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Show HN: Tiny mobile-friendly interactive fiction game (memalign.github.io)
106 points by memalign on Dec 1, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 22 comments



Hi HN! I finished this mobile-friendly interactive fiction game as my Thanksgiving break project. I shared more details about the tiny game engine I wrote for fun here[0] with the hope that others might find it interesting :)

[0] https://memalign.github.io/p/dungeon-memalign.html


Nice! But what was the blue key for :D


The blue key opened the first locked door (after you rescue the fox)


This was a very fun little distraction from work, thank you! I think it probably plays a bit better on mobile than desktop, but it was still great amounts of fun. A suggestion for making it play better on desktop is to reverse the scrolling so "old" parts go below the "current" part, and maybe mess with some text alignment so options aren't "jumping around" -- makes it easier to navigate quickly :D

Overall this is extremely fun, and looks like it was a very fun little project!


Fun adventure that chokes my Android Chrome after a while.

It seems to build up and get slower for each action. Trimming past actions on page reload would be a good workaround, but I bet there's a way to keep the most-recent N dialog options or N unique states instead.


For me on Windows, the map is rendering very poorly: ▫ is much narrower than all the rest, so that the map is painful to behold.

But, in the mean time, I’ve applied this to make the map a bit more tolerable while I play through:

  #gameMap {
    text-align: justify;
    text-align-last: justify;
    text-justify: inter-character;
  }
It would be best to do this as an actual table or grid, so that you can definitely align everything properly, regardless of character width.


Thanks for the tips and sorry for the hassle! I admit I didn’t test on Windows :(


A useful rule of thumb: never depend on character width, unless you’re dealing with ASCII in monospace. Especially once you’re dealing with emoji, also get used to the fact that there will be very wide variation, including that some devices simply won’t have a font that can represent your text, especially newer emoji.


Enjoyable playthrough, interesting dialogue, and clever. Kudos!


rescuing that fox was so fun!! could there be some kind of fox-related epilogue in the end, to fill up the last couple of squares on the map?


That was fun! Wish there were non-violent ways to deal with the inhabitants. And also that the movement links didn't move out from under my cursor.


FYI, when I encountered the 3rd wolf, the text implied I had already dispatched the others, which I had not. In fact, I hadn't even encountered one of them.


Thanks for playing! That’s a bug in the story - added to my bug list!


    "Now... where the heck are you?"


Excellent approach to making a mobile friendly text adventure. Did you invent this tap/log pattern, or is it common in the IF world?


Thank you!

Twine[0] lets you make branching stories and those games usually show the choices as hyperlinks. The ones I’ve played are more like Choose Your Own Adventure books than Zork, though.

I’m no expert but every IF game with a map and objects I’ve played has been text-input-and-parser-based. In this game, I tried to design something that would maintain most of the degrees of freedom to explore and act on items without requiring typed commands. This technique removes some of the guesswork required for parser-based games — sometimes that guesswork is part of the puzzles and personality of a game but it’s also often frustrating and intimidating.

If others have seen a tap/log game like this, I’d love to check it out!

[0] https://twinery.org/


This was very fun and very cool. Thank you for making and sharing this!


That was an awful lot of fun. Thanks, memalign.


had a lot of fun, but ended up getting stuck with the dragon. explored every room multiple times but never found anything that helped hurt the dragon. i'm probably just missing something... still fun, up until a point- which from the comments doesn't seem like anyone else hit this snag, so it must just be me lol


Thanks for playing! Some hints: Did you find the metal fangs? Did you repair and look at the magic parchment?


Enjoyable, thanks for sharing!


Very cool




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