Excellent points raised, Psycho. I can say that it's kind of already happening, the developers working together that is. Manamon and other Vg storm titles were a collaborative effort between Aaron, Damien and sometimes Philip as well, three obviously very well know devs. Now that Out of Sight has released A Hero's call, there's always another adventure, no pun intended, that could be released as a collaborative effort between devs. Mainstream game devs do it all the time because they all know each other. We can kind of say that about audio games, but let's just say that Aaron finished Manamon halfway into the development process of what is now A H C.

One other problem that Tom Ward always raised when this question of collaboration came up was individual  choice among developers of what coding language to use  as well as what conventionss within that language, since manifestly someone using python, someone using java, someone still using visual basic and someone using C++ will be coming at things from very different perspectives, though that is one area where Bgt has helped I think.

I'm not sure I even understand how people do this "collaboration" thing. But clearly it's just me.
... Ooooorrr, it could be the whole internet thing. Being able to work together in person would almost certainly help. But some people can do it the netly way, so I guess that can't be it.

I picture a bunch of cats having a contest to see who will turn up the dominant cat. They hiss and spit at each other, growl low in their throats, maybe take a swipe. By gawd, you will use camel case and you will learn to love it!

Lol. Camel casing is the act of lowercasing the first word then uppercasing the first letter of the second word in a variable name, not that that affects the program in any way shape or form, but it's the way I like it to look so you all must do it! That's the story behind that whole thing.

@dark Yes, what Jack said. Also, I find it funny because apparently the NVDA team have this review process, and if your var names and stuff don't match up with the rest of the code, they won't put your addon on their official community page. Like, OK, whatever dude, the damn code runs, its fine. That's why if I ever made an addon, I'd just publish it myself on my own server and hand the link out.

I could see auditing code for malicious intent, or efficient use, etc. like, OK don't accept addons that are coded in such a way that they'd create a bottle neck, or those that may have memory leaks, but because they don't use the official python naming conventions? go fork yourself XD #GitHubJoke

If I was ever on a development team, which there is no chance because I suck at coding, but if I was, I'd adapt my style to match the project's. For instance, whether to use camel case, or first letter caps for each var, capitals for classes, whatever it may be, indents / braces position. I'd take a look at it and note down how it was laid out and I'd follow that way of doing things, but probably a lot of other people wouldn't.

I say cats because I think their dominant matches are funny. If you ever see a cat get higher ground on another cat, its dominance. They're asserting they have a better tactical position. There's a lot of complexity to cat behavior.

TL:DR praise good devs, shun dodgy ones, raise the bar

that's sort of subjective though, I mean, manamon, I don't like it to be honest, its OK, but its a rip off, that's a fact too its not just my opinion, its a rip off of pokemon, and there's no getting around that fact. Does it have some good elements to it, sure. I think its overpriced for what it is though. SO, Studying things like that, OK, so what if you study the wrong things, and decide it's OK to go around copying mainstream games and doing everything they do. I don't think that's very good for the audio games market.

The thing is, people are so desperate for new content, new games, and it takes the form of this almost fanaticism where as long as its not too buggy, they'll play it no matter what that developer did to bring that game to light. In the mainstream world, people get new games all the time. I mean, the PSN store is always flooded with stuff, even little things to tide you over until something big comes out, that's just fine, but here, we don't get that flood of things to choose from.

You know what's worse about Manamon, not the fact that it pretty much is a straight up clone of Pokemon, but the fact that the developer tried to hide it. That just burns me, and I can't believe I was stupid enough, and yes, I fell into the trap I just talked about above, but I did buy it. It was overpriced for what it was as well. I could have bought physical copies of pokemon games, then I'd have the legal right to use an emulator, then I could use the accessible emu with scripts and stuff to play it, and I'd be totally legit, what's more, I'd spend less than I did on Manamon too.

Price isn't the overarching factor though. I would have gladly paid $60 for A Hero's Call. I will shell out the dough if its warranted, but what I don't want to do is support developers whose morality is in question, which I have to wonder about Aaron Baker. His games aren't that captivating to me, I bought two of them, manamon and psycho strike. I tried the gate with a pirated key, and I chucked it. that game was so bad as to be ridiculous, the voice acting sucked, it had combat code right out of psycho strike, it felt the exact same, just different ambient sounds, different monster sounds. Now he's apparently developing for Leasey, yes, well, that pretty much made my point for me because I don't agree with that whole proposition. Admittedly, I don't know much about it, but i do know its apparently pretty expensive, coming in at about $300 for some scripts to help you with Jaws, which already is a boat load of money. Where do people think this money comes from eh?

