Re: what are your thoughts on BSG's new blog post?
@nidza, I never said the blindfold games were the best thing ever, and for the record I agree with many of your comments, I was just making the point that even something which is regarded by most of the community as sort of universally bad can have it's good points, thus an un nuanced universally negative attitude won't help anyone. Indeed, it's interesting you mention Acefire, since back when it was first released, there was a right royal ruckus on the audeasy list, with so many people declaring the game was the worst thing ever! and doing a huge amount of bashing, especially since originally the game was commercial.
At that point though, Tom ward stepped in and pretty much said many of the things said in this topic, EG constructive criticism is good, bashing is bad, and people should really calm down.
As to, "what is a mainstream game" you bring up an interesting point.
I have been using "mainstream games" here, to refer to graphical games produced by majorly commercial companies with commercial standard budgets and marketing.
There are however, especially these days, a massive load of independent games, produced on platforms from Steam to Ios with pretty much similar budget and time restrictions to audiogames development.
The difference unfortunately, and the reason so much more has been done with graphical commercial games, is I believe a combination of the fact that firstly, graphical indi development has been around for such a long time, there are far more tools and strategies which aide developers, and secondly that it's simply easier to produce a unique graphical game.
To explain a bit. Firstly, look at what happens in the audiogames community when tools like BGT or the scripting engines used by Japanese developers are around. You get an influx of games. Yes, many messy practice projects, but also games like crazy party and a lot of Oriol's work.
I'm not going to bring up the BGT obsolescence question again, but I do find it interesting just how much of an explosion of development there was, when the tools were available.
Secondly, another point to consider, is that audiogames are essentially limited by sound availability, where graphical games and text games are not.
If you want a giant cyber mutant monkey in your graphical game, you just need someone to draw one, and then the coding chops to both animate it, and have it intigrate into your games physics and scripting.
if however you want one in audio, it's not like there are loads of monkey sound available, or you can ask someone to create one.
There are obviously various ways around the problem, using text, using creative narration, having people imitate monkeys etc, but none of these solutions are half as simple as those available to people making graphical games.
One thing I will note though, is that this landscape is changing rather, especially with the advent of alexa etc.
Indeed, I'm afraid as someone who plays alexa games on a daily basis and has seen some quite interesting things done with the system, I don't agree that there is nothing of the quality of at least graphical indi games, or even a good few audiogames, which is another reason I tend to see the future of audiogames coming with indi developers.
But we will see, I still agree with Kenshiro's point, audiogames will get there in the end, we just need to give it time and enjoy the ride.
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