can I enter despite having the game, not to win it again of course, but just because I'd like to have a crack at the writing contest, if my name were to be drawn, someone else could take it or a re-draw could be done.

Again, awesome. Yes, what someone said earlier is true. A Hero's Call has, for good reason, brought this community together. I've really noticed a lot of awesome things as a result of this game. Frankly I was waiting for the hate, the stupid criticisms, etc etc etc. I was waiting for someone to say how they didn't like something and then for a bunch of other people to hop on the "screw this game" bandwagon, but I have yet to see that. People, with regard to AHC, have provided constructive criticism where necessary, and have not complained about the price or anything else for that matter. This is awesome. Again, I'm really glad to see this game getting people to come up with contest ideas and seeing everyone be happy for once lol

Another contest? Wow. But this one, I can't enter for sure. Why? Because I'm not good at writing, so yeah. But anyway, glad to see another contest going.

Hey all! I updated the blog post to answer a few questions. I know others will hold contests not related to writing. I'm a huge proponent of promoting and supporting blind writers so it would be natural of me to host this kind of contest. Someone will fill in other contest gaps such as those in other countries.

Re post 8, the massive pool of random number guess copies will easily handle that, I really can't hate on this guy for spicing up his contest a bit.

And no personal offense to anyone in the Dev team I hope, but for all those heralding this game as the second coming, AHC plays like an early 2000s or late 90s RPG, no realistic AI for non enemy NPC's, a lack of tactics used by enemies even at highest difficulty, able to steal anything you want without any consequences, limited dialog variations, no voiced player character, relatively little actual replay value do to nearly identical playthrews each time and a lack of any major challenge past level 65 or so, and mostly simplistic fetch quests, but without even a quarter of the content of some of the most popular ones of that time, and still not up to par with some modern indi games with similar budgets, though admittedly, in different genres.
The voice acting is relatively hit and miss, and the amount of bugs on release was pretty staggering, along with the lack of graphics after so many years of Dev time and exceeding the funding goal by so much.
That said, the writing for equipment, character descriptions, most of the books, and some of the quests is fantastic, at least in my relatively uneducated opinion, the spacial audio would be impressive even if it was a mainstream game, the sound effects, particularly the magic, forest and mine environment, door, parry and draw sounds and most of the voice filters are almost exclusively top notch, and the music, though limited in it's application, feels passionate and is of triple A quality.

Also, obviously their were the extenuating circumstances that this was Out of sight's first project, it has unique requirements because it is still mainly an audio game, they weren't being backed by a larger publisher, and most of them were collaborating over the internet with no actual home base, and with a shoestring budget with only a small expected customer base for sales.
Their have been other projects in the past that have had to deal with many of these same issues and still came out a better product than AHC, but far more have collapsed under their own weight and been forgotten, so the fact that it came out at all is a testament to the perseverance, passion, and personal sacrifices of those involved in it's creation.
And besides, AHC has it's charms to go with it's flaws, even if some of them are long held tropes, Rogar the goblin we all love to hate, the amusingly satirical comments about fetch quests, Simeon's cutting remarks, Victoria rushing you to leave her with her new lover, Nigal and patunia's over the top punchability, the amusing choices you can get for responses, the conversations that can actually boost stats if played right which I haven't ever seen before, ETC, that all come together to still make it a memorable game even though it's stated purpose is to emulate rather than innovate.
Plus, the honest and engaging PR before and after release, and the impressively fast and stable (better late than never) patching and responsive bug report gathering by Joseph and Ian over the last few weeks has really shown Out of sight games to be an upstanding team, even when working against the tide.

So no, I don't think it's worth 80 bucks, I think it's worth pretty much exactly what their selling it for, and I really, truly do hope that they break even on their investment at least, as some of them had to put their own cash in to fund it (which was very generous) do to bad money management.
I also hope that the soundtrack will get plenty of purchases, since the producer behind AHC's awesome music gave a much lower asking price than usual because he believed in the project.
Thankfully all these contests are really helping make that a reality, and helping those less fortunate at the same time!

To those complaining that a writing contest isn't a far way to give away AHC: I don't think the point is to give away AHC. The point is to have a writing contest. AHC is the means, the contest itself is the end.

@Holden: I couldn't agree more. Plenty of people have shared criticisms and constructive feedback, much of it valuable. But it's almost all been in a spirit of wanting to see the game be the best it can be, and that makes us better as developers as well.

@Defender: No offense taken. Of course the game is behind the curve as far as the mainstream is concerned. After all, we're a team of four people, working on nights and weekends, trying to inch audio games one step closer to what they could be. The fact that the game is, on the one hand, being praised for being such a big step forward for audio games, but is on the other hand so far behind the main stream, just shows you how much this medium needs to catch up. Even if we could have made that quantum leap in one shot, would we really have wanted to? Think of how many people we would have left behind. It took sighted gamers years of new titles to adjust to the gradual maturing of video games as a medium. Audio games are going to need that sort of incremental change in order to move forward without totally bypassing their players. If you don't believe me, consider the number of people who have lamented the fact that AHC is made to be navigated in the first-person, and say that top-down is more comfortable. That's a major change to game mechanics that would have been disorienting to sighted gamers when it first came along, too. Now imagine if video games had tried to skip directly from the SNES to the Xbox One. It would never have worked.

On a more specific note, I'm baffled that you point to the limited dialogue, while also commenting on the amount of money we raised. I suppose you would have been less impressed if we'd gone with the amount of dialogue the game initially featured, before the success of the KSC. Voice acting is expensive. Processing that voice work is also expensive. You say there are indie games with a similar budget with more content? Um...show me one? Because I want to know how the dev did it, and copy their technique.

