Subjunctive Games
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MindWare UI Redesign and Mobile Compatibility
🕑 Added 2024-09-11 14:40:22 +0000 UTCI've decided to bite the bullet and redesign the UI so that MindWare can be played on mobile devices.
The decision came as a result of my learning experiments, which I do mostly whenever I have some free time at work.
It took me just two weeks of very intermittent tinkering to replace the stock SugarCube UI (the Twine story format I'm using to develop the game) with a completely custom one (made possible by the StoryInterface feature in SugarCube). The custom UI is 100% responsive, looks great in my opinion, and I've even enhanced it with sound effects (using the Howler.js library) and properly implemented music (the current system in MindWare would never work on mobile devices).
The only problem is that the responsive UI I've created isn't designed for MindWare specifically (it may end up being used for another project in a distant future), so some extra design work is needed. But that's easy since I can reuse many existing styles. What's more difficult is to make all the necessary adjustments to the rest of the game.
I estimate that the implementation will take me roughly two weeks, and I would like to start working on it as soon as I finish the transformation quest early next week.
Once implemented, MindWare will be playable on mobile devices—only minigames will be disabled by default. I then expect it to take another two months to fully polish and optimize all existing content (problems like sticky hover effects on mobile devices and so on). However, this polishing will happen in parallel with working on the game's story.
Further down the road, I would like to add sound effects and ambient music to the game. I would also like to reorganize the game's code and reimplement certain mechanics that are currently difficult for me to work with while creating proper documentation in the process.
The UI redesign will allow me to get a better idea of how much time that would take. I have already "refactored" the game once soon after its first public release because it was a huge mess and virtually impossible to work with, and another refactoring would make it significantly easier for me to continue in 2025 and beyond, but the amount of content in the game has grown a lot, and I'm aware how easy it is to get stuck in a cycle of endless refactoring without making meaningful progress. Therefore, I'll need to carefully consider the scope and necessity of any major code restructuring.
And if you're wondering why I don't just make smaller changes to the existing UI to make it work on mobile devices, then the reason is simple: it's much easier and quicker for me to create a new custom UI than attempt to tweak the default SugarCube one to fit my needs. That's what I was trying to do until I discovered the StoryInterface feature (yeah... I should have read the entire documentation much earlier) and it was painful.
I know that many of you play MindWare exclusively on desktop (like I do), but I think that it's kinda silly to develop a game in an engine whose major advantage is that the games created with it can run on any device in a web browser yet essentially throw that capability in the trash. I had a good reason to not complicate things with mobile devices a year ago, but I don't have it now.
If you're not among those who will appreciate and benefit from MindWare's mobile compatibility, then I kindly ask you to bear with me. I promise to do my best to get it done as quickly as possible.
Comments
Kelsi
I recently posted on craigslist looking for a new place to live. In the add I included a sentence that says, "preferably somewhere with more trees than houses". So Im right there with you!
DreamweaverMirar
Nice! I always prefer to play this kind of game on my phone if possible.
Subjunctive Games
Lol. I guess bad dev practices can be a form of code protection too!
gg
I play on both my Chromebook and Android phone. RenPy is the format that I use on my phone. Healslut, Luna Fall from Grace, A Wife's Phone, and E9 Factory are some good ones. But if you have a port from Twine go for it. Personally I have faced these problems and I treat the first cut as a learning experience. Some times my code was deleted so I was forced to redo it. But it's always better the next time. But I didn't have an easy way to refactor either. It was mostly done by hand. I applied for a big data company near Boca Raton that had open sourced their code. I figured I'd look at it so I downloaded it from GitHub and looked at the C++ code. No comments and every variable was three characters. I asked the head engineer if they ran it through a program that makes your code proprietary so all variable names are meaningless. He said no and pretty much hung up.
Kevin Klimeck
Oh I have so many pictures. I'll throw some up on discord
Subjunctive Games
Enjoy your road trip! I would love to spend a week or two where you are right now—somewhere where the number of trees greatly exceeds the number of people :D
Kevin Klimeck
As I am doing a road trip from Florence Oregon to Anchorage Alaska, and am currently in Witset BC, I love the idea of it being mobile. Thank you for your hard work and dedication. Kevin.
