2019-01-27 11:47:38

Hello dear friends and audio game players!

Only 4 days left to launch (31st January) and we bring you good news!

We have decided to give Episode 1 of GoldGun completely for free, so all of you can enjoy and get a feeling of what is coming next. The game (read below Disclaimer) can be played on 97 % of working iOS and Android mobile devices, and will be available on App Store and Google Play. If you can't find it there, look for the direct link on our website https://www.mytruesound.com/games which will appear once the game in on the stores.

Because the game is free, we hope to reach the 10000 downloads goal. This is necessary to show the game industry and some few investors that there is really huge potential for audiogames. Despite you like the game or not, if nobody downloads it we won't be able to address to them that there are millions of people wishing to play audio games.

For more info about the game, read our Press Kit at https://www.mytruesound.com/presskit
We appreciate you share this info in your social network and to your friends.

Disclaimer:
1) We are facing some issues with Apple Store we are trying to solve at the moment. Somebody there basically seems not to understand why an audiogame doesn't require visuals, or why the menu is so minimalist. We hope this doesn't affect launch date, but everything now seems too bureaucratic. Launch on Google Play seems to be problem-free.

2) This is the first episode of the GoldGun game, which is scheduled to be composed of 6 more episodes. Each episode will be better and longer than the previous, and have more playable content. Due to the complexity of this type of game, you should expect next episode to appear within two months. However, we appreciate if you play this one already, so we can reach the 10000 downloads goal.

3) This first episode worked for us as a pilot project. It is a bit short (compared to the future ones) with about 35 minutes game play. Pilot project means that it helped us to understand better the technology we use, and to make different tests. That being said, we believe the quality of many of its parts are not yet where we want them to be. We believe you all deserve better. We will work hard to improve quality of audio already in the next episode. We appreciate You are not very hard with us, and provide us with some time to improve those issues.

4) Next episode has been already written, and the story improves pretty well. As many of you know, the main character of the game, Soren, suffered an accident which turned him blind. There is a reason on the game script to why the police department thinks he might be able to destroy the GoldGun, but few betatesters appointed that blindness is a topic which should be avoided on audio games. We understood their point and blindness as a topic to talk on our game will not be appearing at all on the future episodes. We hope you all understand we are trying to constantly improve.

If you read until here, then you know most of what we wanted to tell.
Thanks a lot for liking, sharing, following.

Best regards
The team of myTrueSound working on this game
Mikko Herranen, David Oliva, Jussi Elsilä, Shane Wirkes, Joshua Kennedy, Maksim Pokrovskii

mytruesound.com - we hear the difference

2019-01-27 12:32:06

wow I can't wait to try this game out when it releases on the 31st.

going in to the wilds, collecting pokedex, and capturing them are my kind of thing,
training them, making them evolve, and generally making them stronger is my ultimate goal,
fighting other manamon tamers, winning the tournament, and fighting octoros are what these manamons like to do,
and ultimately, I become the master of mana!

2019-01-27 13:25:24 (edited by Honk 2019-01-27 19:38:10)

Hi My True Sound team,

I want to adress the blindness as a story device issue here. Because I highly disagree that you should avoid the topic at all costs. There are however some problems with the approach on this.

Firstly the audio game market is full with games that give you an arbitrary reason why your character can't see and thus the game is audio only. So this plot device feels really stale to experienced players. Seen thousands of times, can't they come up with something new? That might be a problem that puts some people off.

Secondly this aspect is often just used as a justification, not as a narrative device. There is a very important difference hidden, let me explain:
A justification tries to establish the reason for a certain gameplay mechanic and is stacked ontop of a complete construct. Thus it often feels ill fitting and forced. Blindness as a narrative device however would use the special condition blind to build a story and some game mechanics ontop of it. This way you actually can work with the topic and develop it into something artistically fulfilling.
Blindness puts us in a disadvantage to normally sighted people in most situations. But games tend to tell a story about some superhuman being conquering all obstacles and enemies in their way. That doesn't fit very well together. Try to solve this dichotomy with your story or don't use blindness ass a plot device.
Just think of the movie don't breathe or the super hero daredevil for some interessting implementations of blindness in a real story environment.

Lastly coping with their own blindness is a highly delicate topic for some blind people for obvious reasons. Getting confronted with this aspect of life in a highly escapistic medium as video games can be a real bummer. By any means blindness as with all disabilities is a delicate issue and should be handled carefully. But also it has to be handled somehow because denying doesn't help either.

So if you feel comfortable to adress this issue with enough care and thought I am pretty sure someone could build an amazing audio game with a compelling story out of it.
If you however just want to make a game accessible to blind and visually impaired people please don't just use the "well, our main character turned blind, let's move on" trope. I don't need that at least.

