I’ve always loved indie games built with RPG Maker (more specifically Pokemon fan games) and I caught myself always wanting to play those when I’m not in front of my PC.
A few years ago I heard about JoiPlay and how it allowed anyone to play fan games/games built with RPG Maker on your phone.
Problem: it’s Android-only and I’m a long-time Apple enjoyer, so I gave up on the idea of playing those games while on the road/outside of the house.
A few weeks ago I got back into fan games with Pokemon Z’s release, and I was annoyed that there was still no app that allowed me to at least boot the game, so I made my own JoiPlay for iOS.
It’s probably not as stable and battle-tested as JoiPlay, it probably packs a bunch of bugs, but at least now I can play those fan games when I don’t have my computer close by - and it’s open-source, so if you want to fork it and tinker with it, you can!
Here are some screenshots of Pokemon Z running on Empo (you'll find more of these at the link below):
You can download the app (.ipa file) in the app’s GitHub repository and side-load it (check the README.md file for more information):
https://github.com/mateo-m/empo-app
Right now I haven’t released it on the App Store, but I'm thinking of trying to publish it there depending on the traction the app gets.
One more thing for the techies: the codebase is messy so don’t expect reading through it to be a walk in the park: you’ll find weird hacks to make specific games run properly, syntax transformations for recent games that try to run on Pokemon Essentials forks which use old Ruby binaries in weird ways, etc…
I hope you’ll be as happy as I was when I was finally able to start a game on my phone 😁
If you like the project/find it helpful, giving the repository a star would mean the world to me!