That's an interesting question and one I've thought over myself in all the time I've been playing audiogames.

Broadly I'd say it comes down to three things:

1: Atmosphere.

Just as with a graphical game, environment counts, and the more engaging your environment, the more your likely to actually achieve a level of immersion, indeed possibly a greater level of immersion than in many graphical games since audiogames give the player more scope for their imagination, (one friend of mine who is a huge fan of the Doom series once said the audiogame Shades of doom was actually much more terrifying simply because you only heard the monsters).

This obviously goes for sound and music if your creating a full audiogame, but it also counts text.
I can't think of the number  so called text rpgs I've  where the battle boils down to:

"You encounter a goblin with 10 hit points, the goblin attacks and does 2 damage, you attack the goblin and do 3 damage" etc.

What is this goblin? what does it look like? what does it smell like? How the hell is it attacking?

Not to say every audiogame with text should be an interactive story, but certainly the more the better.

Indeed this is one issue with Caves of thorn hill currently, namely that it feels far more like a numeric logic puzzle than a game, ----- which is fair enough given it is! a numeric logic puzzle, but if you were trying for something a little more complex atmosphere is something you should bare in mind.

Second is the matter of judgement.

So often audio action games boil down essentially to audio boppit, just  hearing a sound and reacting asap, while audio or text rpgs turn into snakes and ladders, roll the dice and see if you get lucky.

Like any game, audiogames need to challenge a player's ability to judge a situation, interpret what factors are involved and react accordingly, whether that is judging relative position of obstacles and sounds and how their own actions interact with them as in audio action games, or judging which tactic, maneuver or spell is best to use in a turn based game.

After all which game is better Pong, in which a player must track and judge the position of the ball relative to their paddle, the movement speeds of both and to a lesser extent the movement speed of the other player's paddle, or snap in which a player must do nothing but react according to what they see.
I don't know why people don't assume hand and ear don't have the same coordination as hand and eye.

Another pet peeve of mine (as an rpg fan myself),are games in which essentially the battle mechanics just boiling down to selecting the right equipment and then rolling dice.

After all in medeival days I'm pretty sure the best knight wasn't! the one who equipped the pluss two spiked gauntlets and the plus three shield rather than the one who had the plane iron gauntless and pluss one shield. having combats essentially won between the equipment screen and the monster generator also reduces the player's agency and sense of immersion, since if I am more likely to actually have an ability to affect the fate of the battle by my actions, then I am more likely to be engaged with the battle, ditto if your playing say a strategic building game.

this is especially true of games where the battle text might get repetitive or where players need to kill a similar enemey or follow a similar situation over again, since sitting around and just constantly attacking the same goblin can get pretty boring pretty fast.

In addition to judgement and immersion, another major  in audiogames is ease of information.

In an audiogame players will not be able to  through a huge settings screen with many options, so you need to give players many tools to select options they want and reject those they do not.
Another major part of this  includes the ability to  the game voice up when needed (since the last thing you want is to have to listen to the game voice rattle off information you already know when your just trying to scroll through to the choice you want).

Hope some of this helps.

obviously it also depends upon the type of game your creating, and indeed the platform your using, and if you say a little more about what yor up to we might be able to give some more specific information.

Still hth.

Hi.

In terms of team management etc, maybe its that I've played far too many text rpgs with the fairly simple fire and forget battle mechanic, since its a very common one in browser games like crimson moon, alien adoption agency etc, but I do prefer something hands on that gives me a bit more engagement and control over an onrunning situation than just having to sit and equip and wait or constantly hammer an attack button.

actually I don't mind grinding a little so long as it is interesting and has some sort of point to it, for if an npc tells me to go off and slay fourty goblins to keep the population down I'll gladly go and do that, but if I just have to go and slay 40 goblins to get strong enough to move on I'm much less engaged.
of course the better written the "go and slay fourty goblins" quest is, the more engaged I'll be and the more interested to see the next part of the story and thus the more willing to put in grind time .

I've got no problem with numeric puzzles gameplay wise, indeed they can have their fun moments, but even in puzzles atmosphere actually counts, especially if you put in a bit of random generation. For example, if you had a random cave descriptor in thorn hill that would insert two adjectives to describe the cave your in,

EG "You enter cave 7, it looks new, it is a narrow damp cave" or "You enter cave 12 it looks familiar, it is a  sandy, stalactite cave"

You don't need a lot here, just a word or two, indeed if you wanted to go all out two adjectives would likely be enough as well as one or two descriptions of a monster smell.

One very annoying thing my lady and I have noticed in the past few days is that Alexa is no longer possible to interupt. previously if you sadi "alexa" while it was speaking you could interupt the flow and go on to something else, now it seems to have stopped doing that and rattles on regardless unless you hit the action button.
this makes skipping over the sports news (which doesn't  us at all), very much a pain, and also makes adverts at the end of aps which ask to give a five star review rather more irritating ;D.

