2018-01-11 04:40:15

So I'm sure that after this post I'll be vastly unpopular, but I feel it's worth discussing.
We are in the year 2018, and have just had a pretty successful release in the form of A Hero's Call. While I will be the first to tell you that I understand things like these are not something that just happened over night, is it time to reevaluate and go right back to basics, as it were?
I'm talking about things like:
What makes this game any different to the 50000000 clones out there?
What will make people want to come back and keep playing for longer than 5 minutes?
When I sit down tomorrow and hammer out another game, will I think about the game I just made yesterday?
How can I get the best with my sound design with whatever limited resources I may or may not possess? (I know that last one is a very grey area).
How am I going to market my game, should I maybe seek advice from other successful candidates?
If this a practice game, maybe state this in my thread when making it? (Hey, everyone starts somewhere right?)
Should I perhaps implement a pre planning stage before I start making a game?
I know that this barely  scratches the surface, and that there are tons of people who are in lots of different environments with different levels of expertise, potential language barriers etc, but I'm only saying this with a care for the community, and so much untapped potential.
Again sorry if this came off really harshly, but I feel that it really needed to be reiterated.
I welcome any discussion, criticism etc you may have.

2018-01-11 15:30:36

IMO....and these are my thoughts:

1. AHC is an audiogame at the end of the day. It's an audiogame trying to appeal to both blind and sighted gamers. Now I don't have the game (YET) but I did read the actual....graphics.....part is coming in an update. I don't think that'll help with sighted gamers any at all, I don't think any sighted gamers who backed it will be pleased to discover there's no graphics in a game they backed to appeal to both blind and sighted gamers. Don't get me wrong, I love the concept of a game everyone can play. Butt....if it's missing features, state it on the website. Put in Early Accesss on Steam, State it's an early acccess release on Steam. Say it's not a fnail build. This applies to everyone, I can look at a new release and assume it's a final version simply because it's in new releases on here, Perhaps there should be an early access subforum in the new releases rarea and the new reeases area is only for final, finished games. Just as a thought, it's what Steam did after all and that gave the world a hell of a lot of asset flipped games BUT it gave the world actual outstanding games.

2. Everyone is making games, This is not a new thing, indie games are coming out left and right. For every Minecraft or in this case AHC there's a billion indie games nobody plays, for every HL2 there's a billion Rogue Warriors, games so badly made they're fodder for internet mockery. I think this community and the indie game sene in general is too ego centric, the 'I will make MY game and screw you guys' attitude, it's, for a lack of a better word, a clusterfuck of games, and it seems to me to be a popularity contest, if you're on good terms with a big name, you'll get noticed a lot faster.

3. I think audiogames are inherently limited, I think AHC will struggle to crack the mainstream simply because it is an audiogame. Short of having a big team and a huge publisher to do sound and graphics design, I have this feeling AHC will just sit there and get a small following on Steam and GOG and wherever else, and just be this curious little indie game, while the Baldur's Gate type games of the world rule the genre. I don't think the fact it's made for blind gamers will help any.

In order to crack gaming as a whole, I feel audiogames have to reinvent themselves and go out of the box. Forget the 'for the blind only' approach. Get your sighted and blind team together and come up with stuff everyone finds fun and works from both ends, find a common ground and go from there. If you have to, say, build it in Unity and make your own TTS and sound stuff, if it gets through to everyone....then at the end of the day it's a win win situation, but I doubt that'll happen because there's a huge huge stigma from both sides IMO, the blind people are deeply suspicious of sighted gamers, the sighted don't think blind people game since they can't see the screen (no, seriously...that's a mindset) and the blind people typically give crap right back to them and start a bitching fit with sighted gamers.

IMVHO blind gamers need to break out of cultural isolation and take a sniff around Steam, find their favorite genres, get a few sighted guys togetther on a team, and find a game absolutely everyone can enjoy, not just five or six blindies arguing over software. The world's bigger than that. This community will not sustain a publisher wanting sales, they have to reach out to everyone to get a return on their investments.

