My thoughts on mobile IF user interface:
First, on 5" phones, the situation really isn’t so bad. Hadean Lands is basically playable on a 4.7" iPhone 6 with not much in the way of phone-based UI assistance.
Having said that, I think there is room for some possible improvements.
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iosGlk offers a nice feature where you can double-click on any word on the screen and it will add it to the current input text, with a little animation. That’s a big help.
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iosGlk also provides a nav bar at the top of the screen with a button to show/hide the keyboard. When the keyboard is hidden, the game shows a tab bar at the bottom, including a Help tab and a Settings tab.
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It would be cool if Thunderword would provide game-specific keyboard autosuggest suggestions. I believe it’s possible to influence/control the keyboard autosuggest options in an Android app. At a minimum, you can disable the keyboard’s suggestions and provide a “fake” suggestion bar of your own.
If you populate the suggestion lexicon with words shown in the game, plus a dozen standard commands (examine, look, take, wait, save, restore, undo, drop, open, close, push, pull, turn, put) I bet it’d work just dandy.
It’d be especially helpful if the “default” three suggestions before you type anything are “examine” “inventory” and “look” (or maybe “help”).
- Long term, I think the right way to make phone-friendly parser IF is for all games to adopt key features from Blue Lacuna, especially including hypertext in the transcript, and a feature where typing a noun does a default action (normally “examine”). The autocomplete bar would then support links instead of terms. For example, Hadean Lands includes a “dusty bubble” and a “scratched bubble” as objects. Typing “d” should suggest “dusty bubble” instead of just “dusty” (because that’s a link that has appeared in the game). The game would autosuggest only links and verbs, ignoring non-linked (non-notable) words in the transcript.
Then, upon entering a room, you could just tap on things that you see in the room description to examine them, or type just the first letter or two of an object’s name to get an autosuggestion. Tap the room name in the status bar to examine the room, i.e. “look.”
I think this is all beyond the scope of a general-purpose interpreter like Thunderword, so I’ll stop my rambling here.