This looks really cool. I grabbed it and will begin exploring. The cursor movement system is a little weird, but I appreciate that info on each tile is displayed and updates as I move. I just hope it won't put off people who aren't used to rogue like games.

on windows this doesn't look usable again.

i could if only i could set up a normaly working virtual linux, i always wanted to play CDDA for example. But for a few games it is not worth it to switch OS'S i think.

JaceK,

Cataclysm, Dark Days Ahead. It's an open world zombie survival rogue like. I haven't really played it much this past year or so but then again I haven't had Linux on my machine either, I should remedy that.

This game works best if using Windows 32-Bit, not 64-bit.
Sadly, mine's 64-bit.

If you attempt playing, use the
arcane_fortune_windows_pdcurses.bat
file, not the first one.

NVDA will "kind of work?" if using ObjPad and set to "screen review" mode, but it's trial and error there.

Yep? Definitely get a linux VM/bare metal machine as an addition to your Windows way of lifestyle.

Seems like this is the wisest decision, might as well go a wee bit off-topic and ask @zkline and @SLJ regarding vmware workstation/fusion , others may be interested in the fact that I've heard very good things about it and it's accessibility both on Windows and Mac despite it being a virtual machine - I believe that this is the most accessible Linux virtual machine and works very well with Linux screen readers such as SpeakUp and Orca, is that correct?

IS it possible to play this with linux subsystem perhaps?

It's definitely possible to play this with WSL, I've just not bothered to do it yet.

JaceK, I always had the most success with a regular framebuffer in text mode with Speakup. I never liked how the GUI handled terminals, at least with screen readers.

@ZKlein:

How would I do that with espeakup?

Hi,

I'm the developer of Arcane Fortune and am interested in learning more about what would make this game accessible. I have (many) questions that maybe you all would be willing to help me with. I think having a better understanding of all this will help me improve the game's accessbility and also avoid introducing new features in the future that may not be accessible.

Firstly, though, to attempt to clarify some of what's been said in this thread, I want to say:
The game already supports the Windows console--see the directions below. Further, I haven't released a 32 bit version of this game. I have only supplied 64 bit binaries on all platforms (so I'm not sure why people are saying that only a 32 bit version is provided haha).

Here's how you can launch in the Windows console (that is, from cmd.exe) -- zkline already posted this earlier, but I'm reposting it with a few more steps to hopefully make it more clear:
1. Open cmd.exe
2. Right click the top of the window and choose "Properties".
3. I set the font size to 7x12 in the Font tab, then I set the window size and height in the "Layout" tab to 181 for the width and 76 for the height. The exact amount doesn't matter too much, but much less than those amounts can cause the game to crash. You can't change these preferences once the game is launched.
4. "cd" into the directory where you downloaded and unzipped the game.
5. "cd" into the "game" subdirectory.
6. Run "arcane_fortune_windows_pdcurses.exe"
7. Select start a new game
8. Configure the game to show only 8 colors--via the keyboard you can press the following letters in sequence "m", "p", "u". That sequence will open the menu which is on the top of the screen, then it opens the "Preferences" menu and then it selects the "Use only 8 colors" option.

I'll post my own questions in a post following this one, because they've grown to be a lot, hopefully not overwhelmingly so.

Darin,

Good to see you here.

I'm BlindGuyNW on Reddit, in case you wondered. Anyway, I'm happy to answer some of these questions.

A Braille display isn't essential for playing this, or any other rogue-like/text-based game, it just makes the process easier. A bit of background wouldn't go amiss here, I hope this helps answer your questions as well.

When I use a Windows console window to play a rogue like game, the thing which makes it useable at all is that the terminal cursor always focuses on the location of the player character/@ sign. In turn, the screen reader review cursor, which is an entirely separate thing, starts there. It's therefore mostly straight-forward to move the review cursor around and get a sense of what's nearby because I always have a solid reference point.

This holds true for the console (Speakup) screen reader on LINux, and Jaws for Windows. NVDA has a slight issue which I will explain if I can. It's an internal problem and I've never really found a satisfactory solution.

NVDA's review cursor behaves badly in Windows console windows because it doesn't understand columns. That is, if you had the following map display…

----
|.@..|
|....|
----

NVDA's review cursor would let you start at the @ sign but if you moved downwards, you'd end up looking at the vertical bar on the far left, not the period immediately below.

Jaws and Speakup don't have this problem.

I apologize if this takes us a bit far from the point, but it's been a continuous source of frustration for me for years, and hard to explain.

Thanks zkline -- this is very helpful. I think I see what you mean with the NVDA issue you described.

I don't think command-style interactions would be too feasible with my game, but maybe I could do the following with the text cursor to make it easier:

-Have the game move the text cursor to the active menu item, if any.
-If you don't have the menu open, the text cursor will be on the map (as it is now), but I could add a keyboard shortcut to have the game move the text cursor to either the right side of the screen (where things like your money and the game year are printed in text) or the bottom of the screen (where the map tile you're on is described in text, such as the land type or building or unit descriptions). Then I could add a keyboard shortcut to tab through the relevant lines of text on those parts of the screen.

Aside from fixing the color issues, maybe that alone would be worthwhile to do?

Are there any good ways to represent graphs such as gold vs time? It's not entirely necessary to see the plots but it can be useful.

Another thing I'm wondering about is the best way to show the map. Each tile can be land or water. If it's land, it also has an arability value indicating how habitable it is. I could represent arability by showing it as number between 0 and 9 and have the water be something like the % symbol. But I am worried if this would be too overwhelming -- the most important thing is knowing if it's land or water. Perhaps it's easier to have a space be land and the % symbol be water so it stands out more? (The arability values, are always printed in text at the bottom so one could look that up if needed) I don't know if I'm describing this clearly or not...