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2018-01-11 16:03:29

Hi,
I think the other thing and the point that the original poster seems to be making, is that A Hero's Call really got a massive following, and why more games don't do that.
Well:
The team for A Hero's Call gave us textual updates once announced, and kept on going with that. I don't know how this happened, but there was soemhow a respect for the time it was taking. I have heard of devs who gave up because people kept on asking when this or that game was going to be released. Yet with AHC, this didn't seem to happen, even before we had a release date set, people were, somehow, content to wait for it, which is seriousl how it should be, as long as the dev still lets us know that he/she/they are around, or, in the case of Japanese audiogame releases, surprises us out of the blue sometimes.
It also takes time to create a game like this though, and a lot of it. AHC took around four and a half years, I was checking back on old topics as I was doing a bit of research and pointers because I'm trying to spread the word a bit, and back in around 2013 Joseph was asking for a sound designer, and now, that game they were talking about back then, turns out it was, indeed, AHC.

2018-01-11 16:06:44

I wouldn't call AHC early access as it stands right now. Just because it doesn't have graphics, OK, sure, no sighted person is going to play it right now, but would we expect them to? no. Also, I kind of agree, I don't think it will do good on steam, at least not by the standards of other well-received indie titles. For us, or well, for some of us, me included, I consider AHC to be a triple A title, and in the audio world, it kind of is. But that all goes out the window when the graphics get put in and the game gets released to the wider community. Also, I don't think its going to be as seamless as they think its going to be. For instance, you can turn off your radar, but that better be off in the steam version by default I'm telling you, because there ain't no sighted person gonna be playing and listening to beep bop, skidly boop beep, I can tell ya that right now. The game also needs a HUD, and out of combat, it would show everyone's stats, like a red health bar, perhaps a green stamina bar and a blue mana bar. In combat, it would just show the active person who you are in control of at that very moment. Then what do you have, a game that was made for blind people, but then all the stuff for blind people is in a sort of suspended mode until you turn it on. I think maybe like a very small handful of people will buy the game to play with friends, or will play with friends when the update comes out that includes graphics. Also, if they don't do something like allow you to completely disable the graphics, or maintain two separate versions, one with and one without graphics, some people might find themselves perfectly able to play the game one day, and not the next because maybe heir system doesn't have a dedicated video card or something, or if its a desktop, maybe its like 4 or 5 years out of date.

SO yeah, there are some considerations to be made, discussions to be made among the development team there, I'm sure at least the ground work of this has been started though. On the whole, I do applaud them for coming out with a game that has rocked the audio gaming community, and I don't see how anyone can think otherwise really. Even if you don't like RPG's, its still a feat of excellence that the game has such well thought out sound design that tops just about any other audio game. Also, hopefully this has set a spark in motion that lights a flame under the asses of other developers to start making higher caliber games tongue

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-01-11 16:09:39

Well put together topic and post, sir.  I sincerely hope this generates a lively discussion and doesn't simply end up swept under the rug.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2018-01-11 16:25:07 (edited by JaceK 2018-01-11 16:26:15)

@3: So basically doing the normal Kickstarter/crowdfunding routine of updates but actually delivering a product worth backing by blind people then. I've started playing AHC while posting this, I'm getting a good feel from it, BUT I do think it'll struggle outside of the audiogame bubble simply because there's a lot more competition

@Iron: Agreed, I love the idea, don't get me wrong, I love the idea of AHC, an RPG for everyone BUT.......I just don't think it'll be as successful as people think, I do think people need to keep hype in check. I like what I've played of AHC so far, but is it a GOTY? No, Not when I know what's coming for RPGs as a whole genre, even a hurriedly put together cliche RPG with graphics will get more traction on Steam. Joseph needs to send the Youtubers of the world a key and let them do videos on AHC to get the word out, but that's a double edged sword. TB's done videos on games I enjoy but he found fault with and the other way around, same with other big creators. I just feel AHC will be as I said this small little blindie game on Steam people will buy for the curiosity of it, more so when it has graphics.

