I made and published a short game to get a hold of the process of making a game on here. I made it unlisted and shared it with a friend. This game is only supposed to take about 5 minutes to play but he told me that his session had expired and that he had to refresh his browser. Can somebody explain this?

Sorry if this is obvious but I couldn't find anything on it.

If you are away from your pc too long while playing online, it will "time out". I assume he played it, walked away possibly for a smoke or a healthy dump, came back and got the expired message.

I believe. And downloaded games don't do that.

i just played my own game online and the session expired without me leaving the computer. in the middle of the game, the session expired.
it seems that if you are not logged in the session will expire after a certain time.

I had exactly the same experience while testing my own new game I had just uploaded! I had not left the computer, but my connection was very slow...
Very frustrating, and I imagine that players would take a dim view of being thrown off while progressing well! Is this function really necessary? (I assume it's a Quest function as it stated that my game was over).

If your internet connection goes down, this will happen. The server needs to be quite active at getting rid of games that nobody is playing, otherwise it runs out of memory and other players can't start new games. It will keep your game alive as long as your browser tab is open but if your internet connection goes down, the server has no way of knowing if you're coming back so it will clear out your session.

This will change eventually. I'm rewriting the Quest runner in JavaScript, so games will be downloaded to your web browser. This means you don't need to maintain a connection to the server as everything is just happening on your own computer, in the browser itself. This will mean no more session timeouts and we'll be able to handle vastly more traffic, as all the web server needs to do is serve up files, not run any of the game logic.

Soon. Sooooooon!

Thanks for that, Alex. I'm reassured!

Is it normal to sit down and make a serious attempt to play an IF game without downloading it first? I'm honestly curious. I download any game I have even the remotest intention of playing some day and file it away in the Quest section of my text games folder. Wi-fi is just too unreliable and there are too many issues with playing any games like this online to make me want to rely on it for more than a quick peek to see if a game is worth my time.

I do all my work on an I pad. I don't even have a larger computer set up at the moment. I have never downloaded anything.

I remember you've mentioned this before, but yikes, attempting any kind of extensive writing with a tablet just seems like a form of masochism to me. I'm really impressed at how prolific a writer you've been...and does that mean you're stuck using the online version of the Quest developer too?

IDK, I've gotten IF games working on my Kindle before but they were almost unplayable. Maybe I'm just old fashioned (or maybe just old ) but I need a big screen and a real keyboard. I'm stuck on a cheap laptop right now, and even that's not use.