Play/read Twine interactive fiction in your Pocketbook

[hotdaisy]

I didn't see any posts about this possibility and it is very straight forward so I thought I should share in case anyone is interested.

Twine is a popular interactive fiction software that runs on a web browser.

To play the works created with Twine you don't need any special software, just a web browser.

Pocketbook eReaders have a fairly full featured web browser so I am not really bringing anything new here, you can open any website with a HTML5 game, book, interactive fiction, etc. and it will play fairly well. What is interesting here, at least for me, is the possibility of playing these interactive fiction stories in a full offline way. For me the eReader is a device to disconnect from the internet completely and I keep my wifi off as much as possible.

You need to get offline versions of the Twine stories, which will be a folder with a main HTML file and other files/folders. Place them in a folder inside your eReader, and then search for it in the "Library" of your eReader. Pocketbook will show HTML files found in your folders. Long-press the main HTML file, choose "Open with -> Browser". It might need to load for a few seconds and it will show up.

So that's the good news. Twine stories work in the built-in web browser (at least on my device, the InkPad Color 3) thanks to PocketBook having a good web browser (for an eReader of this kind) that doesn't block local files (in Android for instance, for security reasons, it gets pretty hard to run any local HTML5 apps). Hopefully PocketBook keeps it this way for future updates and devices!

The bad news:
- In my device everything runs great initially, including background music and sound that some of these stories have. However, after maybe 15 minutes of playing, the background music stops, and the responsiveness goes bad, so for instance if I press a button to go to the next page of the story nothing happens, but if I just swipe or touch anywhere in the screen it reacts and moves to the next page (better than tapping twice in the button or it will move 2 pages forward).
I tried mostly with this very big Twine game, Trigagea, which I just finished today. What I believe happens is that each time you move forward in the story and interact with the story in different ways, the RAM size that the web browser takes increases. Twine stories are not made of separate pages but instead they are huge HTML pages with big Javascript, so maybe it is a bit too much for my device to handle it and these eReaders are always tight in RAM. It might work better with smaller Twine games. I have no idea how it would run in other Pocketbook devices that have half of the RAM this has.
In any case, if you close the web browser and open it back again, the issue is resolved for another while. Also the web browser can remember the last document opened so it is fairly quick to do this.

- Since these Twine games are single-page HTML5 apps, the screen refreshes do not happen always as needed, so you need to manually refresh it sometimes. I wasn't very bothered by this since I am used to this kind of experience with eReaders.

- There are many many Twine stories out there, but not so many available for download. Even if many of them are free and the authors probably wouldn't mind at all that people plays them offline, they just don't provide a download and they instead host them in itch.io or similar.
Trigaea is a good start if you want to try one, I played fully in my device and it was nice. You can save and load the game any time, that also works.
In https://ifdb.org/search?searchfor=tag:twine you can find many Twine stories and some will have download links.
Some could in theory be downloaded by other methods, but I can't advice on that since I don't know if that's something the authors would like.


If you happen to try this out I am curious about your experience and if you find any trick to make it run better or anything! or if you found any interesting interactive fiction that runs well on these devices.

By the way, I started playing Trigaea in a previous version of the firmware of my eReader and then I updated and I think it worsened a bit the issues I talked about. It might be that there is a bit less RAM available, i don't know.

I hope this is useful.

[hotdaisy]

Here is a screenshot.

[neil_swann80]

I've just tested Trigaea on my HD3 (not a color device) and it's working. I haven't tested with audio yet (no in-built speaker, so will need my BT headphones) or played for long enough to experience the issues you've reported to occur at around 15+ minutes of game play.

I'm finding it's not always clear that you've pressed the on-screen buttons, so I'm spending a fair bit of time waiting on the page to change and eventually realizing I need to try another press. But other than that, so far so good.

Looks interesting, should be great entertainment on my next train journey.

[diegoocampo]

Originally Posted by neil_swann80

I'm finding it's not always clear that you've pressed the on-screen buttons, so I'm spending a fair bit of time waiting on the page to change and eventually realizing I need to try another press.

I am also trying this and it might be that it does not really need another press in the button/link, but just a press somewhere in the screen for the device to react and render the content. I was having the same issue as you and I realized with time that the device was always registering my tap in the button, but it wasn't always rendering the next page.. so what I ended up doing is to always tap the button/link and right after swipe my finger anywhere in the screen (doing a swipe would not interact with anything so no worries about triggering anyway unwanted thing in the game..)

Maybe in your the device this is not the exact issue or solution (i have the same device as OP), but just in case it helps!