I'm all for games for everyone but I just think audiogames need to reinvent themselves and move on from a blindie first approach to making a game both sighted and blind can play out of the box or off the download without having to put in graphics or put in screenreader stuff and shoehorn in either once a game's in development. I sent a link to the AHC site to a few friends and their responses went from oh cool, I'll check this out to I'm not blind, why should I play this to what the hell man, you want me to lose my sight to play this. That IMO shows a problem with gamers as a whole really, There's this idea that AHC is made for blind gamers, not gamers in general, I feel Joseph misssed a trick by even mnetioning blind gamers. If I were in his shoes I'd have marketed AHC as a new RPG everyone can play with optional accessibility features. That way the mainstream gamer isn't scared off by 'omg blindie game im not touching that' mentality as there's still a huge huge stigma from both sides about games really....which does need to change but is a slow process. I just feel that AHC while in this community can be considered a AAA title I'm still of the opinion it's a A to AA release on the wider scale of things.

Just my 0.02c here really, I just think audiogames need to reinvent themselves and figure out what they want to be

EDIT: They did say graphics were going to be a big part of it Iron and unless I missed it (possible as I didn't back it) did they state graphics weren't going to be in at release?

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2018-01-11 17:16:26

Hello folks! James, I don't see personally, how this could make you unpopular. Everything you considered here is a valid and all developers should weigh it before launching a brand new game.
As for A Hero's Call itself. I agree, it is not a new concept, but it is, as far as I remember, the first successful attempt at making a story driven rpg like that for the blind and VI comunity. Also it is going to have graphics. So, when producing an accessible game, it is nice to search if the idea is already available for us to try. We don't have the means to compare the accessible market to the mainstream market yet.
Best regards, Haramir.

The true blind is the one who refuses to see.

2018-01-11 17:47:11

And to those that wrote it. What do you mean with reinventing audiogames? Can you be more specific?

If you like what I do, Feel free to check me out on GitHub, or follow me on Twitter

2018-01-11 18:16:59

I mean, when you compare it to what we have, I mean yeah there are some good audio games out there, but a lot of what is made now are these small projects made in BGT that have ore bugs than you can shake a stick at, and the only people who are interested in them are, and I mean no offense in this, but people from other countries who can't by bigger releases, either because they can't afford to, or because payment systems aren't let through their governments filters, or what have you. And that's nothing against BGT either, make a compelling game using BGT, and I'll play it.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-01-11 18:52:20

I'm not sure I understand the issue. Not outside of wanting to see games made by predominately blind development studios break into the mainstream anyways.

Folks in wheel chairs have never asked that ramps be made more "stair like." Appealing to those able to walk has never, nor should it I think, been a concern of those in the ramp making industry. Sure their market is niche, but it's there.

Likewise...

The Oscars have a multitude of categories for which a person in the movie industry can be recognized for their contribution to film. Nobody asks foreign film makers to make their films less foreign to appeal to a wider audience, nor do they ask Drama's to be more like comedies, or this summers action blockbuster.

It's okay, I hope, for us to acknowledge that certain differences exist. Rather then trying to adopt the things that makes another more mainstream, we ought to be celebrating the successes of the pioneers in our own arena.

Why? Well in this case...

The needs of sighted and visually impaired players in (certain respects) will nearly always be different. Not in terms of: story, character development, and atmosphere. No, those things ought to always be in parity regardless of the audience or platform in question.

However game mechanics, by necessity, will have to be not only made well and interesting, but tailored for the best possible experience for the intended demographic.

I don't think audio game developers need to focus on making their "ramps" more "stair" like. I think they ought to simply be focusing on making the best game they can.

As for the latter: I think better, and more aggressive marketing to get the word out needs to be done, certainly, if for no other reason than to remind the world that gamers of all stripes exist. And because the folks behind their creation deserve the spotlight for a minute or fifteen.

Pardon me if none of that made much sense, I only just now woke up.

- Nate

2018-01-11 19:15:55

That's a flawed analogy @10 thoughh. Actually yes American audiences have shown they prefer films to be made less foreign and some of the best recieved films have been Westernized versions of Asian films, for instance Amerianized versions of Chinese or Asian cinema, or English dubs of Japanese anime. So that's a moot point. Also, Hollywood casting American actors in foregin roles merely reinforces my point that Hollywood has a habit of Amerianizing or Westernizing foreign cinema. Some of the best movies you'll ever sit down and get sucked into are Asian cinema because they are compelling and interesting, but the Hollywood remake does not come close to the original. For instance, the Ring, Japanese vs the English version. Both are decent but the Japanese original is far, far more a horror film than the English version ever was.

