2019-08-10 16:19:40 (edited by libreaudiogamer 2019-08-10 17:15:33)

Hello,
I thought this game had a lot of potential but there were a lot of bugs that were holding it back. The game was originally released alogn with its source code back in 2005 from some university students. The game is very much like a text adventure game. You pick menu items such as move, use, or examine items.
The story is that you are hit on the back of the head on your way home from work. YOu wake up on an operating table. AS you explore the house of the mad doctor/scientist who detained you, you learn all kinds of crazy things about his experiments as well as getting to interact with some friendly characters. Be careful to watch your step though or you might end up staring down the barrel of the doctors gun or break the ingredients for an antidote that are vital to your survival. Be careful to always listen to cut scenes as sometimes they start the same but have different endings or go on a twist and things aren't quite the same as the original.

Changes since the original release in 2005.
* It is now possible to save and load games.
* The game is now more easily cross platform relying on only open source libraries.
* Many ordering bugs were fixed meaning you can't do things in the wrong order which made the story confusing.
* I removed all pauses from the beginning of the sound files with sox and a shell script. In some cases, a little too much got trimmed. Its not many files though and overall, this makes the game much more playable in my opinion.
* added a way you could get killed by the doctor and also a way you could break the ingredients.
* Fixed all timing puzzles so they function properly.
* fixed a bug which resulted in Eleanor being in two places at once.
Direct link to latest zip file: https://github.com/libreaudiogamer/Desc … master.zip
Github Page: https://github.com/libreaudiogamer/DescentIntoMadness
You can pull the git repo on github if you want to help me develop this or download a zip file if you are just interested in playing. Make sure when you unzip the game, you preserve the path. Both the Windows build and the python source code look for the sounds folder. I program the game on linux so that is supported and a windows build is included. Mac binary builds will hopefully come soon, but until then, you could play on a mac if you installed Python3 and Pygame. Pull requests are welcome.

2019-08-10 16:27:32

Can the game output to sapy5 or a screenreader like NVDA please?

2019-08-10 16:36:37 (edited by Dark 2019-08-10 16:37:55)

@libreaudiogamer, wow, that's quite amazing that you've updated and improved the game after such a long time, though very welcome. I remember being irritated myself by the fact that you couldn't save a game, meaning that one mistake and you had to replay the hole thing, plus I remember getting one sequence when using the hammer on one of the upstairs doors which assumed I'd met a companion even before I had.
Great that the bugs have been fixed and the game is still available, I always liked the haunted house atmosphere, sinister music and audio.

@mazen for goodness sake! Descent into madness has a really nicely recorded script and music, its effectively an  audio drama, if you want to play interactive text adventures, there are plenty more available else where.

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.)

2019-08-10 16:39:50

mazen wrote:

Can the game output to sapy5 or a screenreader like NVDA please?

This is not currently supported. Pull requests are welcome with operating system specific features. The only requirement is that other operating systems do not regress. You could also fork your own copy and change all the sounds to text if you wanted. If someone wanted to translate the game to another language, I would be willing to add recorded sound files for that language with an option to select language from the main menu. I don't speak any other languages so I would require all the sound files be given the correct names.

2019-08-10 16:45:19

HI Dark!
I did fix the bug with the hammer. Right now, it says nothing happens if you hit it too early but I would really like someone to help me come up with a story excuse for why you can't do it. Maybe you hit the window in the door and the doctor hears it and comes. Maybe you don't know where to hit the door so just randomly hit it. The file in question is hammerToUpperHallwayDoorEarly.ogg. I would be happy to replace it with something created by a user here. We could also optionally trigger a gameover although that doesn't currently happen.

2019-08-10 16:48:56

Also, Mazen, the game currently contains a ton of print statements with most of the text. The authors created a text game first and then commented out the print statements when they added sounds. Most of the text you would need is there. I never bothered converting those to python 3 though. You could modify the playSound function to instead talk to your screen reader of choice. My next project is likely going to be fixing Sonic Zoom to make that cross platform. The sapi is going to have to be voiced because from what I am aware, no suitable cross platform text to speeech libraries exist.

2019-08-10 16:53:08

Hi, Phoenix here. I want to play the game, but when I click on the link it says that the page is not found. What is going on?

Phoenix

2019-08-10 17:00:05 (edited by libreaudiogamer 2019-08-10 17:00:47)

It should be fixed now. The period at the end of the sentence got added to the url.

2019-08-10 17:39:56

Grabbing. Hopefully it's able to start. I couldn't play the old one at all due to it being unable to start properly.

