Topic by spiralatlas 2016-03-14 06:41:45

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Hi! I've recently adapted my time travel visual novel SOON to be more enjoyable to those using the self voicing feature, and was told you guys might be able to offer feedback. Self voicing is enabled by pressing "v". The download includes a Twine version I wrote before self voicing became an option. Note that I have not yet added any extra support to my other available game, the demo for Northanger Abbey, although I definitely intend to.

I'd also love to hear any general preferences audio gamers have for this kind of visual novel that I can put into practice for future games. Feedback on the Twine game would also be welcome, though I have less enthusiasm for writing more Twine games. The main options I have with the Ren'py framework I'm using for visual novels are adding alt text to buttons and so on, and adding extra lines that only show up when self voicing is enabled. I only added a few extra descriptions, for example if the dialogue says they're in a park I didn't add any extra description of what the park looks like, because I felt it would throw off the momentum of the story. Would people prefer more detailed descriptions? I intend on putting more effort into making them an organic part of the narrative for upcoming games, the problem with SOON is that I added them afterwards and only have limited energy for further editing and testing.

Playing the game with voicing enabled and my eyes closed it seemed to me that navigation was fairly straightforward asides from the occasional confusing pauses for animations, I'm not sure how to deal with that. Also some onomatopoeia confused the voice reader, as did ellipses. I feel like the weird noises and silent pauses that resulted convey roughly the same effect as the intended dialogue, but would people rather I replaced the relevant lines for the voiced version? Actual words that confuse the reader I consider a more serious problem, I caught a few but am sure some remain.

Finally: I'm currently working on a Picross/nonogram style game. I added alt tags so the voicing can tell if a square is unclicked, unfilled or filled, but it seems like it would not be a very fun game to play through audio. Am I wrong? Are there any simple things I could do to make a nonogram style puzzle game more accessible and fun for audio players? If you're not familiar with nonograms, the wikipedia page is a good description, I had a link but the forum software complained!

Sorry for all the questions! I'm disabled myself, so accessibility is very important to me, and it's been really frustrating knowing my games are probably not as accessible as they could be but not having anyone to ask for relevant advice. Thanks for anything you can suggest, and sorry if I've said anything horribly clueless!

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Reply by brad 2016-03-17 22:56:11

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Hello spiralatlas;

This kind of game isn't really my kind of thing; I prefer games where you walk around and fight, blow things up and collect things but I thought i'd give it a go.

Whilst I still think I won't be playing novel like games any more than I did before, this games voice function is really cool. Thanks for implomenting it. I hope that people who like these kind of games can comment and tell you what they liked and didn't like and in doing so, you can improve the game making it the best it can be.

I'm gone for real :)

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Reply by crashmaster 2016-03-18 09:04:36

  • Registered: 2010-08-25
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Hi.
well looked at that program spiral and well ok my views.
The abby one was accessable but is not a game I generally play it got so boring so fast I guess if you like the old shakespear type times which I don't it would be good.
Next soon.
Ok, wow, that was really well it would be cool if I could ever win the game!
I went with my evilness and failed.
I went with trying to change me to be a nice guy, set the entire thing, set the bomb.
Pulled back, got the robots finding out about it and well  destructed.
If there was a way to actually smash the machine or in fact actually win, I'd actually keep the game.
Sadly I have no interested in a circular time line where it all means zip.
It was an interesting spin on a what if but as far as I care I have played it to its conclusion was the main guy even supposed to win, because it looks like in the end everything just didn't worked out.
The only way that it worked was the earth being destroyed which would mean you won but didn't but won anyway.
Its an interesting take on ai though.
My theory is that everything is in logical terms, computers can never think of it not being that way because you would have to have binary backward or something, so 1 before 0 probably would destroy all computers in existance.
So in the end everything is changed, and then isn't.
So this game is no longer on my hard drive.

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Reply by spiralatlas 2016-04-07 16:53:43

  • Registered: 2016-03-14
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Thank you both for your feedback! Sorry I took a while to reply, I thought I had replied but must have misremembered.

