Posted November 05, 2018 by Tim Knauf
#audio #gamepad
Hi all, lovely to hear that people have been enjoying Signed by ’89! I sure enjoyed making it.
By the way, mobile devices still aren't properly supported, sorry, but you can try your hand with the version on the PICO-8 forums, which adds on-screen controls. It didn't run great on my (cheap) phone, but you might have more luck!
Safari and Brave originally refused to play audio, because from their perspective, the game was no better than one of those nasty auto-playing ads. Even though you clicked 'Run Game' on itch.io, the way the game was loaded (an "iframe") looked to the browser like it was a whole different web-page, blasting out its own audio uninvited. (Chrome will reintroduce this restriction in December as well.)
The game now loads behind the scenes, as soon as you show up at the page. The 'Run Game' button just tells it to go, including starting the sound. From your browser's perspective, you've "authorised" the audio to play by clicking that button. Phew!
Several browsers now support game controllers as input devices, so getting that working in the game was a question of telling PICO-8, the "virtual console" which runs the game, what the controller was saying. I lightly adapted scripts from Krajzeg and Sean to do this. (Thank you both!) Those scripts translate the analogue sticks and so on into simple numbers which the game can understand.