Next point. No. AHC specifically stated they were making a gam that blind and sighted gamers alike could play. Now that may just be marketing, however.....they set that out now they have to live up to it...and considering graphics, a big part of it aren't out yet I'd still say, Iron, that qualifies as early access, if you buy a car and it doesn't have a driver's seat you wouldn't carry on driving a car would you?

Your Oscars comparison, @10 is flawed as well, because, well, the Academy Awards are naturally biased, they are voted on by the movie industry and no, the videogame industry as a whole, isn't any different. Nope, they vote on their own awards, see the past few years awards ceremonies as proof.

'We should celebrate the pioneeers in our arena'

No, we should be looking outside our arena to grow audiogames as a whole and get it more recognized. This I feel is part of the issue with blindies, you want to celebrate your achievements and not acknowledge there's a wider world out there that you could show off what you've done, instead you go and want to restrict it to just audiogamers, when AHC is reaching out to gamers as a whole and trying to draw them in.

Once more, I love the idea of AHC, I love the fact it's trying to reach out to gamers as a whole. I'm liking what I'm playin, I'm gettin a definite good feel from it BUT.....here's my issue. I do think Joseph and company need to take a look at what makes mainstream RPGs work for marketing and such or even, and I hope they don't do this, sell AHC to a publishet to get it marketed right on Steam. The reason I wouldn't like AHC to be sold to a publisher is that publisher would then completely dictate what happens to AHC.. Best case? Publisher loves the concept and runs with it, adds graphics and supports the game. Worst case? Publisher does jack with AHC, no patches, no graphics, nothing. Seen both happen to games and not the games you'd expect either. Oh and they'd want all AHC discussion on their forums if it was a big publisher too.

Last point
I'm not saying  that differences shouldn't be acknowledged. I'm saying that audiogames shouldn't just be restricted to the blind, AHC is as I said trying to reach out to gamers as a whole but there's a ton of  stigma around blind gamers from sighted gamers and vice versa. AHC is trying to change that but.....

Okay I have to respond to this: Devs should make the best game they can?

That's a given. But. Devs should make the best game they can....for everyone. Not just blind gamers. They should make games absolutely everyone can pick up and play because at the end of the day gaming is bigger than just audiogames, there's a hell of a lot of gamers out there to wave game X at and get them to try it out. The problem right now I feel is audiogames has 'blindie game' labels, or, 'simple games for stupid blind people' mindsets from some gamers and other outlets, whih I feel looking at some audiogames could well be deserved....hence my argument for reinventing audiogames, make them more compelling, more mechanically complex, more engaging to play for everyone.

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2018-01-11 20:06:31 (edited by whiteknave2 2018-01-11 20:08:02)

"Americans have shown  they prefer..." You're still myopically focusing on one market, the analogy stands. I'm certain a quick google search would provide a list of best foreign titles that are anything but westernized, half the Criterion collection is comprised of Italian and Japanese fair that tends to boggle the mind of the average Western viewer. Simply pointing out that some folks don't like it doesn't null-n-void what I expressed in my post above.

"The Hollywood remake never comes close," this is more an argument in favor of keeping to what one knows and does best, rather than attempting to do what's garnered success in another arena entirely. A solid strategy I and every author endorses ("write what you know").

Your dismissal of the Oscar comparison because "the industry is biased" also falls flat, since their bias isn't the issue, but that they acknowledge nearly all film in whatever form it comes to them as, is. Different kinds of films, and film makers are represented, adulated, and given the respect they've earned.

Celebrating the pioneers in "our" respective arenas and acknowledging that said devs and their games aren't receiving enough attention aren't mutually exclusive phenomena. We can, obviously, do the one while bemoaning the  grim reality of the other.


As far as devs making the best game they can I stand by it. Again you advocate for the industry and people in general to start paying more attention to said developers, then acknowledge that the only reason they don't is because of some misconceptions, and some harsh realities, regarding the types of games they develop.

Bad games will always be bad, great games won't always be recognized as such by the majority of gamers (as a sighted man I can name a plethora of these), and some good games will transcend their small indie label and all the stigmas that come with it. That's just life.


At the end of the day we both want these sorts of games to be the best they can be, we just don't agree on the road they ought to take to get there. I'm off to work, I hope you have a truly lovely day.

