to a page that says “never use Wingdings” when the whole point of the game seems to be that it’s made in Wingdings. If it doesn’t work on some systems it doesn’t work on those systems, but saying “Please trash your game and write a different game instead” isn’t constructive.
I think the idea isn’t to avoid the symbols, but to avoid one particular implementation (using ASCII characters in rather than Unicode). Here’s what the game looks like for me:
However, the Wingdings → Unicode transliteration isn’t perfect; I’m not sure which characters this relies on, but if it makes heavy use of arrows it may not be worth it. The majority of people use Windows or have Microsoft Office installed nowadays.