Hi all, lovely to hear that people have been enjoying Signed by ’89! I sure enjoyed making it.

Version 1.2

• Audio in the Safari browser now works fine. There's nothing sadder than a mute music game!
• Audio is also working in the Brave browser, but unfortunately you'll need to turn on "3rd-party fingerprinting". I have no idea why this is. I promise I'm not trying to... harvest... erm, your essence. (If any Brave experts know what's going on, please let me know!)
• You should now be able to use a gamepad or controller instead of the keyboard, if you prefer. I've tested with an Xbox 360 controller in Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Let me know if you do (or don't) have success with other controllers and/or browsers.

By the way, mobile devices still aren't properly supported, sorry, but you can try your hand with the version on the PICO-8 forums, which adds on-screen controls. It didn't run great on my (cheap) phone, but you might have more luck!

Technical details

Safari and Brave originally refused to play audio, because from their perspective, the game was no better than one of those nasty auto-playing ads. Even though you clicked 'Run Game' on itch.io, the way the game was loaded (an "iframe") looked to the browser like it was a whole different web-page, blasting out its own audio uninvited. (Chrome will reintroduce this restriction in December as well.)

The game now loads behind the scenes, as soon as you show up at the page. The 'Run Game' button just tells it to go, including starting the sound. From your browser's perspective, you've "authorised" the audio to play by clicking that button.  Phew!

Several browsers now support game controllers as input devices, so getting that working in the game was a question of telling PICO-8, the "virtual console" which runs the game, what the controller was saying. I lightly adapted scripts from Krajzeg and Sean to do this. (Thank you both!) Those scripts translate the analogue sticks and so on into simple numbers which the game can understand.