- Nate

2018-01-11 20:46:34

The way I see it, we have two different types of gamers within this community this discussion needs to take into consideration, those who have played mainstream games and those who haven't.  Before discovering the concept of audiogaming, I was a huge fan of mainstream games; that's what I grew up on.  My brother's cousins, friends and I invested onconsoles and titles for those platforms on a regular basis quite regularly and had hours of fun as a result of it.  The first audiogame I played was a game called Terraformers, a game that was made for both, sighted and blind individuals to show that the concept could in fact, be done.  while it was challenging in the sense that there were puzzles to figure out and objectives to complete, the game would never, ever compare to one of my favorite mainstream titles; Perfect Dark and Body Harvest immediately come to mind.
there came a time when I had to recognize that the two are, however, exceptionally different.  Video game developers focus more on the graphical aspect of things because they have to, because the majority of their market, is sighted!  Every single sighted person I know still feels the need to leave the lights on in my house, even in my room, when they leave because to them, lights are of the greatest importance.  it never crosses their mind that they might be saving me some money by turning them off.  I feel the same holds true in games; when was the last time you heard a sighted gamer say, "That rocket launcher sound was so freaking cool!"
I'm not saying we can't join the markets in some senses, and I feel there are developers such as Ed Boon who have taken notice of us.  If you ask me, we need to increase our visibility at gamer conventions and make it obvious that we're here and that we do game, no matter how we do it!  We're going to need to reach a point, however, when we take into account that because of who and how we are, we'll never be able to game on the same playing field and levels, just as we obviously can't drive a racecar or play football or join the military and be expected to participate in the field of battle.  the bottom line is, there are simply things we can't do.
this is not to excuse audiogame developers and let them off the hook, however; we should continue raising the bar regardless of where we are right now and aim for where we seriously want to be, even if we never get there.  Why?  Simple, because success is not going to be determined by the amount of achievements we manage to score, but by the character with which we score them.  If we're willing to settle for medeocrity, we can't complain that we don't get anything better.

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2018-01-11 21:48:12

AHC was made by a team with professional skills over the course of around 5 years. Most Audio games are 1 or 2 people. They raised a budget, even if a small one. Like, this thread seems to keep coming back to "Audio Game developers need to step up their game", which... OK, that's true, but you're using a team of pros with lives and experience and enough patience to work at something for 5 years, who can run a successful marketing and crowdfunding campaign, as your standard of comparison. Can you put together a pro team of pros to do pro work that costs thousands of dollars? I can't. I can't put together a team of random newbies and/or amateurs.
The standard for low-to-no budget, small-to-no group projects remains Swamp and BK3. Manamon falls somewhere between those extremes (just look at the development path from Adventure at C:, the collaboration on Psycho Strike, and the pricetags used to build funds).
And Aprone had over a decade of experience and a job and such when he started, so the real standard is Nyanchan.
There is no physical reason we can't all be as good as Nyanchan. But we've had plenty of time and this is what it took to get close. Anyone who can found something better to do with their 99th percentile superpowers, like pay rent.

It's 2018, FCOL. 20 years ago, I was still playing Sega Genesis (I asked for an N64 at one point but got a Sega Nomad instead). I still come back to some of those games, in spite of how ridiculously more difficult they are to follow now, because give a pro team with pro skills and pro funds a megabyte, an 8600 and a Z80, and they can take that megabyte of ROM and 65k RAM and outdo 99% of what we've done with hundreds of megabytes ROM and gigabytes of RAM. If miracles happen, and AHC is the start of a new age, I will be glad to have been wrong, but we've had time and ability to catch up for longer than our most active devs have been alive, and this is what we have to show for it. Color me cynical (that's jade, right? Which shade of green is envy, then?), but I feel like we're in "roll enough times, and eventually you'll get a 20" territory, still, and if we knew how to get out, we'd've done so by now.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2018-01-11 22:37:58

