Edit: I already forwarded feedback to the developer, who was kind enough to respond in full. I have great confidence in the future of this project but it looks changes might be months ahead. Someone should invent some cloning technique so that at least one of him can commit more time to the project.
Wow, what a gem.
I stumbled upon Fabularium in the Google Play store while searching for text adventure related downloads. Until now I was using Text Fiction (its conversation-style interface lends surprisingly well to IF) but it supports Z-Code only and unlike your app, it can’t handle some of the Z-Code display output (status line, menus).
But now this treat, a whole bunch of engines in a single neat package. I’m so happy that I can now finally play my Magnetic Scrolls collection. I know there is another developer currently appifying (and selling) Magnetic Scrolls games, but their interface choices haven’t really been to my taste so far and anyway I prefer having a single app with a personal game library.
I love Fabularium’s library with thumbnails, the easy import of (zipped) story files and the metadata download. The interface for playing games is very focused (full screen, keyboard never hides) and despite the ever enlarging text feed which I suppose is rendered in HTML, the app remains responsive. There’s also no noticeable battery drain. In short, awesome work so far! My new favorite mobile IF app!
I do have some issues I’d love to see being solved as well as suggestions for changes and features. I apologize in advance for the long read. BTW I can’t comment on writing games as I haven’t tried that yet.
First some issues I’ve encountered:
- Magnetic Scrolls image files don’t seem to be showing, even if the are in the game’s directory.
- I accidentally hit the navigation keys (< > etc) a lot while typing and they make weird characters appear in the input line. These characters seem to be ignored by the interpreter I’ve tried, but it doesn’t look nice.
- Double-tapping a word in the text, which writes it on the input line, also includes interpunction (dots, comma’s, etc). I think that tapping words should only include alpha-numerics. It also sometimes copies two words when the words are short.
- The save / restore process in the Magnetic Scrolls interpreter interacts a little weird with the app. The interpreter asks me for a filename and a confirmation, but the filename is ignored by save dialog. I know interpreters apply their own rules on save and load and you can’t always break into that, but I think at least the filename should be passed to the shell application.
Now a wish-list worthy of a spoiled kid’s birthday:
Library
- I’d like to see a list view rather than the currently very small icons. This should allow for larger thumbnails as well as a bit of text from the game blurb, publisher, rating, or other metadata you find appropriate.
- A new sorting option for games: date last played (started), so that games I’m currently playing bubble to the top.
- Once a game is imported, I think a metadata download should be started automatically, because I end up doing that for every game import anyway. The ‘Get Metadata’ option can then be changed into ‘Refresh Metadata’.
Interface
I think our editing options on the input line are rather limited. I guess this is because you want to be true to the original games where the input line is integral to the text feed. But, because it’s not a native input field, we miss out on all the Android built-in benefits. For example, when I notice too late that I made a typo at the start of the line I now have to backspace everything away and start typing again, rather than moving the cursor by tapping the place to put it, or tapping a word and use spelling correct, or automatic spelling correction. So I would really like to see a native input line introduced, which simply adds the final input line to the text feed after pressing enter. We then get benefits like spelling correction, adding words to a dictionary (spell names come to mind in some games, or names of characters), and word prediction. In the same vein, some sentences that are reused a lot in a game (“Consult guide about”) become part of word prediction suggested by these dictionaries. If it is possible in any way, it would be great if for each game the app could build up its custom dictionary and word prediction (as so they do not interfere with other games). I don’t know what the feasibility is of this, these may require games to create sub-language on top of the current language (usually English). However they should not become a default dictionary for the entire system.
Alternatively, at the very least it would be nice to have the keyboard extended with a fold-out of icons for common actions (examine, get, drop, inventory, open, close, lock, unlock) which can be configured / changed per game.
Other interface suggestions:
- I really prefer a single tap to copy a word from text to the input line, because as it is it’s already challenging enough to tap a word once (maybe make this configurable?)
- As mentioned in the issues, the navigation keys get in my way a lot, while most of the time I wouldn’t even use them. I would suggest having one button on the keyboard that switches to a secondary keyboard which contains these navigation keys, as well as keys that are regularly used in combination with them (tabs - space - enter?)
Other
- I love the ability to customize, but there’s quite the overwhelming array of settings to configure the display with that I think will realistically only be touched by people with a lot of perseverance to get it ‘just right’. I would suggest moving them to a theme configuration file, which people can edit using a text editor. The app should have a sample display with a refresh button to reload the config file so you can see your chages more quickly. You can then include a theme (down)load so that these theme files can be easily redistributed.
- For people less inclined to programming, it would be great if Fabularium would support Inform 7 in addition to Inform 6 (I7 uses I6 behind the scenes I believe). I don’t know how hard this is to do, this will depend on the portability of the tool chain behind I7.
Quite the list but honestly I’m already very thankful for what you got us, I really hope that you find the time, motivation and community support to continue this project. So far, so awesome.