2019-01-27 13:55:11

Hi.
Awesome. I'm looking so much forward to this...
So, are you totally sure that the game will be in the IOS App store in four days? I hope yo will get the issues sorted out with Apple.

Best regards SLJ.
Feel free to contact me privately if you have something in mind. If you do so, then please send me a mail instead of using the private message on the forum, since I don't check those very often.
Facebook: https://facebook.com/sorenjensen1988
Twitter: https://twitter.com/soerenjensen

2019-01-27 14:31:53

Hey,
very nice info. Thanks for that.
I hope it would be ok for you if we show the game on our YouTube channel. smile

- Eagle Ear Entertainment
YouTube
Twitch
Mastodon

2019-01-27 15:02:04

EagleEarEntertainment wrote:

Hey,
very nice info. Thanks for that.
I hope it would be ok for you if we show the game on our YouTube channel. smile

Absolutely!

mytruesound.com - we hear the difference

2019-01-27 18:49:07

Sounds awesome, I've put some news on front of site, and will post again when the game is released, I'll also be very interested to play it, though I'll admit I'm especially looking forward to audio wizards.

Honk's point about blindness is an interesting one and one I'd like to address.

On the one hand, I don't really mind if a game represents what a sighted character can see in audio terms for the purpose of creating an immersive gaming experience, for example with audio targeting, after all, any game with a health bar or some other artificial mechanic has done that to some extent anyway.

I would though be interested to see games (or indeed any medium), tackle blind characters whose defining trait is not specifically blindness, that is characters who happen to be blind, but are not either super because they "overcome their blindness", or helpless because of their "incredible disability"

Imagine for example, a game in which you played the captain of a starship on a mission in space. You'd need to make complex decisions, you might need to send your crew on dangerous missions, you might need to sacrifice some crew members for the good of your ship, manage resources  or delicately tackle contact with aliens, you could do all of this whilst "blind", indeed especially in a science fiction setting where assistive technology could exist.

Such a character would not however be "the blind starship captain", they would be "the starship captain, who also happens to be blind"

This is what I tell people myself, "I'm not a blind person, I'm a person who happens to be blind", since while blindness is one fact about me, it is by no means the defining one.

Okay, I'll get off the soapbox now.

However the characters are, I really enjoyed your mission statement in the about section of your website, and I'm going to be most interested to see how the games you produce measure up to that both now and in the future.

Good luck, and here's hoping you have lots of downloads.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-01-27 19:38:50

Dark wrote:

Sounds awesome, I've put some news on front of site, and will post again when the game is released, I'll also be very interested to play it, though I'll admit I'm especially looking forward to audio wizards.

Thank you very much Dark, for this support.

mytruesound.com - we hear the difference

2019-01-27 19:41:17

The audio games blindness thing is more of a trope than anything. It's just stale, not that it is necessarily offensive. One thing of note though, is that when developers do that, they further their view that we are to be set aside from everyone else. People tend to see us as blind before anything else, oh the blind programmer, the blind artist, the blind musician, the blind woodworker. We just want to live our lives the same as anyone else. We have the same struggles, plus some of our own, then on top of that, everyone else sees us as apart from them, we're set aside, compartmentalized. That's what this blindness trope does, it marks us as separate.

I think we've come to a point in time where we can live harmoniously with our sighted peers. Maybe they could give some assistance with things, but we also. We're not limited to being consumers, takers, users; we can also be creators, givers and friends. We might have limitations, and don't let anyone fool you, we do, that's the cold, hard, truth of the matter. A lot of the things are merely obstacles we can work around, but there are some limitations there as well. Most of these aren't going to stop us from doing what we set out to do, but my point is, despite that, we can be valuable as friends, neighbors, and colleagues. That's what I would say is the downside to the blindness trope for your main character. Developers use it as a means to justify why everything is in audio, and there are no or minimal graphics.

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

2019-01-27 20:09:57

@David, your welcome, I'll send a mail to the blindgamers list (what used to be the audeasy mailing list) as well. You might also want to go to the applevis site for accessible Ios/mac programs, http://www.applevis.com/  and post about Golden gun there too if you haven't already.

I believe there is also a mailing list for Blind Android users, but I'm afraid I don't have any details, perhaps someone else could clarify?

@Ironcross, interesting thoughts. I actually don't mind the game using the character's blindness as an excuse for being played in audio, or still giving the player the vision  a person with limited vision. What I mind more, is in those cases where this occurs, the characters also always seem to be firstly defined by their blindness, and secondly nearly always made so as to be completely dependent upon some sighted person to find out about the world around them, like Blind legend and the knight's daughter, or the demon in Echoes from Levia.