Anyway, yeah, I will stand up for, support, buy from, and herald developers who work hard, are dedicated to supporting their products, are dedicated to helping their users who have trouble with their products etc. I will be just as quick to shun developers who do dodgy things, overprice their products time and time again, do not respond to the community's questions, sell out to the highest bidder, etc.

If we made this forum more like Reddit, where we plus 1'd people who do good work, like Joseph and Ian from Out of Sight Game, Liam from L-works and so forth, and we talked about the positive aspects when there was positive aspects to talk about, but we talked about the negative aspects when there was an overwhelming amount of things in the game that aren't satisfactory, I think it would send a clearer message that we will support you, but if you screw us over, forget about it, you won't sell another freaking thing around here. I kind of do wish we could be more like that.

Reddit is weird at times, but I love their up vote and down vote system. I wish we could have that for each title, if we liked it, up vote it, if not, down or just neutral. Neutral isn't good or bad, but down voting is bad.

I think if we want to see this steady increase in quality of our audio games like we've begun to see here in 2018, what we need to do is raise the bar a bit. What I mean by this is to not give attention to games that don't really deserve it. If we can collectively raise the bar, people will see that if they post shoddy work here, it won't get any attention, they'll either have to put some real effort in, or leave the arena, as it were.

I can't say I have a stake in this thing because I don't. My products I've bought from VG storm all have worked, etc. but, I can't condone the complete and utter lack of support I've seen here.

I can't speak for the rest of Leasey, but as I understand it, the gaming section is one part of what was meant as a modular system. However, I don't think any game should be developed to be exclusive to one screen reader. Now, before someone hops on the xbox versus play station thing, that's different, that's publishers making a choice, or Sony or Microsoft reaching out to publishers to make deals. I don't necessarily agree with it, and I wish all games could be played on all platforms,  but I understand it. This thing though, I don't understand. A screen reader is preference, sure, but there's more I could factor into it. For one thing, if I personally wanted to, I could go out and buy a license for Jaws, but not in cash, at least, not straight from my bank account, I got bills and stuff too, so that means I'd have to put it on a credit card, and I'd be paying it off for a while. Then you add the SMA on top, is it doable, yes, is it optimal, not really. Now, me personally, I about dislike Jaws about as much as its possible to dislike a product, but your mileage will vary. Everyone should be able to use whatever access solution works for them, and if Jaws works for you, great. So, I don't think its right for Leasy to be a thing, just as I wouldn't think its right for NVAccess to come out with some new games module that hooks into NVDA in such a way that other screen readers will not work with it, or it relies on a copy of NVDA to be on the system / running.

If you'll notice, Jamie, formerly of NVAccess, now of Mozilla, has developed Osara in such a way that it works with MSAA, that means you can use Osara with any screen reader capable of dealing with MSAA. This is good, because if you want to use it with Jaws, go ahead, system access, right on. This is the right attitude to have, develop your products so that its independent of what access solution the person is using.

I fall in line more with the FOSS mindset than the proprietary everything one for sure.

Well, there's a few things there. First off, anyone can go download NVDA for no charge and use it to play that game, while using Jaws for everything else. Now, is that optimal, no not really, but its a lot more doable than it would be if that person were an NVDA user and that game or translation pack were exclusive to Leasey. They'd have to buy Jaws, then go buy a subscription or however it works, then take advantage of the service. Also, one thing about it, NVDA addons are flexible because they use the power of the Python language, while Jaws scripts, I can't speak for much as I've never tried to code in it, but its proprietary, their own in-house production, and it will have limitations due to that. For one thing, it might not be able to call on external libraries, or it might not be able to open network sockets and so forth. I honestly don't know, this is outside my area of expertise. So, maybe its impractical, or impossible to make such a translation pack for Jaws, I really don't know. Certainly, if they can, they should do so.

Ah OK like I said, that area is outside my expertise, I was just speculating.