2018-01-12 02:33:43

so, I am not really sure if this has been discussed elsewhere on this forum with a single devoted topic to it. Please excuse me if it has been done before.

A little background from me. I grew up blind all my life, without knowing about audio games at all. This has a geographical reason for being so (see my location before this post or on my profile)
I actually did not know about many, many things for the blind, especially software. The only screen reader presented to us was jaws for windows, and i came to know it through organizations for the blind ever since version 3.2. I used it but did so every time I visited their centers. A friend of mine helped me contact the distributor in here that was selling jaws and I bought it. I was amazed, thrilled and very happy that I could open up some programs and was able to use basic, very basic functions of a computer!
That was enough for me. Then came the notetakers. A family relative of mine who lives there contacted fs, and we did buy the latest of that technology. A braille 'n speak. My school work was turning out to be facilitated so, so much more! You just cannot imagine the relief. My parents no longer had to grind their eyes transcribing braille. The institute that tought braille to the techers finally was free to go and teach that elsewhere to those who could not even dream of a note taker. I was able to print my work and that was it. I moved to the united states later, much later in hopes of studying, ETC. I eventually finished my high school and started university. Later on, immigration stuff went sour and I have returned to my home country. However, I learned a great deal of things for the blind. A whole bunch! I learned that jaws was not the only one, and that nVDA was starting to develop. It was like a dream come true because there were so so many things that exist for the blind like brailled everything,  talking everything, tactile everytthing. Magnifiers, services, transportation acomodations or even specific services too, the talking books, the nls, the podcasts, ETC ETC! And then, audio games. I think if I remember correctly the first or very first type of games I played were educational ones. The school got them for me. Math flash, talking typer, you name them. They even bought a copy of grizly gulch although my english was not at all mature so i never enjoyed it simply because I never understood it. But then I found this site, on 2004 or thereabouts. So believe it or not I have been following this site for a really, really long time even though I decided to create an account for myself all the way forward to 2013.
This site told me about every single game that existed. I enjoyed the popular successful jim Kitchen's games a whole lot, and we even exchanged communications back and forth via email. And then I was ready for my first buy. That was, hunter from bsc. Even though it was not the super intense arcade game, it was too fun for me. I also bought the old pipe because blast chamber was not even an idea yet. And then all of those companies started coming. Draconis (or ESP Softworks), l-works, GMA, bpc, pb games (or blastbay), pcs, vipGamesZone, and on and on and on! the whole thing was unbelievable. I think the market was really starting to rise up. There were interesting ideas, more concecpts, there was and still is innovation. Games became more complex (I did play the demo of monkey business) and way, way more vast and its unbelievable that all of the amazing bk series are free (I did gladly buy the translation pack even though I have some japanese relatives just to support the work) and oh yes. I also liked the castaways concept a whole lot so still do have an account on aprone's site. I also donated to Oriol Gomez, who I had long ago met in person at one of those blind conventions. (there you go, another thing I had no idea existed). I also bought metris, which is still for sale but its no longer being supported but still needs activation (I was e-mailed a key recently) just because I liked the game a lot being a musician. I donated to Oriol because his beatStar plus game is unbelievable and I did a soundpack for one of his older versions of the game, simply called beatstar. Being a proffessional musician, those were among my very favorite games.
Of course, now, things dealing with my use of software have changed. For one, I do not use jaws anymore, even though my country did acquire a national license so that people that coudl certify they are blind can use it. I was tired of the way fs did their business and on how eexpensive the dollar is here and I came across performance hogs. Plus, not being able to use the latest of the latest and some other things made me switch to NVDA. I did not have faith in it. But then a few projects came and I decided to become a monthly donor to nv access. I have devoted my time to documenting as much as I can about osara at www.reaperaccessiblity.com (most of that is my work) which I consider is only a small small gesture in apreciation of what others have done because those programs and things have helped me to lead my own, musical proffesional life (you can check some things I have done at www.soundcloud.com/belloj   or from my profile page).

