@16
Unity doesn't allow non-programmers to make games. You have to know programming to get anywhere with it even as a sighted developer.
Lifelines to people who don't know how to program at all don't get us better games. They only get us more of what we have. I don't want more of what we have, because frankly what we have sucks. I know it's sort of taboo to say that, but it's true. Games don't primarily differentiate themselves through everything but the gameplay; if that were true we'd call them movies or maybe visual novels. There are tons and tons of outlets for artistic blind people who don't want to learn to program; they don't need to make games that all have identical gameplay to all the other games. And I don't think this persistent idea that audiogames.net believes in where somehow you decide to learn whatever and then game occurs is particularly good either: even sighted programmers doing this quickly discover that games are actually one of the hardest things to code.
Unity being accessible and somehow ergonomic, or Godot, or whatever else, that'd be cool. I'm not dismissive because I don't want it, and Nolan is known to me and capable of making Godot happen if anyone can. Indeed, Godot being open source makes it not at all a bad place to try: it may be possible to turn off enough things.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about audiogames and the kinds of constraints audiogames need to have to be playable over the years, and (for example) most of what Unity does starts at figuring out what all you have to turn off (namely the third dimension, in many cases the concept of continuous space as opposed to tiles, etc). At the end of the day one of these being accessible might make some things easier--in particular networking is a big one--but it isn't going to be the end-all that people like to think it is.
Unity isn't sighted BGT, nor is it aimed at the same people. Unity starts well after where BGT stops teaching. They're not really even comparable. There is this idea that Unity is sighted BGT and if we have sighted BGT it's better than BGT, but that's not actually how this plays out.
The problems with audiogames aren't technical, they're social. Taking a sighted game engine and making it accessible to blind programmers isn't going to suddenly make the programming easier. What makes the programming easier is one of us who has a lot of experience here having the time to write a book or something to that effect, or getting a time machine and making everyone start fumbling around with Python in 2014 or so so that the audiogaming circles would now have good experience with open source instead of being random BGT includes spread across dropboxes, or making people stop complaining and causing drama all the time so that when someone thinks about doing something paid or online their first thought isn't that they're going to have to deal with it for the rest of forever.
I know that if I leave that there I'm going to be misunderstood and then people are going to get mad at me for the wrong reasons, so let me be really clear in order that you can be mad at me for the right ones: I'm not saying that it's valueless if one of these are accessible; I'm saying that, if one of these being accessible fell out of the sky onto this forum tomorrow, it wouldn't change anything for anyone who is still trying to learn to program because it's not aimed at people who are trying to learn to program in the first place, and it wouldn't fix the social problems that have held us back for as long as I've been on this site. A couple years or more after it happened we'd still have the sorts of games we have now instead of this mythical better thing that they're supposed to enable, save perhaps for a few by people who could have done without the tools to start with. That doesn't mean the tools couldn't be helpful, but the tools aren't coming to save us, even if someone had infinity money to throw at Unity, because not having Unity isn't currently the primary problem.
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