Thank you for the kind words about the areas where the game shines, however. Those are definitely appreciated. Understand that I'm not actually saying that your quibbles about the game are not valid. These are all areas where the game could be improved upon—except perhaps the issue of challenge after the theoretical level cap, because I don't think you can, or should, make a game that doesn't let you get into a basic god mode eventually. But yeah, I'd love to have ten times the dialogue we have. I'd love to have player choices affect the game world more frequently and more dynamically (which comes with more dialogue). I'd love to have better AI. And I'd certainly love to be done with the graphics. But I'm convinced that four a four-person team, working only on our personal time, for no pay, and without access to the mainstream development tools used by the aforementioned indie developers (since none of those tools are designed with blind developers in mind), I couldn't possibly be more proud of what this team has accomplished. You think someone can do better? I sure hope you're right—because if they do, then we'll be one step closer to the closing the gap between sighted and blind gamers, and none of us are complaining about that.

(PS: You're absolutely right that the release was unacceptably buggy, and the incredible amount of grace and patience extended by this community in the face of that has been appreciated more than we can say. But faced with the distasteful options of releasing an imperfect product, or watch the growing discontent of a fan base that has been burned too many times by developers who promise to release a game and then simply never deliver, we chose what we thought at the time was the lesser of two evils. I remain convinced we made the right choice, imperfect as it was).

Hey Defender,

This is a good conversation so I'll keep it up unless asked to stop derailing the topic in which case I'd be happy to relocate. First off, don't get me wrong—I'm not over here all jazzed about the idea of taking small steps forward, though I do think there are benefits—mostly I'm just saying small steps are the way that games progress, typically, and it's better than nothing. But honestly, any time you're asking for Game X to resemble Game Y, you have to ask if the manpower and resources are comparable. A lot of what you're pointing to as points where AHC doesn't step as far forward as it could (with which I don't disagree) are simply places where we couldn't take it farther, with our resources and time. Honestly the game was far too big for us anyway, and I think any indie team of our size who worked on a game of this scope would probably agree with you.

You pretty much made my argument for me regarding indie titles. Unity? Unreal? Free art and other assets? All things that sighted indie devs have access to. I don't know many of them who have the tenacity to build all of that from the ground up like Ian did for this game engine. When I see what this team was able to do with what was available, it almost hurts to imagine what we could have accomplished with access to the best possible tools. I definitely don't mean that to sound like an excuse for any weaknesses the game does have. It's more a gripe about the lack of equal access in the game development scene. But it's really just me singing the praises of this dev team.

And regarding your suggestion about things like just using less dialogue, or sourcing volunteers for the dialogue to get more of it: when you set out to make a game, you have to decide what aspects are more or less important to you, and prioritize those things. You've mentioned a lot of mechanics that feel like they're lacking to you, and the reality is, mechanics were not the most important thing to us in this game. You don't make a turn-based combat game with basic walk/run movement if you want to focus on mechanics. We wanted to focus more on story, character, and world-building, and hence the higher amount of dialogue. But why not source volunteer dialogue, you may ask? Well, we also had a particular bar of quality we wanted to try to meet. You may remember that we posted not only on this forum asking for auditions, but also auditioned indie voice artists at large. Now, considering we were auditioning for a paying gig, and we picked the best options out of what we got, and you still complained of some hit-and-miss quality of the acting, imagine how much lower the quality had been if our philosophy had instead been, "Let's get as much dialogue as we can, and just take anyone who's willing to record, so we can get it all.

Anyway, I am definitely not trying to invalidate any of your criticisms, and I appreciate the fact that you seem to recognize the fact that even though the game definitely was not the greatest possible game anyone could ever have made, it may still have been the best we could have been expected to offer. And moreover, if someone feels that it's the best accessible game they have the opportunity to play, and wants to express their gratitude for that...I'm not about to stop them. The fact that there is room for improvement doesn't negate that gamer's experience. But if your point is that we as blind gamers and developers shouldn't settle, and should always look to a future where accessible gaming is even closer to the mainstream...I couldn't agree more.

Also, reading "Give the people what they want, lest they rend us limb from limb" made me laugh.

Honestly, I've not had that many issues with AHC myself. There was one version where it would sometimes crash when I was navigating through very big areas, but I just learned to save every few minutes and it wasn't too big a deal. Most of the issues I dealt with were sounds not playing correctly sometimes, but I would tend to agree with those who say that the Out of Sight team had to choose between releasing the game when they said they were going to or keep holding off until things were "perfect." Years ago on this forum I was one of the ones who did quite a lot of bitching, if I may use the word, about games that didn't come out when they were supposed to etc etc etc. Now, I'm a lot older. I'm a married man, and an experience like that will teach you that you can't always, in fact most of the time you don't have the option to wait until everything is just perfect. Would it have been nice to have a few less bugs for people to find when AHC came out? Yes. But was their "we're going to find these bugs and flesh them out" attitude a wonder to behold after some games that were released and then put way on the back shelf never to be dusted off and updated or patched again equally awesome to watch? Yes. A lot of times it's not simply the game, it's the attitude of the people who made it. Out of Sight has shown us that they are a developer who is committed to the gamers. To this community. In future, they may or may not announce release dates, deciding instead to take the road of it'll be here when it gets here. I don't know. Hopefully this disjointed rant made sense to somebody lol.

If I may ask, what is the email address we should send our stories to? I tried to click the send your story to this email address link, but it doesn't do anything. I dunno, it could be because I was not using an email application and usually opened my email via IE, but if it is at all possible please post the email address here or on the post website.
Thank you, and thanks for giving us a chance to win this game!