But anyway, enough of me. All of This was just to prove the point to you that in developping countries, and especially in the latin american ones many, many blind people do not have much choice on anything for them. Brailled books, magazines or anything of the sort is rare, hard and expensive to come by. The only talking books you can find are now at audible and if you are lucky a few of them are in your language. I you want adaptive games, or adaptive cooking things, or adaptive anything, either use your brain to make some solution for yourself or ask a friend, or bring all of those things from Canada, the U.s., or probably Spain And that costs a whole bunch of money. I have saved to bring some stuff here that I had considered pretty useful. Even though the notetaker I had is not dead, because it got burned (wrong power supply was plugged in once) I have to say that it was an important part of my life. Now, comes the juicy part. The part that i want all to discuss. Audio games.
I was lucky that 1. I found this site, 2. I learned to write, read, and speak English and as a result, 3. Found about those games and am really thankful to be able to enjoy them just as much as most of you do. Audio games are not easy to come by in Spanish or even in other languages. SO much of the world is locked out of the comodity of enjoying them.
Recently i have started to read some discussions on a lot of things. And they all come over and over and the trend repeats. One company, or whatever, or one game, or one disagreement and the whole thing turns towards the audio game market, if there is even one anymore, and I have seen very interesting points and ideas, but none truly come to be done or sought after. I have found and seen posts that talked about the piracy of the audio games and was even once offered a copy of hunter, which I still have original because I bought the package from bsc when it was closing out.
Seeing those things happen made me think a few things:
1. Most people are not even thankful or enjoy what they get, they take all for granted.
2. Many of those companies are going out of business, because there is no sustainable model. There is simply no support. No people want their games because they are being pirated or can be obtained for free. I applaud and am amazed at the ones that still cling to even exist. Now we have more single independent kind of developers which you guessed it, may produce lower quality audio games, and this is due to:
3. When developers ask (and sometimes in an almost apologetic, very shy manner) for donations the backlash is generally impressive and this is simply because of the reason outlined on number one. So the results are silly, childish, non-valuing  excuses like:
*I don't have a credit card (why don't you ask your mom for one, I did that when I bought hunter)
*I do not have enough money (yet you spend that with beers ot with friends or.. depending on your age, on candy or whatever else)
*I think that such and such is way way expensive and it really does not deserve that kind of price or that price at all, it should be free, this is not at all fair. Well, beats headphones were a piece of crap, eventually talks for nokia ended up being a piece of that too, and so are some of apple's computers in terms of usability, hardware and specs (of course this is personal judggement) yet people of all types, sighted, dumb, smart, deaf, you name them! spent their oh so precious money on those pieces of trash. They desperately wanted them, did not make excuses and posted them to their faces, and simply just bought them. True proffessional customers, even if they did not realize they were being so. They saw value for what they bought. They realized that it takes effort and materials to do stuff. In case of audio games, This is put in the form of learning or applying something you are an expert at like programming, buying or having people design the sounds, maybe a story or a concept, taking time to write the documentation, maybe making others take of their time to test and run the game, and actually taking more time out of their personal lives to fix those errors. And at the end what do they get? not even a thank you or a gesture of apreciation for their work, instead they often times get rejection. which is a bit disrespectful and sends a very clear message.

So, with all of this where do you think the audio game market is going next? what will actually happen to audio games?
are we going to have to create more archives and more kirky ways of running them just because greed and lazyness (I actually forgot how to spell that word sice I haven't written much English in a long long time) takes over and prevents the community from supporting the developers of audio games even though the prices are really low?
when is the first or even the last time you have seen a single  audio game for, mm, I am not sure, the same price as for a retail, mainstream one (fifty dollars or more?)

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

2018-01-12 04:35:47

You're comparing apples and oranges.  The fact is that even in the mainstream market you have people who are ungreatful and disrespectful.  The reason it seems to matter here a little more is because the community of audiogamers is a rather small one.  My quick and simplistic answer is that people will come and people wil go, but games and true gamers will last forever.

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

2018-01-12 05:12:45

right. the smaller community makes those problems perhaps stand out a bit more, but the mainstream industry and this one are pretty much the same. With a few exceptions, the dominating majority of these games are english based ones. However, you would be surprised at the reactions of amacement my sighted colleagues show (and that is about 98% of my friends) when I tell them there can be such a thing as an audio game and the ones who have tried them find them to be really clever and fun, even if the concept is as simple as say, audio disk.
I think another reason why those things happen, besides the more social and emotional one is that the adio game world is widely known only in very few countries. Maybe if the concept could have been expanded and communicated some more (and there are some interesting youtube videos which really can do the trick) there would be more awareness and more potential clients.
For example, now many people know that blind people can use smartphones because there is an accessibility tab and a magnifier and a screen reader which are usually part of whichever system you are using and they will find that even if by accident.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