True, not all games have done this, Airic the clerric did a pretty good job  making Scout, the character's scouting robot and aid to be more a tool and sidekick  something the player entirely relied upon for description, ditto with  audio interface for the environment suit back in Terraformers or the EVA of shades of doom, indeed its interesting that most sf games have some degree of robots or advanced  technology that make the main character more an agent than a passive party.

The problem however, is in most/all of those cases the main character was as you said, "the blind! clerric", or "the blind! warrior"

This isn't to say they're bad games, I rather like the way "the blind swordsman" presented all enemies as underestimating the swordsman, but still it'd be nice to see a game, especially a story based one where a character was "blind" only as a secondary characteristic.

Then again, this is already something not particularly common in general fiction, anyone remember This rather interesting topic on representation?

There was sadly a good reason why Jordi laforge is both the most recognisable blind character in sf, and also the least developed and most dull member of the Tng cast.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-01-28 11:39:18

Hi,
Awesome, will download the game once it come out on IOS!
I have a question though: is there any Kind of Audio Trailer available?
Also, thumbs up to Ironcross and Dark! Very true words about blindness, both of you.

Greetings and happy gaming, Julian

If you say you never lie, you're a liar.
Oh, and #freeGCW

2019-01-28 15:54:33

This sounds like 1 of these games where you pay for something that literately has no replay value.
No upgrades, nothing.
Just pay for some episodes, complete them and fume because there's nothing more to do.

Though our eyes may fail, our ears prevail!
User Karma, every little helps

2019-01-28 16:31:57

Hi TheBlindSaiyan,

I don't understand your problem here. First of all you're just guessing. So why spoiling the atmosphere with pointless criticism before the actual release?
And secondly people tend to apply double standards on the monetary side of gaming. On the one hand they pay over ten dollars on a cinema ticket for maybe two hours of unrepeatable movie, on the other hand they complain when they have to pay the same ammount of money for five or ten times the time in story gameplay. Even if you can't come back to the game later on I don't see why you shouldn't pay for it.
And well, if you don't like story games and instead want to have some game play driven ones, just don't buy the first. As long as there is a market for them they will be developed, marketed and bought. No need to take offense about that.

2019-01-28 17:23:23 (edited by Dark 2019-01-28 17:29:31)

Personally, I view story based games the same way I view dvds or films.
Yes, big long rpgs with loads to unlock are good, but not every game is like that or should be.

If you look back to the 90's, nobody criticised loom, or monkey island or simon the sorcerer or any of the landmark adventure games for not being replayable, everything came on story, action and atmosphere.

My only personal problem with a lot of audio adventure games, is that they are either too easy to complete, (everyone knows about chillingham), or they run into the same issue as many interactive fiction titles, that of literally impossible puzzles, and getting stuck in a game because I didn't happen to realise i needed to stuff the dwarf with the spongecake is more irritating than fun I tend to find, then again with the possible exception of time adventures (which has a complete walkthru), and the inquisitor games, most audio adventures like graille to the thief and codename cygnas have been easier rather than more difficult anyway.

Then of course, that is assuming this is a choice based audio adventure withh "choose action" and "choose object" type of gameplay, rather than a first person adventure like Blindfscape or a blind legend.

Myself, I'll wait and see what the game turns out to be like before making up my mind, especially since goldgun isn't the only game that Mytruesound have in the pipe line (as I said I'm quite looking forward to Audio wizards).

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-01-28 17:29:40

A bit curious, how long does the game takes to complete? Are there multiple endings and other stuff that makes the game replayable?

going in to the wilds, collecting pokedex, and capturing them are my kind of thing,
training them, making them evolve, and generally making them stronger is my ultimate goal,
fighting other manamon tamers, winning the tournament, and fighting octoros are what these manamons like to do,
and ultimately, I become the master of mana!

2019-01-28 17:35:24

Did I say I was taking offence about anything?
I'm just voicing my opinion.
If I were to release 2 games to a community, describing 1 as having an open world and lots of upgrades to customize your character, and the other 1 I just say you play a couple episodes as a policeman and that's it, then me being me, I'll go with the open world 1 because it has replay value and customization options, because that's my preference.
It doesn't mean to say other people won't like games where it's a once pay and play scenario.
I'm just not fond of games where you pay for just a story, and nothing else.
If I were a game developer, I would benefit more if I knew I created a game that had replay value, and people actually took notice of it because they liked the game, rather than going, here's a game, you're playing as this character for a few episodes that will be payed, and that's it.
It's kinda like comparing Resident Evil to Call of Duty... Resident Evil being your story driven game, and Call of Duty being the game that yields the customization options for your guns ETC.
It doesn't mean people won't play the first, however, it's preference.

