2015-10-22 18:43:42

Dear all:

My name is Jesus Vilares, associate professor of the Department of Computer Science of the University of A Coruña (Spain).
One of our students is working on his Ms. Thesis, which consists on designing and implementing a classical old-fashioned roguelike computer game adapted for VI people. For this purpose we will use NLP techniques for generating a text description (in English) of what is happening on the game, so a blind player can use a screenreader for playing. At the same time, a classical old-fashioned graphical representation would be displayed so a seeing player (or someone using a screen magnifier) can play in a more "classical" way. In case you don't know this game genre, I will describe it at the end of this post.

We are looking for a small group (5-10) English-speaking visually impaired volunteers for testing the game. I guess the first version  of the game will be ready for testing in a couple of months.

Notice that this is a small academic project (1 student, 2 supervisors), we have no commercial interest; our intention, in fact, is to make the game available as free open source software if possible, so anybody can use or modify it, or even adapt it to other languages.

Thank you very much for your attention.

  Jesus

Know, I will briefly describe what is a roguelike game. If you already know them, you can ignore what follows.

WHAT IS A ROGUELIKE?:

Classic roguelikes are "dungeon crawling" role-playing videogames where the player is an adventurer (warrior, archer, magician, etc.) who explores a dungeon looking for hidden treasures and monsters to fight. The game is played in turns, in the sense that every action you make (either move, attack, cast a spell, etc.) roughly takes one turn. Although the most well-known roguelikes were developed by amateurs, they have had a great influence in commercial games.

The most orthodox roguelikes do not have graphics in the usual sense, but they are played on a text MSDOS-like terminal, where the dungeon and what it contains (monsters, treasures, etc.) is "drawn" from above, as a 2-dimension display using ASCII characters. Each character represents a different element: a stone wall, a weapon, a goblin, the player himself, etc. This kind of representation. If you want to represent, for example, a room with a door and a dragon in the center, what you would see on the screen is this: a rectangle formed by characters | and - representing the walls of the room, characters + that appear on the walls representing doors and, at the center of the room, a D representing a dragon.

However, because of the use of this kind of pseudo-graphic representation, roguelikes are not accessible for VI people, either using screenreaders or a braille terminal. This is the reason why, apart from displaying the dungeon on the screen in the usual ASCII-based way (either for seeing people or those who use a screen magnifier), at the same time we will show a text description of the dungeon (for those who need a screenreader), something like this:

"You're in the center of the room, which has two exits: one to the north, behind you, and another one ahead of you, to the right. There is dragon in front of you and, behind it, a magic scroll; behind you see a potion."

This will allow you to play the same game in both ways, thus allowing anyone to play and share experiences.

2015-10-22 19:08:33

Hello. This sounds very interesting. I would be happyto test this game.

“Can we be casual in the work of God — casual when the house is on fire, and people are in danger of being burned?” — Duncan Campbell
“There are four things that we ought to do with the Word of God – admit it as the Word of God, commit it to our hearts and minds, submit to it, and transmit it to the world.” — William Wilberforce

2015-10-23 02:51:12

I would absolutely be interested, as I remember struggling along back in the DOS days to play Moria and Nethack.  Please let us know how to give you contact info so we can help your student.

2015-10-23 08:47:11 (edited by guilevi 2015-10-23 08:47:47)

Hello,
I do believe I was one of the people who volunteered a few months ago when you asked on a Spanish mailing list. big_smile
I remember back then I couldn't get java Access Bridge to work, so I couldn't read what the game was sending out. If you want me to, I can try again. This sounds like a quite interesting game idea.

A fight we cannot lose.
An enemy we cannot defeat.
A destiny we cannot escape.
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2015-10-23 14:08:06 (edited by defender 2015-10-23 14:08:48)

Sure!  I'd be happy to help out as well...  smile  This sounds interesting.


My email address is  "[email protected]".


You may want to check out the audio games "Entombed", "Tactical Battle" (most especially the kobold dungeon map pack), and "Grave of Redemption" to see how other games do this in audio.  You can find links to all of those games on this site as well.

I'd also be willing to help out with sound design in a relatively basic manner if it would ever be helpful in the project.

2015-10-23 20:50:12

Hello, everybody:

It's me, Jesús. Well, four volunteers in just one day, that's great!, but we still need a few more. Thanks a lot everybody for replying.

(1) Yes, Guillem, I remember you. Sorry, we could not start with the English game at that time. Do you still have the same gmail account?

(2) Defender, thanks a lot for your offer and your comments. I'll tell Darío, my student.

Regarding how to keep in contact, we have this thread and most of you have your emails in your profile. However, I was thinking about opening a Google Group, since it worked very well when we were working in the previous game for Spanish. Moreover, since I'm trying to contact more volunteers from other webs, in this way we could centralize all the "work" in just one place. What do you think?

2015-10-24 01:10:36

Hi.
I will be able to test this thing.
Its a small project so yeah why not.

2015-10-24 06:50:30

I can also test the game my email is [email protected]

2015-10-24 16:06:06

I would also like to test this game my email is [email protected]

I used to be a knee like you, then I took an adventurer in the arrow.

2015-10-26 03:58:12

Hello Jesus, we've corresponded already, the email here is atouchofreverence at gmail . com

2015-10-27 04:10:23

Hey, I am MLG_Horse from rogue temple. You can contact me at [email protected]. Cheers!

2015-10-27 17:10:43

Oops, forgot my email. It's [email protected].

“Can we be casual in the work of God — casual when the house is on fire, and people are in danger of being burned?” — Duncan Campbell
“There are four things that we ought to do with the Word of God – admit it as the Word of God, commit it to our hearts and minds, submit to it, and transmit it to the world.” — William Wilberforce

2015-10-28 08:45:54

Hello everyone;

I'd really like to test this game.

My email is [email protected]

I'm gone for real :)

2015-11-14 18:07:12

Looks kind of full already, but I'm willing to hop on board with the testing group if that's still a thing. Do I need to provide any further information?
For Your Information:
There already exist several roguelikes adapted for the blind/visually impaired, mostly done via the inform 7 language. The most noteable is kerkerkruip, currently in version ten.
I don't say this to crush motivation, only to provide a potential source of information and ideas.
Hope this helps.

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