2018-01-12 07:35:25

Well, most audiogames come from the us.
I am also blind, from birth.
In 1989 I was introduced to my first computer of sorts.
A language master se, it had some word games on that and it was fine for a while.
In 1993 I was introduced to my first computer a keynote gold 1850, this was a voice card in a now non existant toshiba t 1850 series with ms dos 5.00.
This lasted me till 2008 when it finally died.
During its life I worked on it with mastertouch 1.33 and keysoft 1.33f and did word processing.
it had duxbury on it but I never ever managed to work with that.
It had wordperfect on it and while I was told how to use 5.1 I never really used it.
In 1995 while on the way home I dropped the computer on my foot.
The box was never the same afterward.
Still I got it updated to dos 6.22 and so on and so on.
Round this time though dos while a real good os, was fast outgrowing my needs.
No one had told me to try windows 3.1 though and I had never asked to use it.
The new box I got was a toshiba sattelite 310cds.
It was an real upgrade from the old 386sx with monocrome display, 4mb of ram and a 256kbp card.
It was now a 8mb shared chips and tech card, able to do 256kb colour and 16 bit and 32 bit true colours.
It also had sound, I never had sound till then, with a gemini sound synth from dolphin computers and hal 2.0 I started to get into the win95 ecosystem.
This also ended with me having a xircom cm56g a 56kbps pcmcia credit card modem which enabled me to get on the net.
Up till now I had achieved a few things.
On the keynote I had been through trial and error to modify my cmos to tell it that I was using a colour display, this meant I could take ownership of the monocrome memmory on my video card and make it part of the memmory I had.
I was also able  to along with dos 6.22, obtain norton utilities 7 and then 8, and quarterdeck expander emmory qemm 7 eventually upgrading to 8 when I found out how to get access to it.
With all this stuff in my posession I started to game.
Up to then, I had fiddled with disks my dad had, wolf3d, agent, dave, cat, morce code tutor and a few others just fiddled about.
Later on while at school I got friendly with an autistic geek wno had a lot of old style mojo game disks and prism game disks.
Out of all these a game we enjoyed playing was intergalactic battle, a menu driven graphical game.
Igb was not playable, but the turns were so you could make your choices, it would go to graphics mode and your actions would run.
Round this time I got into the net, my first site owned by paul henrichson had a few games on it.
Also the audyssey magazine, 17 issues of it.
I spent ages reading, learning about the games.
I never had a chance to access a bbs or compuserve at all.
My geek friend got the net before I did, it was interesting you looked up info and mucked about.
Spam back then didn't exist as such.
If a site said we want to subscribe you  to something or install our software and get you to look at adds you just did it, if they said they would give you something they usually did.
I never took advantages for those things, xdrive was the first cloud drive but it never lasted to long.
One thing I did take advantage of was what was then mp3.com
Got there, and got asked to put my name in to view a file I did and got subscribed to a news letter and got adds on my system I had no interest.
I ignored it, 6 months later a message popped up, thanking me for viewing the adds and asking me to enter my interests saying I would get a cd.
After that the software was uninstalled.
6 weeks later I got a cd of interesting but weird stuff.
Sadly that just like free internet is no more.
I was happy I was round back then though.
Windows 95 didn't even have much in the way of security updates.
I was able to update to 1998 se a little later on and a swan smart 56kb modem to boot.
In 1998 I also obtained a software upgrade to hal 4.0 then 5.0.
Amongst the improvements was a synth called orphius1.
That was good in a way because my gemini through over use had gotten dry several times and had to get serviced/ replaced at least twice.
In fact when I took the system to get repaired the second time, I was recomended to upgrade and was given the upgrade  in exchange for my synth and postage.
Well that was all ok but things get old.
I had by this time played some of the bsc titles and also an early prototype of shades of doom.
There were the pcs games, cops, lonewolf, shooting range math panzas in north africa and others.
But I had no idea how to buy them and I don't know if I would have anyway I never really played that much zcode, tads and adventure game toolkit were my babies cosmoserve was my favourite title in the games.
In the year of 2001, came the truth, even with all my hacks and modifications, the old dos box was falling apart and the old 310 wasn't doing much better.
I still have the first box, but after reformatting the cds, I traded it into my gym instructer for 2 dvds of mp3s and that was about it.
My next was my introduction to university, a nec versa premium.
It ran xp just barely with a 128gb ram stick, a 20gb hard drive, a slightly better intel graphics card, a crook fan, and the wish to get stuck and not clear its buffers.
2 years of reformats sometimes weekly followed.
