Hello all! I am very new at this. I spent weeks working on my first Twine game. I released it today after testing it on my phone, my best friend's phone, and my sister's phone. The game worked on all those devices.
Today, after release, two of my friends complained that they couldn't get the game to load past the start the Start page. They click my "Play" link (or any of the links on my Start page, like for instance a "Credits" link) and are immediately redirected back to Start. It's like an endless loop.
My story isn't too complicated with regards to CSS. It's my first attempt, and it's mostly linear in shape. The story format is Sugarcane. I'm using Leon's "Closed In" stylesheet with my own custom colors, and his loopsound macro to loop my background music.
I made the story in Twine 1.4.2 on a Mac.
Every single person who tested this on mobile are using iPhones. Some people get it to work, some people don't. My friend who said the game didn't work on mobile tested it on a computer and it was fine.
I wonder if anyone who has made games with similar variables has also experienced problems with their game on mobile.
I hope this question isn't annoying! I tried hard to search the forum and google group for answers before I signed up for an account here. Let me know if there's any information about my situation I can provide for someone to help. Thank you!
Comments
What browsers (band and versions) are the people who can run the game using? What about the ones that cant?
Basically you will need to copy the HTML file you built using Twine on to a web-server and then create a link to the file for people to click on, once you have done this people can use the web-browser(s) on their mobile device to view/play your game the same way their view any other HTML web-page.
You may want to test your game to see how it will look on smaller screens by resizing your web-browser, try each of the different Story Formats to see which one looks better.
That sounds like a way to make the site mobile-friendly, but I'm wondering how to make it an app to be put on the app store.
Making an iOS or Android app (either native or hybrid) is a lot more complex, are you a programmer?
1. Getting a Developer's License.
Both Apple and Google require you to get one to release an App on their App Stores. The Apple license gives you access a Developer ID that will allow you to test your app on your own device.
2. Building your app.
Because Twine generates a HTML / java-script file I suggest you create a Hybrid app which is basically a dumb web-browser (called a container) that you embed your HTML file into. You can create the container in one of two ways:
a. Use third-party software.
There are a number of products you can use to do this, one is PhoneGap.
b. Build your own.
To build your own you will need to know/learn both Java (for Android) and Objective-C/Swift (for Apple).