Hi.

Well Alexa does seem to be fixed in terms of being interuptable now which helps.
It wasn't so much reviews of other games as the constant requests to write a five star review, or of developers to go and want me to try one of their other games (doubly annoying given that Amazon's silly geo blocking policy often means said other games aren't even   America anyway).

Either way let me know when you've updated thorn hill and my lady and I will be glad to give it a try, ditto with anything else you come up with.

Btw, for team management rpg style games on Alexa, have you checked out six swords?

SwankyGoose, I have played thorn hill with the adaptations.
I do like the sounds and the extra additions (the dun dun dun!" when you smell a monster made me laugh.
My only comment though is that now you  included sounds you could probably trim the game's events a little.

for example you don't need to tell the player "you shoot an arrow" when you hear the woosh sound of it launching and the player has just said "shoot at cave 14" 
In the same way, I like the idea of the missed arrow waking the monster, but why not have an echoing clunk sound? (I'm pretty sure you could find one relatively easily), that way you'd shoot the arrow, here a "wooosh! clunk!" and then "oh no! you woke the monster" ditto with a sound for falling down a pit.

(a crunching sound for getting eaten would be amusing as well, though I don't know how easy that might be to implement).

I'm also not exactly sure on the bat sound, since you hear a gravel walking sound but not the actual bat? That seems a little odd to me, again if you could run across a bat sound that could be helpful.

I think the sounds combined with an adjective or two for each cave would make the game nicely atmospheric, after which you could consider some gameplay expantions if you wanted, or move on to another game.

Btw, one game I've always fancied is a fantasy style board game which mixed minimal rpg elements with random dice rolling and calculated risk, alla talisman or dark tower. My lady played dark tower as a child and really enjoyed it and I'm sorry I missed it and my brother is a huge talisman fan although as with many things there is no accessible version.
Something like that might be a fun addition to Alexa, especially with the popularity of fantasy board games these days.

@Simba agreed on music often providing atmosphere, I'm also a huge fan of film score, James Horner, John williams etc, not to mention more recently Debby Wiseman, however really amazing music isn't something you can just pick up, although it'd be nice if more indi musicians from outside the community got involved with audiogames, heck with a favourite graphical game series of mine, the Turrican series, (exploration platform shooters), there are musicians devoted to just! composing music for indi custom made levels, indeed I suspect many would be glad to help with audiogame music.

I'm not sure about attacks and combos though, since not every game has to play like a beatemup.

The main problem  a lot of audio action games is simply one of being a little too straight forwardd with controls and attacks. You press forward your character moves forward at a fixed speed, you let go, your character stops instantly, you hit attack, your character attacks and anything in range gets whacked.

That's not however how most graphical games, even 2d platformers from the nineties work.

Look at original marrio brothers (still one of the best put together games of all time).

you press forward, and marrio doesn't just walk at a fixed speed, he starts slowly then accelerates until he's at full speed. He also has a stopping distance, meaning that if your running towards a pit or an enemy,  can't just let go of the forward button.

Marrio's jumps are similarly mechanically complex. if you tap the jump button he goes up only a small way. if you hold it he jumps higher. Then of course you  hold forward or back in mid air while marrio is jumping which dictates the arc of his jump. So if you just want a little one block hop you tap jump while holding right, while if you want a high jump that doesn't go far to the right you hold jump but tap right, while if you want a long jump over a wide arc you hold both buttons, plus of course, how far marrio jumps also affects his stopping distance, meaning that frequently you can clear an obstacle, but run straight into an enemy if your not careful.

And we haven't even mentioned the run button yet, which not only makes marrio run faster and jump higher, but also increases his stopping distance to the point that frequently you'll need to tap backwards after a run to avoid marrio skidding all over the place, ---- plus of course Mario's taller, thinner brother Luigi, though he jumps higher and runs faster is even worse for stopping distance.

There is no earthly reason why! an audio 2D side scroller couldn't have complex movement mechanics, even if showing objects vertically would need to be done with a bit more care, heck there is no earthly reason why a first person game couldn't have these sorts of movement mechanics (remember those jumps in quake).

And all of this is before we get onto attacks, since manifestly if your swinging a sword you need to calculate the time it takes you to swing the sowrd, the range of the sword vs the distance of your enemy etc. The same goes for bullets, from a projectile weapon indeed in a game like old space invaders it was tracking the speed of your bullets vs the movements of the invaders that made things such a challenge.
Some audiogames have done this (audiostrike, alien outback), others however less so, and certainly not quite enough in a platform game, indeed I notice that in most audiogames  people have messed around with attack range and occasionally rate of fire, actually having the delay, the time between when you launch an attack and when it actually hits is not something people have played with at all.