See, this is why I want people to stop developing games in BGT. BGT is a limiter. BGT limits us to what games we are able to produce. If we stick to BGT, and don't even try other possibilities, how will we ever advance? The sited community is more than a decade ahead of us and the more we rely on BGT and make games with it the further and further we get behind. If we even want to come close to challenging the sited gaming market (a possibility, no matter how unlikely), then we need to stop using BGT and permanently abandon it. We need to get down to either developing games by hand in C++, Python, etc.; or find a way to make use of existing game engines (because making our own game engine is not going to cut it, no matter what you guys think). But if we keep trying to make games in BGT, all it's going to do is isolate us more and more. We're already as isolated as is.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!]: 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out ?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."    — Charles Babbage.
My Github

2018-01-11 23:08:32

Woooooooo I think I got it after the first BGT.  I won't use bubble gum tape anymore, I promise.  :d

When life gives you oranges, demand lemons since everyone else is obviously getting them.

2018-01-11 23:14:22

cae_jones wrote:

It's 2018, FCOL. 20 years ago, I was still playing Sega Genesis (I asked for an N64 at one point but got a Sega Nomad instead). I still come back to some of those games, in spite of how ridiculously more difficult they are to follow now, because give a pro team with pro skills and pro funds a megabyte, an 8600 and a Z80, and they can take that megabyte of ROM and 65k RAM and outdo 99% of what we've done with hundreds of megabytes ROM and gigabytes of RAM. If miracles happen, and AHC is the start of a new age, I will be glad to have been wrong, but we've had time and ability to catch up for longer than our most active devs have been alive, and this is what we have to show for it. Color me cynical (that's jade, right? Which shade of green is envy, then?), but I feel like we're in "roll enough times, and eventually you'll get a 20" territory, still, and if we knew how to get out, we'd've done so by now.

I give 0 craps about which language or toolkit people use, so long as they use it well. What does AHC do that BGT can't? HRTF. If BGT limits us, then it's not because of BGT's limitations, but rather, its convenience keeping people from developing better skills.
Final Fantasy VII is a PS1 game. The Legend of Zelda is on the NES. The NES has 2kb RAM! Literally a millionth part of the less powerful CPUs still in use on PCs! These games are still popular today, even though the youngest is old enough to drink in the US. It's not the size/power that matters, but how you use it. I guarantee you that, ceterus paribus, if everyone switched from BGT to C++ right now, and were magically given mastery of all its facets, and everything they've built up in BGT is ported seamlessly, we'd still be in the exact same place, except development would take longer because of the extra typing and project management and the ways in which C++ can break that almost all of its descendants go to great lengths to forbid.
The problem is not the tools. It's us. Using BGT doesn't stop anyone from buying pro sounds or hiring actors. BGT doesn't make bad gameplay design decisions for us, or make us focus on explosions over substance, or keep us from organizing and working together and raising the necessary funds. All of that is on us.

看過來!
"If you want utopia but reality gives you Lovecraft, you don't give up, you carve your utopia out of the corpses of dead gods."
MaxAngor wrote:
    George... Don't do that.

2018-01-11 23:28:41

No, no, CAE it's both. the tools and the user so to speak. It's a bit of everything, but it comes down to audiogames being 3 or 4 decades behind even an NES or ZX Spectrum or 2600 game, which had a lot less power than a PC.

What does AHC do differently? Hype and able to convince people that they'll add graphics down the road and they'll somehow make sighted gamers curious about audiogames....at which point the sighted may well realize what  audiogaming really is.

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2018-01-12 02:23:23 (edited by death 2018-01-12 02:25:42)

I'm with Cae here. Programing has nothing to do with it. For the most part, the community has no comparisons. Story, gameplay, replayability, all of that comes from the ideas you have. Yeah, actually putting the ideas into effect is one thing, but if you don't know what to code how can you expect to code it? We're stuck (for the most part) in a swamp of average games. Take two examples here. Cae's games which are actually pretty great story and idea wise, but gameplay isn't really intuitive. Then you have the overly simplified games with literally no challenge that people are super excited about because really, what else is there? invaders, RPGS, hell, card games. Part of why they're so popular is crisp graphics, I won't deny that. Another part though, is that they try to offer something to the gaming community at large that has never been seen before. They try to seperate their games from the rest. AHC is a perfect example of this. Ignore my opinions about the game itself, it has done something that hasn't really been done before in this community. It's a storydriven RPG with a beginning, middle, and end that focuses on multiple class paths. I suppose if you wanted to, you could throw manamon in that conversation. Up to you. Anyway, just my thoughts.

