In-Browser Client



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The game client presents the game to the player and allows the player to, well, play. We chose to build a web-based client for Tohm first so that there wouldn't be a requirement to download and install an app before a player could try it out. It also ensures that our client is cross-platform - thanks to Javascript, HTML , and CSS being very standardized, we know that players on all types of devices can use our one client to play the game, keeping our potential audience wide while allowing us to focus on making the game better rather than spinning our wheels by creating many clients to make Tohm available on many platforms.

Ease of Access
No download or install necessary. If it can be done without drastically reducing the quality of the game experience, it should be. In the case of Tohm it's very doable, so we've built an in-browser client.

Overall Presentation
The Tohm web client looks "nice". Many text gaming clients have a very dated appearance - they look like command prompts laden with menus and icon-plastered buttons, which intimidates many potential players. The trend in gaming in general, especially now that touch-enabled experiences are becoming increasingly common, is a "clean, simple, streamlined" user interface. Tohm combines high-resolution images (we purchased licenses from ShutterStock ) with a very simple layout devoid of menus and buttons.

Text Styling
Support for colors is standard across online text games - with so much text put in front of players, subtle colors help the player parse what's happening. Tohm takes this farther, allowing for different text sizes and fonts, plus italics, bold, and other markup modes. When we chose colors, we chose colors which would not fatigue players after long reading sessions - try to avoid high-intensity, high-contrast color schemes like the old school rainbow-on-black (combined with too much scrolling, it can prompt headaches and nausea in players).

We also default the Tohm client to a variable-width font, which means that most of the text will NOT be fixed-width, which makes the text appealing and easier to read. This is a departure for the genre, which often leans on fixed-width text to create text art and. While text art can serve a purpose by depicting a table of information or a map, it's always a poor, half-solution that comes off as "old" or "tacky". Either design your game so that players don't need maps, tables, and other visuals, or provide quality, non-text visuals (we're doing the former). Before you make the decision to use text art, think about farts in video games - seeing a greenish cloud around a player isn't even close to the experience of smelling his real life farts. Similarly, text art isn't an acceptable approximation of the visual your players want or expect.

Lack of Visual Imagery
Even though today's web apps can do almost everything an installed application can do, we choose not to use lots of visuals for several reasons - the most important is that we want to play to our strengths (the written word) by focusing attention on text. Also, we're not artists, we can't afford to pay artists, and artists take too long... one strength of the text medium is speed of execution. A writer can build a monster or location up to its full potential through text in a fraction of the time it would take an artist to design and refine a 3D model with textures, animations, sound effects, and so on. This means text games have a great potential in scope of content.

Smooth Scroll
Well-written, descriptive text is the strength of the text-gaming genre, so Tohm must allow players to read and enjoy its text at a pace that's comfortable for them. As new messages appear, they scroll gradually into view. This allows players to more comfortably finish reading something they were already working on. Without smooth scrolling, the text gaming experience is like trying to read a web page while someone else scrolls it, which stresses players because they feel they have to skim incoming text very quickly before a new message arrives to disrupt them.

Non-scrolling Messages
Error, confirmation, and other types of messages which are not describing in-game events aren't important enough to keep on-screen for long. Tohm displays those messages in a reserved area at the bottom of the text window so that they don't move the text above them, and then fades them gradually out of view. This reduces overall scrolling to minimize reading disruption, and also reduces the need for players to scroll up when reviewing recent in-game events, since more game text can fit on the screen (due to the lack of mixed-in error text).

Aspect Ratio
You'll notice that the Tohm client arranges text in a "portrait" orientation. When text lines are too wide, the text is overall less comfortable to read because the eyes have trouble scanning from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and have perform more horizontal movement to take in each line. You can see this trend reflected in most applications of modern web design (not just games), like in the design of this wiki - notice the dead space on the left and right when you make your browser window as big as it can get. If that space were used for text, more would fit on the page - but web designers know that switching to that aspect ratio would make readers less comfortable.

Lack of Scripting Support
The Tohm client doesn't include any "scripting" features. Today's gamer isn't a computer pro like those who were playing early text games, so most lack the skillset and patience to develop even simple scripts, macros, and triggers. Also, we want Tohm to be intense and challenging - if players want to write scripts, that indicates they've recognized part of the game as being tedious and mechanical, like a chore. When players ask for features of this sort, we'll be following-up with questions about where they want to use them and why, then reconsidering our designs to make that portion of the game more interesting (or remove it entirely).