password, the typing game, is about to receive mobile support
I've been working on the mobile version of password for a while now, mostly lending to the fact that much of the infrastructure of the game required expansion to accomodate for that. Plus, this sort of gameplay on mobile is a new territory for me, which makes it both worrisome and exciting.
Long story short, you can preview the mobile gameplay of password with the same link:
The gameplay is different from the desktop version. Here, you have to tap the keys in the order of their number: 1, then 2, then 3, and so on until the last key. Tapping keys out of order (4, then 6) results in a foul, which takes away a bit of time. Tapping all keys in the correct order means you win the round and get awarded the score. Other instructions are on screen.
It is NOT the final version. It's playable but contains some visual bugs. I'm gonna work on fixing those in the coming weeks. Right now, I'm looking for feedback:
- How does the mobile gameplay feel?
- How does the sizing of the score looks?
- Are there any problems with swiping or tapping?
- How does the timer bar look on smaller screens? (Think smaller than iPhone X.)
- How does the timer look on devices that have a notch?
- Does it load the correct version at all? (If you're on a mobile device – smartphones and tablets – you should not see keyboard references. If you do, it didn't load the correct version of gameplay.)
Desktop gameplay has only received visual updates. You can still play it with the same link.
Let me know if you encounter issues. You can post here, or you can open an issue in the GitHub repo. If you do, make sure to provide what information you can on the issue, like what sort of a device you're using (maker, model, OS version, browser etc.): this helps figure out the problem easier and quicker.
I know of these issues so far, and am working on resolving them:
- after pressing the last key of the order (8 right now), the red border flashes, as if you've received a foul (you don't)
- score has to fully animate towards the final value before it resizes to fit the screen
- swiping distance may or may not be too short, so it may feel as though it doesn't register
Painstakingly anxiety inducing, but I suppose that's the point. Although counting the points and pulling a foul does trigger a small lag spike on my (1.5 GB ram) phone.
Most of the time I'm not paying too much attention to it, but they seem fine, with the exception of maybe single digit numbers.
In my phone/browser swiping down prompts a page reload, meaning I need to be careful. Not sure you can do too much about it though. Maybe add a pause button or double tap option?
It looks OK in my galaxy J3 (2016)
(My phone doesn't.)
Yes.
Thanks for the feedback!
I hope you're joking, 'cause it's meant to be challenging but not uncomfortable. If it isn't, I should keep working on it.
When exactly does the spike happen? It can't be a RAM issue 'cause RAM doesn't into the equation. I'm not loading much into the memory, and the game itself is very light (50kB total).
If there's a problem with the visuals, it must be the integrated video chip.
Either way, I'll look into an option for reduced graphics. Glad you mentioned it.
That's... not great. I mean the interface to be unobtrusive, but if it collides so heavily with browser defaults, I'd rather not mess with those.
I'm thinking of an option where you could replace swipes with tapping particular parts of the screen as if buttons. Should accomodate both pausing and the upcoming settings menu.
Did you know Galaxy J3 is almost the same size as iPhone X? (That's my 5C in the middle, for reference. You can choose the "Stacked" option to see just how close they are in dimensions.)
Yeah, I was joking, It's mostly somewhat impulsively pressing the wrong buttons. I'm not good at reflexes.
When the points are counted/added and when the 'foul' border pops up. Also I don't really know what specs are important for this unfortunately.
Yeah, that seems OK.
Yeah, that's a graphics issue. I had similar problems on my laptop, ostensibly not very good at handling those, with previous iterations. It's why I had to scrap some of the prettier animations: they didn't run so well.
Does the timer work for you alright? Is there stuttering while it's running?
Yes.
When clicking the link using Firefox on mobile (Galaxy S10, Android version 10) it takes me to what I assume is the desktop version, which requests for me to press the space bar. No interaction possible with the page; I confirmed I didn't have the "show desktop site" option selected in firefox.
About:Firefox just says "Firefox Browser 68.8.1"
What I'd really like to get is the user agent string these browsers produce. Not what they're supposed to produce, but what they produce in reality.
See, the way I check for whether to toggle mobile mode right now is by checking the user agent string against a multitude of RegEx patterns. This should not fail for most browsers because the patterns are fairly rigorous: they test a lot of stuff, and one might fail but not all of them.
But, I have neither the access to such devices nor the money to pay for a proper testing application, like Browserstack.
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_5 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.1 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1
This is from my iPhone 6s+ on iOS 13.5. I got this from https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent
Thank you, that's very helpful.
Long story short: something's wrong with mobile detection. Maybe it fires too late. It should, by all accounts, correctly discern that this is a mobile device.
Yep, exactly the same. I also tried it on an iPad Air 3 with iPadOS 13.5 with the same problem.
iPhone 6s Plus, iOS 13.5, safari. Doesn’t load the correct site.
When I first tried to get the game to load on my phone (pixel 3) I was only prompted with the option to click space to start. After reload it and aimlessly clicking it seemed to load the mobile version. I think it's because I loaded in chrome and not my Firefox pinned link pinned to my home screen. Opening the link in a regular Firefox tab also only told me to click space.
Once it was loaded it took me a while to figure out how to play. It just loaded numbers with a count down right away.
Swiping down does not pause the game. This just triggers a refresh in chrome.
Thanks for the feedback!
That's something I'm going to have to figure out a way around. It's good to know that it can give false positives: that narrows my options.
That's a good point. There are instrustions attached to the post, or the the README file of the GitHub repo, but none in-game. That's worth addressing.
I'm going to rework pausing with taps. You're not the only person affected by that.