Often I had to return to my cds still not traded just yet to complete work and what a hastle that was.
Gaming was out of the question, the internal modem was nice though, I think I used a soundmax card or was it yamaha it may have been that still with a hardware midi synth.
By this time I was using jaws 4.5 and with smas 6.0.
But it was horrible there were no mirror drivers or dcms or any chaining.
Basically, you had a registry and chain ini hack that went like this.
If exist video card run screen reader driver.
Screen reader driver loads video card.
videocard loads screen reader.
Screenreader a loads screen reader b, the last reader loads video card, video card loads kernal and os.
That was fine but if you uninstalled screen reader a or b or did out of order or started a and b, suddenly it was broken even if I was carefull.
Often this resulted in a non booting machine.
The same would happen if I had a driver update for the display.
And even if they booted, the system wouldn't work with either reader.
To fix this a full reformat was required.
However if I wasn't on my toes, I could break the chain easily.
So every couple weeks I reformatted because in haste I hit the wrong button.
Luckily the nec didn't last long, during a bios update the main board started beeping and beeping and beeping.
In panic I turned off the system, the board died, it got hot, and it blew up and I was happy.
Using my insurence cash I was back to a toshiba sattelite this time an a10 which somehow I still have even though its fan, keyboard and cd drive are both useless.
It ran xp home, had double the ram of my nec, worked with a 40gb hard drive, and this time I got an external cd writer which I still have.
For a while things went fine, I built loads and loads of disk backups I still have a bunch of disks all of which are old now.
I still have my flopydisks to.
Due to jaws being quella I had a  floppy disk drive and was able to transfer all my dos games from failing disks to a 100mb folder which for unknown reasons I still own.
By now its 2009, my old toshiba the a10 keyboard due to me gaming from everything from lworks to bsc, to sod, to gma tank commander 1x to well all sorts was failing mostly the arrow keys.
I got an external board but never bothered using it fully for anything bar games.
In 2008 my dos box died and I tried to get another without success.
My next machine was an old now toshiba same type but a tecra a9, still intel but a core2 with windows vista, downgraded to xp pro.
There I had an issue jaws needed to be upgraded to pro to work with xp pro and that was all.
Dcm was about and I managed to get the cash to upgrade to hal 12.0.
This came with easyreader express which I should have got but didn't in responce I simply got an apology and a code in the mail for a full version of easyreader 6.0 a bonus you may be sure.
By this time I was migrating to hard drives a 320 which I dropped in 2013 followed by a 500gb drive that died 2 years back and 2 large drives of 1tb which also died I have 2 seagate drives now.
In 2013 or there abouts my university and job hunting life came to an end.
There was no funding,  and I just couldn't afford migrating to win7, the old system 120gb hard drive and all needed to be replaced, its my linux muck about box now.
I also wanted to take advantage of the new 150-300n wireless standard.
The next box is the current one an i5 3rd gen intel, an now outdated hd8600 amd 1gb card and win7 pro.
I have drives, a cd writer and games.
Sadly I lost all my analog internal cards and use a realtech card still good enough and the effects for a laugh are not half bad.
Game wize I play just about anything audio sadly because dosbox does not want to work on x64 for me, I can't play the classics, its also harder to play the old audiogames.
Things like bavisofts titles I have been given, played, beat and binned.
It also is the end of the major players, the only active player in the field is l-works with draconis and gma still probably on the side but noone knows anymore.
Pcs is quiet usagames with the death of its owner is gone, jim kitchen and his stuff are gone, still online but nothing doing.
The rest are no more.
With bgt and a few things smaller developers have come on.
The japanese have made a killing with developers as yung as 12 making actual professional games, there is also 1 or 2 french games the most successfull is crazyparty.
Over that though there is not much left.
In new zealand we have sonnargames the company I test for which seems to be doing well, sadly they are a smartphone previder only.
I did test some of their games etc but still.
The game market I don't know about.
Its been static for some time and only saved from death because of bgt and the fact l-works does streams for audio games and other things bar that and the japanese there is not much going on.
Eurofly from slavakia is one game which is new,with code7 by goodwolf studios, and a heroes call by outofsight well maybe a revolution is starting, who knows.
As for the game market in general, I don't know.
we started off fast paced and action packed, now bar the renpy system we hardly turn over a game a year or anything really new.
A lot of the games are old and well lets face it we won't be needing gaming grade machines any time soon.

