I have Android Studio and I have expeirence in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, C++, jQuery, and SQL. If I want to port Squiffy as an Android app, will that be okay? If yes, what do I have to do?
I would expect that to be pretty simple. Squiffy is already a JS application; so presumably you just open it in an embedded browser; the same way the desktop client does it. However, I assume you'd have to look into how it does file management – and it would likely be easier just to use the online editor for most people.
@LA-Laker if you're talking about porting the Squiffy IDE to Android, I would be interested.
For the Squiffy IDE to work on phones... the biggest thing is probably it's lack of "responsiveness". It looks horrible and is incredibly annoying to use on a small display.
Fixing the web editor to work properly on mobile would be amazing. And from there, it's a fairly short step to an Android or iOS app.
For Squiffy games on mobile, there are existing solutions to convert a HTML app to be an Android or iOS app such as Apache Cordova. Or you can just use an embedded browser control as mrangel mentioned. Just make it fill the screen and load up your game's html file and it should be good to go. I believe there's easy ways to load subresources into a webview.
Perhaps look at https://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/webview and https://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/load-local-content - they should have everything needed for creating an Android app of a Squiffy game. And shouldn't be hard if you already have any Android development experience. (if you need more, that site has plenty of information on getting started with Android development, being their official documentation)
The Squiffy game I just launched at https://www.dragonchoice.com/you-choose is optimised for mobile - well, I say 'optimised'; it's a better experience if you play it on a decent screen, but it works just fine on mobile.
I think most Squiffy games work fine on mobile. It helps that they are mostly just "click a link to continue" and by default very little in the way of styling other than a couple things to try and make it look fairly similar regardless of screen size.
And when you mess around with them to make them look better than plain text (as you should) it'll probably still be fine (due to Squiffy's simple styling by default), and there's always the browser's "responsive design mode" to see what it will look like on different devices to make sure.
I had a quick look at your game @fvu109, looks good. I really like the styles you are using. The section appearance and how you did the stats and traits in the sidebar are nice.
Though I do wonder if you manually put in the unordered lists (for the ::before styles) or not.
I use the FontAwesome library extensively for inventory icons etc - a lot of them work off classes in the stylesheet, others I did manually.
The sidebar itself was entirely @mrangel's handiwork - not sure if the game would be playable (or at least enjoyable) without it. Having inventory tracked, quests logged etc in there made an enormous difference in the early stages of development.
@fvu109,
Yeah. Inventory and quests in the side bar where you can see them easily is great. And on mobile the sidebar by default is hidden, but easy to open and close so it still works.
I'm not a fan of Riders of Pern, but your game looks and plays nicely.
(Though this is getting a little off topic now)
Re "look good on phone screens"
I use a html/JavaScript IDE to code on my Kindle Fire 8.
With Amazon frequently selling their Kindle Fire 10 tablet for $100, by adding a $25 Bluetooth keyboard you have a decent cheap setup to code.
So having Squiffy run on Android might appeal to some people.
@Greendad37
What IDE do you use on Android? I've been looking for a good one.
Concerning running the Squiffy editor on Android, I think it would be a good idea. Especially if it could also work on phone displays, not just tablets.
The editors for things like Twine, Inklywriter, etc. don't really work on phone displays. And Twine games seem to have a lot of hit or miss for phone displays in my experience. Squiffy games almost all work well on phones with no changes.
As I said before, updating the web editor to work on a phone screen would be a great step, making it so it will work well when on a tablet and phone (although as mentioned you may want a bluetooth keyboard) would be great.
And at that point it shouldn't take much to make a port to an Android app. There's already the desktop app using Electron, a wrapper for Android and iOS could be done in a similar way.
Possibly the biggest thing stopping improvements to the editor to lead to that is I'm pretty sure @The Pixie still doesn't have all the access needed to actually update the git repositories, npm packages, etc.
Since once that is sorted people in the community could step in (there's certainly some changes to Squiffy I'd be willing to put in pull requests for, though some of those would be copying @mrangel)
@CrisSDK - I use Acode
https://acode.foxdebug.com/
For non Squiffy stuff, I've been dabbling in these using Acode:
Both produce playable files that look OK on a phone. Both are editable using Acode on a tablet and if I'm bored a phone
