I need advice on full screen mode

[IrisHallo]

Hi everyone, I recently published a game on itch.io. Here is the link.

I published it as a html5 game so you can play it in the browser. I have set my game up in a way that the game will go into full screen mode immediately. You can than change it in the menu to get out of full screen mode.

I have come across an issue with it. When you play it on a macbook or an iphone the full screen mode doesn’t work. With macbook that is not to much of an issue because it is still big enough screen to play on, but on an iphone that becomes way more difficult to play.

This is what I set up for when the game starts up.

And this is what I have in place for in the menu so you can change full screen mode.

Does anyone know why it does not work on apple devices? How do I change it to make it work for every device?

[asimple_dev]

Have you set the default value for the fullscreen boolean as “yes” ?
It also appears non-fullscreen at first when I open, though it is fullscreen using the “Click to launch in fullscreen” mode that itch.io uses.
Also, can you add a screenshot of what it looks like with the apple devices?

[IrisHallo]

Yes the default value is “yes”.

Did you use an apple device or something else? If itch has a “click to launch in full screen” should I have my events in a different way?

I don’t have apple devices myself so I have to wait until I can use someone else’s apple devices. I will add the screenshots when I can.

[asimple_dev]

No I didn’t use an Apple device (don’t have one)
But it still didn’t go “full”-screen
Here’s a screenshot

[IrisHallo]

Aha oke that is interesting!

I think next week I will experiment a little by trying with either changing my fullscreen variable to “no” and or changing the “click to launch in fullscreen” from itch, to see if any of that makes a difference.

[Silver-Streak]

Most browsers do not allow websites to go full screen, or play audio, before the viewer interacts with them. This is a security implementation to avoid phishing/faking that the ad/site/etc is another app.

WIth this in mind, you cannot “force” full screen on a web release for many platforms (and browsers). You’ll need to add a button or option for it that the user manually chooses.

[IrisHallo]

Oh, good to know! Thank you!

I have now made my default value for the fullscreen variable “no”. And I changed the “click to launch” to “embed on page” with the option of the full screen button. On my windows pc it works well but I will have to test it on other devices.

[Lucky-j]

It runs well on both my Linux desktop and MacBook. I didn’t run into anything unexpected in my brief run of it.

Android TCL 30z, Android 12, Chrome Browser

Clicking the start game button immediately launched the game into what seemed to be full screen mode as there was no full screen toggle button shown on the screen, and the typical pop up came on to alert me that I could exit full screen mode by swiping down.

There were black bars on either short side even though I have the Notch setting to Default (draw into notch). However this phone has a long thin screen and not a common resolution. The black bars did not detract from the game as with this phone I am somewhat used to that and barely notice them.

Though the menu buttons were small and close together, it was easy to hit the one I was trying to, and they both responded correctly.

I could access the full screen toggle in the menu and it functioned like I would expect it to. Hitting it did not make me full screen as it seemed I already was full screen, but hitting it to exit full screen did knock me out of full screen, and back to the game page.

From there, either hitting the full screen button or the Restore game button would put me back to full screen the same size as what loaded from the beginning.

Overall the game loaded very slowly on this Android. It might appear frozen to some players, as the loading bar reaches the last little bit and then stops. A looping animation here would let the player know it’s not frozen, just loading.

After it loads, game play seems stable and reliable, though it does take a minute or two for the music to start. Clicking the Back button did not kick me out of full screen as it did on iPhone.

iPhone SE3, iOS 18.5, Safari Browser

After clicking to run the game, the game seemingly launched into full screen mode but the full screen toggle was still showing. Clicking this toggle did not appear to do anything. There where no black bars on my screen.

The toggle did not go away though and was eventually drawn onto the menu buttons. I could still use the menu buttons with the full screen toggle on top of them, but only with the method described here later. This is not to indicate the the full screen toggle was interfering with the buttons, they were just hard to click “only one”.

Using the Back button less than very carefully often caused me to leave full screen mode because it’s very close to the top of the screen, which caused Safari to think I wanted to show the address bar. This would at least make the full screen toggle move from on top of the menu buttons but gave an ugly view.

The menu buttons did not respond to my clicks in an expected manner. They would make some fast clicking noises and appear to open and shut both the menu and item panel quickly.

I could only get them to work with a long press to open the little magnifier, then carefully moving my finger until the button I wanted was highlighted to indicate the touch was over it. This was more difficult to do in full screen mode as the magnifier did not like to go past a certain point and would only show me the very tips of the buttons.

This was easier to do outside of full screen mode.

Hitting the full screen toggle inside the menu neither took me out of full screen nor activated full screen if I was out of it.

Loading time and music start took about the same as the Android. Over all the game was very enjoyable on Android and sort of an exercise in patience on the iPhone.