Silly Gohan, animals don't eat people. People eat animals.

2018-01-12 07:15:48

@13 I used to love playing perfect Dark. I'd start the villa and just snipe at them and then restart it after I beat the game. I'd drive the hovercraft around the institute helipad and try to get it out into the main areas, but it would never go. I used to love setting up the AI scenarios on the multiplayer maps and play those, and then multiplayer battles. It was the game that forced me to buy the ah hell, what did they call it... the expansion pack, basically the thing that added more memory to your N64. It was a cartridge thing inside a cover on the top near the front of the unit, you'd take that cover off and use a butter knife to pop the old one out, and put the new one in, then you never needed to touch it after that. Anyway, Perfect Dark were some fun fun times.

@15 can we please just freaking chill about BG, seriously, if everyone did the same thing you do and forced their opinion on the other users of this forum given the slightest opportunity, the place would be crawling with nothing but clash of the titans and shit all the time.

If you're passionate about this, rather than rant and rave, go do something about it. You're always touting this knowledge, but I never see anything from you in the new releases room, or anything coming up in general game discussions. You have all this knowledge, so put it to work, and either develop some games with it, or write some tutorials about how to use virtualenv or pipenv together with stuff like pygame or pyglet to make an audio game in Python. Seriously though, if all you're gonna do is point fingers, push your opinions unwanted onto other people, and act like the Hermione Granger of the development world, we as a community ought to get something back for tolerating it.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united

2018-01-12 07:52:13

Well its a question on what we can afford.
A gaming grade pc with loads of graphics is nice and bulky its not going to improve playing though.
Till we can take advantage of everything who knows.
Now we have come a long way, basic multiplayer support, 3d audio surround sound and binoral audio to name a few.
We are even doing stuff in the unreal engine.
To bgt, yeah we really need to stop using it.
If you read in another post ethin will tell you because of how its compiled, antivirus programs see it as a virus.
If its bad practice to make stuff this way, then maybe thats telling us that bgt while nice is past its used by date and maybe we need to have another engine or something that works maybe based on python3 or something.
Using nvda with python2, python has proven itself to be no slouch, look we have extentions, settings, a free os dependant screen reader with little thirdparty stuff by default what else can you ask for.
Will this be the next stage of gaming who knows.
There is not a large enough load of companies to handle blind and sighted games.
With the death of most of toshiba and its machines I am going to have to move elseware for my laptops maybe dell maybe hp.
I will loose the accessibility I had had in bios, as well as a load of other things.
But I have to advance I can't stay on duel core cpus for the rest of my life.
Having had a muck with an ssd hdd combo I can't stay with a single drive model either.
I like 7 but 10 is the future and like it or not its coming into its own.
Sadly I do think the audiogames industry is dead or at least dieing.
No one has rushed in to replace the large core companies that started it in 1995 at least for the pc.
A lot of work on smartphones is going on but the pc seems to be in a class of smaller games lately even sighted games are now phone or console based.
Where would I like us to be.
The fact is sound is limited.
There isn't much we can do, and no one has the cash to buuy a mega powerfull headset for gaming anyway.
I have obtained a couple 1 a 100-200 dollar old senheiser the other was found in a horder friends junk it works but I don't know what it is.
The blind can't afford all the big graphics and other things.
Our games don't really need anything over xp or maybe 7 to run and most software is still sadly 32 bit.
I think we have advanced as much as we ever will.
The blind have games, making games sighted, it may work or it may not but it has to work both ways.
ea and a few others are trying but still.
In the latest ms dotnet release accessibility is mentioned weather that means we are being noticed or not is your pick.
So the future, I don't know we could continue this going forth and back for the next century or so without any change.

