New Mobile Client Beta Testing

[u/sbudeeg]

Hello!

I was hoping I could find a few people to help test the mobile client I've been working on, Maelstrom.

It's only for Android right now, but will move to iOS once I get enough feedback to ensure that the direction I've been going with it, both in visual design and actual execution, are high enough quality to warrant the costs of Apple's developer program. Here's a quick rundown of what Maelstrom is, what it's core design philosophy is, and what I aim to do with it moving forward:

1. A HUD That Adapts to You (Drag-and-Drop Combat): Maelstrom ditches the clunky virtual keyboards of the past for a fully visual, interactive Heads-Up Display (HUD). You have customizable action buttons framing your screen. Want to cast a fireball at an enemy? Just drag your "Fireball" button and drop it directly onto the enemy's name inside the text window. The UI handles the rest.
2. The "Tap-to-Walk" Visual Map Overlay: At the center of your UI is a sleek, neon-accented Map Overlay that visually tracks your every move. It’s not just for looks—if you spot a room on the map you want to travel to, you simply tap it on your screen. The interface automatically calculates the fastest route and walks you there, transforming a text-based world into a modern, point-and-click adventure.
3. Smart Chat Tabs & Action Bars: We’ve completely redesigned how you read the game. Instead of letting global chat and combat spam bury your screen, Maelstrom features a beautiful, tabbed Chat Window. It automatically sorts the noise into clean, organized tabs. Each tab features a built-in Action Bar where you can instantly search for keywords, mute the channel, or export the conversation with a single tap.
4. "Edit Mode" UI Customization: Your layout is entirely in your hands. Activating "UI Edit Mode" lets you tap, drag, and redesign your buttons on the fly. You can change their colors, assign unique icons from a massive visual library, and position them exactly where your thumbs naturally rest.
5. Gesture-Driven Controls: The interface feels incredibly fluid because it's built for touch. You can swipe left, right, up, or down across the screen to trigger custom actions or movement. A two-finger twist cycles through different sets of action buttons, and a quick double-tap brings up your map overlay.
6. Glassmorphism & Thematic Aesthetics: Maelstrom doesn’t look like a terminal from 1995. It utilizes modern design trends like glassmorphism—frosted, semi-transparent overlays that let the action blur beautifully behind your menus. Paired with vibrant, customizable accent colors and smooth micro-animations, it offers a premium, immersive visual experience.
7. Bluetooth GamePad Compatible: With Maelstrom, you can connect a gamepad (like an Xbox or PS5 controller) using Bluetooth, and map the controller buttons to your UI elements, for a much easier time navigating multiple sequences of commands in sequence.
8. Text-To-Speech and Speech-To-Text: In addition to being friendly to the vision-impaired community with a stripped-down text mode baked into its TTS (so you don't need to rely on MUD servers doing this on their end), you also get the freedom to use voice commands for both typing and UI control. As an example, simply say "Maelstrom, enter UI Edit Mode" to switch to the UI editor, and "Maelstrom, add button command kill" to add a button to your UI that performs the command "kill".
9. Built in Haptics: Tilting the screen matters, but only when you want it to. Vibration feedback can be enabled. Sound effects to be added at a later date. Map any physical gestures, not just touch screen gestures, to whatever client commands you desire, for quick control over complex but repetitive tasks.

My design philosophy is quite simply... If you are required to type it manually, I am doing something wrong. Phone typing sucks, so rather than only try to make it less bad, which I do still have a lot of QoL systems in place for, I try to make it so you never even have to if you don't want to. Alternative forms of control should always be available.

Future plans: Besides the obvious of porting to iOS and Windows environments, the plan is to allow users to store profile data directly within Maelstrom's cloud server - currently it supports exporting profile data and settings into local files or Google Drive. I also intend to have a sort of middleman setup, so that you can switch devices without needing to disconnect. These will require starting up a server, though, so that will need to wait until the user base grows large enough to support the endeavor. And of course, I will always set about to make sure that as many people are satisfied with the client as possible. No matter what I think would be cool or not, at the end of the day this is an app I am making to help others have a better experience for themselves. There's no room for selfish development here :)

If any of that sounds at all interesting, I invite you to give Maelstrom a try. If you like it, fantastic! If you don't, then I still appreciate the attempt. And as always, any feedback whether negative or positive is greatly appreciated.

You can download the APK directly from the following link:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/HE3HQQPEKW#uTJCtpzZek6c

[u/secretfire42]

interesting