2018-01-12 14:24:16

This is an interesting topic.
I'm from the UK. So my first machine had windows 98. I remember we used to grab all the noisy screen savers we could find and just spend my time with those at home, and sometimes transfer them to school as well. One of the funniest things was when I'd accidentally set up a dinosaur screen saver with an actual time to activate, and the thing came on during a lesson this dinsaur was roaring outside the corridor, luckily it was very easy to stop so no harm done.
Well eventually I got windows xp but we still had dial-up. We learned about audiogames, I forgot exactly how though. My first audiogame was the esp pinball demo, this was back before you had pinball classic or extreme, and esp softworks was alive and well.
I remember spending four hours grabbing the monkey business and alien outback demos.
Then we got broadband, and boom. Troopanum, Hunter, all the bsc stuff, Super Liam from l-works the very earl concept demo.Then I
found out about audiogames.net and I've never looked back since.
I feel like audiogames are coming back again. What seems to happen these days is we get two or three very good games a year, sometimes only one, but we also get years where it kind of explodes a bit, and I think 2018 is going to be one of those, we've got A Hero's Call already, Liam from l-works is creating Brain Station, there's that hting called Echos of Levier coming as well, so that's already two upcoming games, plus one released one. Where as in 2017 and 2016 there was literally no idea of what was coming, and stuff just hit.
One of the Japanese devs seems to do one new project or an update each ear, so I wonder what we'll get this year, if last year was audiostrike, from a dev that we don't hear from too often.

2018-01-12 16:17:56

I find that an interesting point and that is how probably this one differs from the mainstream the most. Audio games have no graphical components, except for very few exceptions (which is not that cool because I wanted to play with everyone lol). With the optimization of everything, even code and ways of running things less processing power is needed to make all of those function. I must say that even with everything that has been going on (including the extensive piracy of some of those games) there have been many many contributions to what audio games are in general. Including a programming language especially done for that purpose. I had never seen such things before either.
lamentably though you can see that much of what the mainstream games use is nonexistent on the audio gaming world. A platform of some sort or making into a service or a subscription model would earn a lot of respect from me. Just like what microsoft or anyone else is doing with their software. I think its a viable alternative to just sellin one piece of software and could make the environment more sustainable for users and developers and those users that would support those things would be the real quote, true gamers unquote that the community would need. Unlockables would be nice too, paid unlockables for smaller prices.
Now, speaking of those amazing games that are free and very good like crazy party. How is that going to eventually keep up? how does it currently sustain itself? are we sure that say, in 5 years from now we will still have an online gamePlay facility?

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

2018-01-12 19:27:56

Well for myself subscriptions require cash.
Not all of us have steady employment so that doesn't work.
I always try to get things for free, or low cost, if I buy something that costs I need to save, a subscription, depending what it was no, its not for me.
Especially for those outside the country the subscription was was meant for.
And then if I subscribed, I'd have to commit to playing and using that sub.
And while there are those adicted to games and such games are not my life.
Its like if I had to pay for office, to get the most out of it I'd have to use it, I'd even have to use outlook to make it worth while.
Our market is designed for those that have little or no cash we can't afford that flash honda or even drive it.
Maybe that will change, maybe it will not.
Maybe the price of antiblind devices will drop to a point where we can afford them and stop being blind.
With conditions to being blind slowly being phased out, I can see a day maybe in the next 100 or so years or so where we will reach the state where there will not be anyone or at least any child born or going blind.
For the rest, who knows.
We all go to second life soon enough.

2018-01-13 18:27:25

@7: well, then Aprone's subscription model would be what is precisely needed, because you pay for something and you use it as your time permits. But for example most people pay netflix and use it when their time permits, too. Its pretty much with every sort of unlimitted thing you pay for... even if you are not going to use it 24/7 you still pay for the unused time of it anyway.

you also said:
Our market is designed for those that have little or no cash we can't afford that flash honda or even drive it.

And so, what about the IPhones most blind people seem to have? or laptops.. technology is pretty much just as expensive. Notetakers and especially most of the braille displays are also expensive pieces of gear. Having them financed to you because of an institution or a school or a district or whatever is another story but truly a blessing because U.s., Canada and Spain and probably a couple more countries make the goverment money be spent on you, almost all of the others would never do that, including mine. That being said however, I think our marketis just like every other regular market out there, but its become fragmented because of ostly, a lack of internationalization and support.

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…