2018-01-12 08:11:18

I pretty much agree with Nocturnus on that matter. If we ever want to be noticed by all the sighted players out there, and, maybe more important, by the game developers, we need to make ourselves more visible at game conventions.
I think, as an audiogame, AHC is actually really great. Simply, because it gave us something, we didn't have before. It has an actual story (which is very important to me), it has, at least from my point of view, a decent replay value, and it is no sidescroller, which is also important to me. But could it stand it's ground in the sighted world?
To be honest, no, I don't think so. For that, the focus was set too much on the blind comunity. If this game one day will have graphics, all the sighted players would have to get used to blind people's gaming style. And somehow I doubt, they will have that much patience...
Don't get me wrong. I still enjoy playing it. But I don't think, it will ever have the strength to step out of our cosy little corner of the gamers world.
If there is a game, that could have the chance of doing that, then it would be Code 7. Simply, because this game was, from the beginning developed for blind and sighted people alike. Here, we don't have a special, blindfriendly interface. Allghough I wish, it would support NVDA, so I can read along on my display. But that's a different story...

2018-01-12 11:56:06

@22: But being more visible is a double edged sword though Nocturnus, gaming conventions are already filled with games and devs and such trying to get attention, blind games would be just another game at a PAX or an E3 or an EGX or whatever other convention it is. It only takes one bad experience for the convention to go no, we don't want X game people back, or no, we're not going to book X game companies this year.

@Crash: You do not need a gaming PC with a SLI Titan 980 GTX quad core setup for audiogaming though. You can audiogame on n ordinary desktop or laptop, something you can't do with games in general, well....the latest games anyhow....

@Iron: You could actually glitch that hoverthing out of the helipad actually....

@Death: Nope, hardware limits came into it with the stuff you mentioned, you couldn't just add more memory to a 2600 or NES or Game Boy or a C64, you had to work with what you had and the games were literaly physically constrained by the hardware limits too, the controls for one thing....however I'm of the same general opinion that I have more respect for older generation devs simply because they couldn't rely on flashy gimmicks to make their games attractive. I'll take Tecmo Bowl with a modded ROM overr Madden any day because Tecmo is fun as hell and plays very very well even now. Or I'll take Perfect Dark over Half Life 2. I know, I just shat on Valve's magnum opus.....but the thing is, the N64 had absolute hardware limits. I'd even take the Genesis/Megadrive original Sonic 1 over later games in the series (though Mania is decently good), simply because the earlier games nailed gameplay because.....they had to. It's sad, I don't get the same feel from audiogames, I can go hunt down 2600/5200 games and....they're still, even some 35 years on, ahead of in a lot of ways

Warning: Grumpy post above
Also on Linux natively

2018-01-12 12:50:45

@JaceK
So, what you are saying is, that an audiogame could fail, so better not try it in the first place?
I don't think that is the right way. Maybe an Audiogame would be only one of many. But at least it would be present there. And, at least on the E3 and the GC, indygames are very popular.

2018-01-12 13:52:44

@21 damn bruh, you dark. I thought I was the dark one around here, but even I have more mope than to realize things in audiogames are changing. In a century, you think we'll be playing audiogames like oh insert buggy BGT thing here? Who even knows, a lot of advances I thought we'd see, especially medical ones are coming sooner and sooner, so in 81 more years,, I can't even imagine what we might be on.

I both agree and disagree about the BGT thing. I agree that it has limitations, my god if you use dictionaries, be prepared for slow and cra-crunch. But, I don't believe, and I've been proven correct a few times, that its not possible to make a good game in BGT. Someone with proper coding knowledge and a good handle on game design would be able to make a game in BGT wel worth playing. Will it be an AHC, no, but people would still play it.

BGT has a bad rep because people put out their projects way too early. Sure, everyone is going to go through a learning process, I am right now trying to learn it, and believe me, the stuff I'm making is both primitive, and uninteresting. But, I make each little thing to teach me some other aspect of the language. If, and that's a mighty big if, there's something that ends up coming about that I can refine into  a game, I will do so, but there's no point in releasing my little starter projects. People make these bad and buggy games using BGT, release them here, and then you go oo, a new game, only to be disappointed. So just hold on until you can make something compelling, and test it thoroughly, get friends to help with it, form a sort of closed alpha ring.

SO, we're flooded with these half-baked, buggy, uninteresting things, and the lowest common denominator is the game engine, but it's really not, its just people not refining their development process.

@23 I tried many times. It would go into the other side, it would also go out the door, but it would stop at the ramp, it would stop at some point and not go through, I tried everything from trying to back it up through, slide it through, push it through, and never could get it.

Facts with Tom MacDonald, Adam Calhoun, and Dax
End racism
End division
Become united