itch.io

Just a to preface, this comment is from the first day this was posted, so anything I call out is hopefully fixed in the future. I'll start by saying THIS IS GREAT! Lots of little bugs but overall a very fun game.

• When saving/closing/reloading the game, all my settlements reset back to campfires. This didn't seem to actually cause any issues with placing buildings or pop counts, but it was a little weird.

• UI in general needs some fixes, like when values get too high the Faith underlays the exp bar. In general it was ok, I think the Godly Powers should just stay in the same order for every game, instead of appending when new powers are unlocked, makes it more cohesive I think. Not sure if Godly Inspirations work the same way?
• Also when saving/quitting/reloading, the settlement list on the left of the world view reversed? Perfectly usable just kinda annoying.
• Prestige: Very cool, expands replayability, doesn't apply to the new game? Unless I missed something you prestige, go into your settlement and then unlock prestige perks which don't get applied until you prestige AGAIN! I think the prestige screen should immediately have you pick perks, THEN start the new game.
• On a new prestige game, so not quitting then restarting, new settlements don't show up on the world map for me at least. Tested this twice. They do however appear on saving/quitting/reloading.
• One more prestige thing, I think skip the tutorial for prestige runs, maybe just give the player the exp as a prestige bonus, or let them earn the exp normally.
• Workplaces, I know they say WOKR IN PROGRESS but they never appeared as an option for me at all, if they're not in the game at all I'd take them out of the tech tree, just my opinion.
• It would be really cool if we could direct Heroes to a specific spot for a new settlement, I know it's an idle game but they have to be manually made/settlements manually made, so it feels more fair to direct them somewhere to build instead of babysitting them until they're in a decent spot.

Overall I love this! Great job so far, its really good.

Ah nice, any idea if that works for iOS/iFrames?

After a bit more research I have an answer. Basically, on itch and iOS, you cannot save to the browser and have it extend beyond the current session. The iframe and the page itself are two different domains, so its a CORS problem. The solution would be a server that users make an account/sign into, which is not ideal for quicker/more arcadey titles. For websites other than itch, there is hope for webgl games saving on iOS. If you own the page itself as well as the webgl, you can communicate from the iframe to the page to post data, this method uses window.postMessage which you can read up on here: https://www.teamsimmer.com/2023/05/02/how-do-i-use-the-postmessage-method-with-c...

So other than itch decided to give us access to our pages JS, we're out of luck. I also considered using cookies but we're limited to 4096ish bytes and I don't even know if we can do that from the iframe. Honestly I saw that the size was that small and figured it wasn't worth it.

I guess the best solution would be to throw your game up on a little site so you can handle saving to browser, then include a link to that page on the itch and hope mobile players find it? Or make a real iOS build and put it on the appstore. Neither solution works well for quicker/shorter titles.

Just before posting I found this post (https://itch.io/t/635029/enable-a-way-for-browser-games-to-access-the-username-o...) where someone asked Leafo the founder of itch if he would consider adding support for window.postMessage, it looks like a no but he was open to extending the current JS API. Maybe with our powers combined we can summon him here and get a mobile specific JS way to read/write to indexedDB/localStorage.

As far as I can tell, indexedDB as well as localStorage are not supported on safari and by extension mobile. I believe Safari in general will only keep a file stored on the browser I think for up to a week. In regards to mobile, there are more problems. While you can make WebGL run smoothly on mobile, when it comes to saving at least on iOS, other browsers are actually built on top of Safari so they have the same saving issue. From what I can tell the browser will keep the file where you store it as long as you don't close out the entire app. You can close/switch tabs, but once you actually close the browser app you lose the data. 

This has been a big headache for my project, I'm using version 2022.1.23f1 if you care to compare. I actually don't own a mac and thus cannot inspect the page on iOS, but I have a crappy little mac mini showing up this Monday 10/9/23 so hopefully I can get to the bottom of this.

That's what it does already? Not sure what you mean by this.

It's "mobile friendly" not "mobile bffs"

Thanks for playing! I see it bugged out a bit at the end there, I'll fix it soon