I’m working on a new Android app called Thunderword that will be able to run Z-code, Glulx, and, as things progress, basically any C compiled interpreter engine that can interface with Glk via RemGlk… so HUGO, TADS, plan-9, etc.
I know that there is some demand “out there in the world” for fiction writers to publish their own app that basically provides one single story. Such authors want to be able to track downloads (and possibly monetary sales) of their work. But the headaches of publishing, maintaining and getting to work a full “interpreter engine” in their own app can be difficult. Many fiction authors may not want to deal with security fixes and complex things in computer software. Beyond those issues, I have found that browsing + surfing + collecting + organizing a large number of stories and games can have many different user interface ideas. By allowing multiple apps to be the front-end chooser + picker of what to play, we can have more open and flexible choices.
In that spirit, I’ve made the decision to promote and encourage third-party apps to interface with Thunderword. For example, a browsing app could be made called Lightning that downloads and picks files from a library. Of course, any player can also fire up a web browser like Opera, Firefox, Chrome and download a story blorb file and open it directly in Thunderword without needing a second app on their Android device.
I encourage people who are interested to make apps now. Basically, to interface with Thunderword, you would save the game file on public storage space such as “/sdcard/Interactive Fiction/mygame.gblorb” and then your app sends an Android broadcast Intent (in the background) that tells Thunderword app to load and play that story… And when the player exits the game in Thunderword, it can notify your outside app back with a similar background Intent (Android BroadcastReceiver). Your app could keep track of how much time the player spent in the story, and Thunderword could even share with your app information about how many responses the player made to the story - so you can determine if they just launched and walked out or actually interacted with the story. Save games and such can be shared with your app (the one that launched the story), in standard format that the existing RemGlk and interpreters would use, and your app could do what you wanted with those files (for example, share them to another Android device or PC the user may own, or email a save game to another person).
Even if you don’t want to make your own Android app, you can take advantage of some of these integration features. You could email the player a copy of your blorb and have it launch into Thunderword from their Gmail client. Or, it may be possible for you to build a normal HTML website instead of an app - and have it launch stories from Opera, Firefox, Chrome, etc directly into Thunderword - and if so wished, have a URL on your website notified when the user has exited the game you requested launched (the user would have the option of blocking this notification for privacy concerns). In other words, you could build a website for browsing Interactive Fiction stories that users could consider to be a library organizing tool for Android.
Of course, Thunderword can play stories entirely offline in airplane mode. I’m giving these online examples to inspire developers to create fancy and nice looking tools to help locate and download the stories! I am currently targeting modern Android 5, 6, and 7 devices. I also have in hand one Amazon Kindle Fire, generation 5 device (just updated to Fire OS 5.3.2.1), and Thunderword should also work on Kindle Fire devices too. It should not take much to get the app working as far back as Android 4.1 devices, so that won’t be too far down the road…
I encourage you to work on apps and ideas today to pick and download story files on Android! Thank you.