None of these are unsummountable problems though, all of them just take a bit of more complex coding, for example coding an increasing walking speed vs a constant one and adding a bit of  distance, but for some reason, these are things people just don't think of.

maybe its that a lot of audiogame devs haven't played some of the basic mainstream games like Mario that have these sorts of concepts, or maybe it's that I over analyse too much, either way it all comes down to the above mentioned problem of "judgement", judging stopping distances, learning game mechanics etc.

People have been saying  ever since I first was on this forum that audiogames need to be "like mainstream games" by which they usually mean have hyper complex beatemup mechanics with 30 different characters, all with move sets or varying mechanics, or have super  hundreds of hours of branching stories with random content, thousands of monsters etc.

one thing I'm increasingly thinking though, is that before we even touch the idea of resources, audiogames frequently don't get right the very basic things.
A game like Marrio brothers can be hugely engaging now, heck look at the popularity of arcade type titles on the Iphone. The problem though is it needs mechanics that challenge a player's judgement and learning skills, rather than just their quick reactions as I outlined above.

if audiogames can't sort out the basic mechanics, then even if an audiogame were! produced with a mainstream style budgit and resources, you still would have essentially a very complex, wonderful sounding boppit, heck to an extent that was what happened with games like pappasangre, and why I'm so eager for potential audiogame devs to have a history of what has been tried before and some ideas of basic game design concepts so that we can! move forward with the resources we have.

@11
I agree that for the audiogame market to progress from what I would personally consider to be a stagnant state that it's been in (aside from a few innovations) for at least a decade, audiogame devs need to be aware of what mainstream games have done before.  Given that's unlikely to happen until mainstream games become fully playable without sight (which admittedly might not be too far off), I think the best option is to just play mainstream games and go from there, though I can understand that many audiogame devs either don't want to or have issues with integrating with sighted peers in terms of gaming (I've seen all too many instances where individuals turn round and say "well no, I won't play this because I need sighted assistance all the time").  Though understandable, I believe this dogmatic approach might be holding development of truely interesting titles back, but for me, it doesn't really matter if the audio-only scene stays where it is or not, though of course I'd like it to progress eventually but that really might be a little too optimistic at present.

I'm afraid sightless combat, that playing a mainstream game with sighted assistance wouldn't convey the sort of mechanics I'm talking about.
Lets take a simple example because the sort of thing I mean is not something that can be explained, but something that needs to be seen and experienced.

to take a simple example, in original mega man from 1986, the boss cutman would react to your movements. If you were close to cutman, he'd jump away, if you were a distance away he'd throw his rolling cutters. The rolling cutters fly in an arc like a boomerang, thus meaning if your too far away they'll arc up and hit you.

So what you need to do is constantly adjust your position to cutman's. When he comes towards you you move back, when he throws his cutters you need to judge their angle relative to you and jump them. Also bare in mind Mega man's jumping mechanics are as complex as marrio's, that being that you don't just get a fixed hight jump, you need to hold the jump button and the left or right buttons.

Now, theoretically you could have a sighted person saying "hay he's in front of you, jump back. Now shoot! now run backwards" or the like, but you would always be working on that person's reactions, you would not have the experience of tracking the position of cutman, and mega man and cutman's rolling cutters, and the potential firing range of mega man's megabuster.

This is what I mean by "mainstream" mechanics, and playing with a sighted person just won't cover it since you need that instant capacity for judgement, to actually experience all that spacial data going to your brain, which is just not something you'd be able to experience if someone else were describing.

The other problem with mainstream games, as a yardstick for audiogame development is of course the resource problem. Most people say "mainstream games" and mean something huge and complex, and bemoan the lack of hugeness and complexity in audiogames.
In all the time I've been here though, what strikes me is that audiogames need to get the simple things right first, and the basic design down, after that we can worry about not having millions to spend on development .

I'll also say though that the situation of audiogame development isn't half as dire as it was in 2006, indeed the word "stagnent" is one I'd disagree with, not with the amount of games produced now,  recent games like A hero's call, manamon  and crazy party, not to mention all the releases of games on platforms like Ios and alexa that run with speech.

I would agree you can learn audio reaction times in a mainstream game, however, my point was not specifically to do with whether playing mainstream games with effort was worthwhile or even possible (heck I've done so from a low vision perspective myself), my point was more about the sorts! of information and spacial judgements that players of mainstream games will instinctively make which have been thus  been lacking in audiogames, judgements which are based around apprehending current information and translating it into the physics of the game world.

the cutman battle in mega man is a good example since it only involves three basic objects. The player, the boss, and his weapon, in  entirely 2d field. There is no earthly reason why! such a battle could not be programmed in audio. However, though a game like superliam appropriated some of the basic elements of this battle for bosses like airbot, the physics, the need to make judgements, the apprehention of information just was not present precisely for the reasons I stated, that audiogames have not featured the basic mechanics.