Why do ghost hunters have to hunt ghosts? Well, there's a fear of being ghosted out there. They may need therapy as well as their ghost hunting kit.

2019-08-10 18:06:46

Wow, this takes me back!  Nice work on the updates.

2019-08-10 18:40:22

mata wrote:

Grabbing. Hopefully it's able to start. I couldn't play the old one at all due to it being unable to start properly.

I would like to know any reports of people not being able to play. Specifically, if the game doesn't run on someones Windows system, please let me know. I don't know much about Windows myself. The Windows builds are created in a Windows 7 virtual machine that I run on my Linux system but I can ask other friends that I know that are Windows experts and others here can probably help as well. I intend to have a Mac version up by the end of this upcoming week.

2019-08-10 18:57:18

I managed to run the game yo. The old one probably didn't have all the needed files or had corrupted files or something. But this one works. I completed the game now and man it's awesome. Give me a good relief from the cripping depression that tortured me these whole two days thanks to medicine change. Keep up!

Why do ghost hunters have to hunt ghosts? Well, there's a fear of being ghosted out there. They may need therapy as well as their ghost hunting kit.

2019-08-10 19:03:17

Really really cool!
I remembered playing this game and it really was buggy so I lost my interest in it.
I never thought someone will update this game. Thanks very much!

Greetings,
Janagirl!

2019-08-10 19:04:00

A gameover for using the hammer on the door too early seems a bit harsh, since its not an unreasonable idea.

How about that you decide that creating too much noise would be a bad idea until you've found a way out of there, which would also make it a good clue for when to use the hammer later.

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.)

2019-08-10 19:31:27

Hi! I have to tell you that very well the shortening of silence in the sound files, excellent! The game was translated in Spanish 10 years ago or a little more, arrangements would have to be made as there are recordings where the volume mismatch is very large and weighs more than it should. One suggestion, maybe there are puzzles that you can turn random like the speakers in front of the waiting room or the basement labyrinth, so that in each game it is different.

2019-08-10 19:35:14

Yeah this takes me back to when I was just start exploring audiogames. Old school went back into session early this year.

2019-08-10 23:04:59

I got an entry point not found error when running the executable. Something about the procedure get final path name by handle w could not be located in the dynamic link library kernel32.dll.

2019-08-11 03:21:33

wow nice!
thank you for the update!

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2019-08-11 13:33:36

Glad to hear that it turns out this game is still being developed.
I really like the concept of this game, but first I stopped playing it because this game did not allow me to save my game progress.
Now, after the ability to save our game progress has been added,
I will definitely play it, and of course I will really enjoy it.

Enjoy all that the Lord has given in your life, and share with as many people as possible.

2019-08-11 15:14:17

I really wonder who voiced all the characters in this game lol. Love Eleanor's voice.

Why do ghost hunters have to hunt ghosts? Well, there's a fear of being ghosted out there. They may need therapy as well as their ghost hunting kit.

2019-08-11 15:50:57

This is great, I'm so glad to see other open-source audiogames being worked on. Great job on this and yay for using Github instead of just throwing it up on Dropbox with a download link that will disappear a year from now.

I hope the trend of people moving to Github for open-source projects instead of Dropbox continues.

Cross-platform screen-reader support should be easy to implement in Python. There's a way to get the OS version but the method evades me at the moment.

2019-08-11 17:02:20

Thanks for updating this! I have been playing it since yesterday, and I am loving the fact that you can save your progress. Also, I am happy I can play the game on Linux!

2019-08-11 22:05:32

KenshiraTheTrinity wrote:

I got an entry point not found error when running the executable. Something about the procedure get final path name by handle w could not be located in the dynamic link library kernel32.dll.

Can anyone help here?  What version of Windows are you on? This probably won't work with xp or earlier. My build setup is a VM of Windows 7 sp1 with the convenience rollup applied but no other updates. I built it two years ago and create a new instance of it when I need to do Windows things. I know the game works on Windows 10 because a friend tested it there.

2019-08-11 22:08:39

Munawar wrote:

This is great, I'm so glad to see other open-source audiogames being worked on. Great job on this and yay for using Github instead of just throwing it up on Dropbox with a download link that will disappear a year from now.

I hope the trend of people moving to Github for open-source projects instead of Dropbox continues.

Cross-platform screen-reader support should be easy to implement in Python. There's a way to get the OS version but the method evades me at the moment.

I have been thinking of just using CMU Flite in my games for text to speech. Small and cross platform. It also has an open source friendly license.

2019-08-11 22:31:29

I'm on xp. Used to work there long ago.