Though our eyes may fail, our ears prevail!
User Karma, every little helps

2019-01-28 18:21:34

@BlindSaiyan, the problem here is that you assume that a developer has a choice. A game with pure narrative and story, or heck even a progressive action game takes far less time and resources to make than an open world game where you can go around and do anything just by nature of the beast.
The plane truth is that while we'd all love to see accessible skyrim, unless someone's got a spare few millions to put into audiogame development, its unlikely, heck even A hero's call took nearly four solid years to make and that's a comparatively short game as games go.

If you want your open world with individual tasks and quests and full scale exploration your best off with a mud or browser game, since its far easier to do more with text. If you want a good audio experience and gameplay, then your going to need to  compromise in terms of length a little, especially with a company who are just starting out anyway.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-01-28 20:20:02

I await the android release and will give my impressions after trying it out.

If this game has multiple paths then that will be plenty reasons to visit, if only to see if the other way is different. After all, movies are not interactive and don't have multiple paths, yet we still like to revisit them from time to time, so complaining about a game before experiencing what will probably give more play time than a 3 hour movie that you would not watch again seems a bit harsh, not to mention discouraging to the dev and those who are actually looking forward to it. Two general rules of thumb are, keep silent if you have nothing constructive to say, and don't judge a book by its cover, or a game by its casing. Besides, it really is too early to draw conclusions, its not even out yet.

I am wondering if there will be an option to pay for everything up front.

2019-01-28 22:32:29

Hopefully there’s a way to buy a season pass that will grant us to all 7 episodes of the game.

going in to the wilds, collecting pokedex, and capturing them are my kind of thing,
training them, making them evolve, and generally making them stronger is my ultimate goal,
fighting other manamon tamers, winning the tournament, and fighting octoros are what these manamons like to do,
and ultimately, I become the master of mana!

2019-01-29 04:09:47

At least they're being transparent about how long the first episode is. It's not like they're leading us into believing that the game is much more complex than it really is so that we'll cough up money, unlike certain other developers I could mention who are guilty of this. So how about cutting them some slack? Besides, for all we know, they might be selling it short a bit. I'm not saying we should expect thousands of hours of gameplay or anything like that, but maybe they got through it faster than the average player, being the devs and all, and if there was a beta testing team, they might also be more experienced with gaming in general.

The glass is neither half empty nor half full. It's just holding half the amount it can potentially hold.

2019-01-29 23:53:44 (edited by Dark 2019-01-29 23:55:11)

Also, at least in Britain, 2.5 euros is hardly going to break the bank, it's roughly the price of a moderately expensive cup of coffee from somewhere  like Starbucks, or a cheap cup of coffee with some cake, but probably not a sandwich.

Heck, I spent four times that amount on a quick lunch the other day at my favourite cafe.

On that basis, so long as 2.5 euros worth of game entertains me for more than about half an hour I'd say I'm probably doing alright out of it, even if I have to pay the same 2.5 Euros each time for Episodes 2-7.

With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)

2019-01-30 00:18:14

I don't know where, but I heard that this game will be also in spanish, or other language than english. I don't remember where, this it's true?

I am a gamer from the begining of my life, and that will not change :p

2019-01-30 20:35:33

ulisesmonge40 wrote:

I don't know where, but I heard that this game will be also in spanish, or other language than english. I don't remember where, this it's true?

Hi Ulisesmonge40

Thanks for the question. Since part of the team is Spanish, we really wanted to make a Spanish version. And perhaps one day. But the game includes so much voice dialogues, that at this moment with our resources it has been impossible. Future games, like Audio Wizards and Music Maze includes much less dialogue (like 1 %) and so they will be easier to implement on many languages actually.

Stay tuned!

mytruesound.com - we hear the difference

2019-01-31 00:33:12

@david_oliva
TThanks for the answer, if you need anithing in the future like a voice, etc. Just ask, I'm open to help.
Greetings

I am a gamer from the begining of my life, and that will not change :p

2019-02-01 04:45:27 (edited by Sean-Terry01 2019-02-01 04:54:43)

Hi all, I just got the app for android. But, as I use the Samsung Galaxy S9Plus. The app unfortunately doesn't seem to work with Voice Assistant.  I just now tried it with Talk Back as well, and I get the same result.The music plays, but, I can't see anything on screen to interact with. Thanks.