Thanks for trying out and giving feedback on games which aren't your genre. As for SOON, it is possible to win in a way where nobody dies (except the robots), but it's a bit tricky. I know you said you deleted the game, but for anyone else: if you look in the game folder there's a walkthrough. Anyway, I'm glad to hear that the games are navigable for audio gamers.

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Reply by Orin 2016-04-07 18:12:53

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I'll try this game out as soon as i can. As far as puzzle games written in Renpy, I think it is doable. I'm not really interested in strictly puzzles though. I wish SunRider was playable, since that's a game that combines story with gameplay. Self-voicing works, but the gameplay is completely inaccessible.

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Reply by crashmaster 2016-04-07 20:17:47

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Hi atlas.
Wow ok, I still do not care about this sort of game but I was able to run through it just now and end it.
It was good to play it through, sadly this game is not something I will bee keeping,
On that note I have just got the latest games from the site and brought the new planet colony defence game pscd, and it is actually accessible and I am playing through it in book mode.
So far I have played it for 2 days basically and not finnished it.
Sadly I need to do other things today so yeah lets see what the good games are for this months doings.

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Reply by Orin 2016-04-08 00:26:53

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Are both of the Planet Stronghold games playable? While VN mode sounds cool it'd be cool if the card mode was also voiced and playable.
I don't think Seasons of the Wolf or the AmazonPrincess one is.

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Reply by spiralatlas 2016-04-08 03:06:44

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It depends if they're made in Renpy, the software I used, and if they're updated to the latest version, since that's the one with voice support. Loren the Amazon Princess, Planet Stronghold and Seasons of the Wolf are all Winter Wolves games, and as far as I know they are made in Renpy, but since they're older games they probably don't have the voice support. Future games from Winter Wolves will plausibly have the voicing feature, but accessibility for minigames etc might be a problem.

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Reply by Orin 2016-04-08 17:11:00

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PSCD has voice support. I got quite a bit through the tutorial by figuring that options don't speak are cards. Some crds are labled, others are 001 101 or something, not sure what's up with that. I wonder if he'd possibly look into adding accessibility to these games. All he has to do is label all of the cards, I think.

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Reply by crashmaster 2016-04-09 03:08:21

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Well.
Planet stronghold and some of the others are not accessible because they use a custom rpg extender which is not accessible at all.
Th latest one works but several things in the visual novel for char selection don't work.
Worse, the battle system is just not something that works, some of the stats bars work but thats it.
The visual novel with the side missions is still worth the 19 dollars us, taking me about 4 days to play it all and thats on one story arc.
Out of all of these games I have that works this would have to be up there with bluerose.
The other games that come close are the sarafina series though sarafina 2 has an inaccessible dial debate system you only need the first number down or the highest number up so its not that bad.
Discouraged workers is accessible but it has 0 replay value in fact while I enjoyed the story 15 bucks was a bit steep.
Sadly I got about 10 novels at the start of the week and I started playing them.
While a few, ie cult of the dead, idealis pallice and children of the gate were interesting titles, their stories were either comic like and or just simply had shitty plots which is a shame.
I seriously am wandering that maybe renpy is the next move to make a fully sighted user and a blind user interact.
The only things you need are alt text and labeled buttons.
You can't use steam or custom rpg or other rpg extentions and you can't use images for everything or customised image controls.
Remembering sound that plays and buttons for sound will tend to block out sapy overriding it.
With being said, there are a lot of good books out there either once over like the unknowns or other playthrough.
Sadly most of them are free or just suck but still there is more chance making renpy books accessible for both sighted than disabled than other games since not much needs to be done about it.
I'd like the card system to be accessible but with at least 4 options for side missions 2 options per mission, pluss the main story with 3 way arcs and sub arcs off the main arc including destruction of things, and the fact that doing or not doing certain events can totally fudge up your life I think its still worth it even if the battle system is a pile of junk.
I'd like it ofcause but its not needed

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