Following Arisa's clarification of the feature request process, I want to request a UI change for users on mobile.
Pulp works suprisingly well on mobile, aside from some audio issues. Scripting will never be good on mobile (or it's already good if you have a keyboard and mouse), but a phone would be perfext for art and music creation on the go.
Creating art already works well in principle: you can zoom in on the art box, edit pixels with taps, etc.
Only three issues remain, two of which at least would be an easy UI fix:
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You cannot draw lines of pixels; dragging a finger just moves the page.
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Once zoomed in, the select tile panel is very far away from the drawing panel.
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The room panel is a huge wasted space, since you can easily place your art later on a desktop.
I would suggest that a mobile version of the site is rolled out with absolutely minimal changes:
- Adding an art page which is just the current room page but without the room panel, just the tile selection and art panels
- (If possible/easy)Have the menu items on the left side as an overlay that pops out upon clicking a menu button.
- (If possible/easy) setting elements to scale to fit different screen sizes.
- (If possible/easy) Have the pixel art panel capture a user's finger press so that dragging works like on desktop instead of moving the page. Not sure what the teminology is for this, but the type of function used on many mobile sites like google maps to allow dragging without actually scrolling the frame page.
Doing this would allow developers to work on art assets in spare moments, and make Pulp development more of a fun activity for anywhere instead of work that has to be done at a desk. I think it would increase engagement, reduce development time, and generally make life easier for devs.
Much more difficult (and less likely to be implemented) would be a fix for the music page on mobile. It has three issues:
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The play button is incredibly far from the lefthand of the notes panel when zoomed in.
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The notes panel is small and made for precise mouse clicks; it is difficult to accurately use with fingers.
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On some browsers (mine for example, lol) sound playback is delayed and (probably as a result) distortes throughout the Pulp interface, including during gameplay.
No clue how to fix the last two, but simply moving the play buttons for mobile users to the spot on the left , in between the full score and the one-voice score, would allow quick playback and at least make it usable.
This would have the same benefits as above in terms of allowing away-from-desk engagement with pulp.
As a final note, there are various apps for pixel-art and music development, but none of them are well-suited to Pulp.
No art apps that I have found are meant for 1-bit art development. That means they dont have the ability to quickly swap pixels between black and white; any mistakes require switching colors manually, erasing, then switching back to black/white. It's just a pain and not fun; the current Pulp page is better despite the shortcomings on mobile.
No midi apps I have found allow scores with only one note per voice; it is therefor similarly difficult to change any wrong notes. Obviously they also dont use the exact sounds of the playdate, and also require conversion from midi to playdate format afterwards.