For instance, how much harder would a boss like Airbot be if instead of Superliam's jump property simply being either A, walking on the ground and thus being hit, or B, off the ground. How much harder if superliam actually jumped in an arc. meaning that to jump over Airbot's charge you wouldn't just need to hit jump when he gets close, but calculate the relative running speed of the boss vs the relative arc of Liam's jump.

Explaining this makes it sound a little cumbersome, but you see what I mean. Most so called "video games" with any sort of action focus from Pong to gears of wor essentially work on the same principle. They present the gamer with a situation contining a number of moving  with a simulated physics and movement patterns, and work on the user's ability to understand that physics and react according to it.

it is the physics, ie, the movement of objects and players that in audiogames to me has been so severely lacking and the thing I'd most like to see more often as far as action titles go.

A similar principle I believe also applies for textual games or turn based games in terms of calculation of factors vs learning the mechanics of the world, though since the sorts of engagement players have with a game like final fantasy ora hero's call are so vastly different from any action title that would likely take another discussion, quite aside from the audio/text distinction, a distinction which is admitedly becoming a little less serious these days I'm glad to say now that games using text aren't confined to old dos console affairs, interactive fiction or browser games.

@SwankyGoose, if you made an alexa version of dark tower you would make myself, and my lady extremely happy, especially if it had the ability to play with two human players so we could play together. I've always wanted to play that type of game.

As regards the bats, perhaps a bat squeak sound would work a little better? I'm afraid the existing one sounded more like gravel crunching underfoot than wings to me.

You could also consider altering the gameplay by increasing the number of cave connections or  the number of bats or pits in the caves, or  introducing the original rules whereby the wumpus moves if you shoot an arrow into the wrong cave as an easy mode.

the zcode version of hunt the wumpus had some interesting varients on cave layout see This page for the download and some reviews

Of course even with a couple of extra cave adjectives for description and some good sfx, there is only so much mileage you can get out of a player, numbered caves, one arrow, a couple of pits, some bats and a wumpus, so if you did fancy moving on to another project such as the fantasy board game I'd be up for that too.

Hi.

An the new version of thorn hill is lots of fun, I like all the cave descriptions and the bones make things feel nicely ominous, the monster munching also made both mrs. Dark and I laugh .
If you do come up with an alexa dark tower or something similar that we can play together would be cool indeed.

Also, @Dark:

the problem isn't the physics, I witnessed first hand when the Deathmatch series went to first person. Everyone was excited about the move....then whine and bitched and moaned it was 'too hard' to learn FPS navigation...despite not having a mouse, despite having a key to know what direction you were going in, despite being told repeatedly what to do, a lot of people simply gave up on it because it was 'too hard', insert air quotes here, to learn. I feel that's a part of the  issue, that blind gamers are  used to certain things and that they don't like new things. I'd rather have, to use your Cutman example, an Earthworm Jim game with accurate physics, or a Bomberman with the same tight controls and mechanics.

I do think though that audiogames are too flashy and such now, it's all HRtF this, binural that, LAV this this and this. I'd much rather hav a simple core game that's actually sucking me in without flashy stuff getting in the way. It's why I prefer games like Sonic or Megaman to later platformers, It's why I preer Civ IV to V or VI, it's why I prefer stuff like WC3 or AOE2 to modern strategy games. Those are all games that get the mechanics right.

To me, coming from a lifetime of playing videogames, audiogames are so underwhelming and disappointing, it's IMO like being handed a game made for children when you're used to better and more interesting things. I do feel that there's nothing that's worth my money, my own  money IMHO, yes you may rave about AHC but I've played D and D based games, I've been a DM on D and D campaigns, I've seen it all before. To me it's nothing new, it's just boring to me. I'd much rather have....well...

I love Cities Skylines, it's a city building game that's addicting as all hell, you manage your city from the ground up but you don't manage everything, you build roads, you zone along roads, you build power lines, you unlock things for getting to population milestones.

I would love a well made, deep, engaging audio city builder like that, but I look around and think where's it going to come from? Nobody here impresses me enough, IMHO to say yes, I want X or Y to make this game. I just feel like audiogames are more toys, IMO than serious games. Yes that can be leveled at videogames as well, I mean, I can point to half of Steam's store and make that accusation, but....

Let's take something like one of my favorite games....Septerra Core, RPG. Okay. It has great writing and great mechanics. I'll look at AHC. It has the same mechanics at a base level, it has flashes og good in the writing, but overall....the writing isn't standout, it isn't incredile, it's IMHO serviceable for the game. That's more a fault with games though, the stories are so predictable.