Re: reflections from a former developer
I've scaled back my participation here somewhat significantly because, quite honestly, I want less of this community's kind of energy in my life. That said, I do still selectively skim, and I'm glad I read this thread, because it does speak to lots of what I think about. If I may, I have some thoughts I'd like to offer.
Re: collaboration. Two things. First, for some of us, money is an issue. I'm not saying that good games can't be free. But it's hard to innovate when you're very young. When you're older, you generally come to realize that you can't give that kind of energy away for free--not if you want to pay rent and eat, at least.
I don't expect to get rich on audio gaming, but I'm rolling out pieces to hopefully make it sustainable in as far as I make enough to not desperately take every contract that crosses my radar because I have to. But that raises the bar significantly for collaboration. And it isn't just about drafting a written agreement that someone gets X% and someone else Y. You need a business structure, or many of the app stores just won't deal with you. That means, at bare minimum, an LLC. And then there are the tax implications of that. I don't, for instance, know whether I could just form a passthrough LLC, take and split app store fees, hire the occasional independent contractor for things we couldn't do, etc. and understand what my personal tax burden will be. And that's before even addressing whether such an arrangement would work internationally, or whether it only applies to US citizens. In short, money is a limiting factor not only for games themselves, but also for whether or not collaboration is possible on the scale that would make an audio game even minimally profitable. And if I'm going through all of that with someone, they'd better be adult enough to stick it out and not drop the ball halfway through because their parents needed them or school became a bit too much. While those things are important, what's also important is being responsible enough to determine in advance whether or not those things might become a blocking problem.
Second, it isn't enough to pick a couple developers, a sound designer or two, and create a game. A lot more goes into a good game, and much of it isn't even necessarily visible. For instance, scope. You need a good sense of what your game is and isn't before you start writing more than prototype code. You need to know when that game is done. And, when it is done, you need to stick with that. If you spend six months crafting your nicely-balanced space shooter, then one weekend a developer goes rogue and decides missiles would be a good addition, you've probably ruined the game. I see lots of developers here treating their games like apps, where they'll continue adding features (or even reselling a new version!) because they're neat. But no one comes along and randomly tosses new cards into your Monopoly or Uno game because those cards seem like they'd be cool. And while games may have expansions, you can be fairly certain those expansions are researched and tested in the context of the original game before they're sold, and they're sold as a complete piece rather than as ten smaller ones released weekly. You really need a disciplined team to crack this problem, and that's harder to come by in teams than it is individually.
There is something I'd like to brainstorm on, though, and maybe it requires a different topic. But I see lots of folks talking about audio gaming being a dead end. Say, for the sake of argument, I agree. Then is there a path forward for indie blind developers? Because, while I'm happy to let audio gaming go, I don't want to let it go at the cost of closing game development off from the blind. That's why I push to make Godot accessible even though we already have audio game engines, or why I advocate for accessibility in every open source game engine project I find. If audio-only games are a dead end, then how do we design games with broader accessibility in mind when we can't see the graphics?
The only path that occurs to me are roguelikes, if not as a genre, then as a basis for a path forward. Nothing says that a roguelike has to use an ASCII console or can't have great sound design. If anything, Hades is good proof of that. I wonder if we can use roguelike concepts to get a toehold in creating more accessible games? ASCII graphics and symbols can be rendered graphically. Maybe if someone took, say, a half dozen different genre tilesets and gave them very descriptive labels, we could render basic enough graphics such that any good ideas might shine through despite that? It all sounds a bit desperate, and while I'm as eager to throw away audio-only gaming as many of you might be, I wouldn't want to do so if it meant saying "blind people can't develop games," or "blind people can only develop text-based narrative games." Because, and maybe I'm dating myself here, but I cut my development teeth creating a pretty rich space MUD no one ever saw back in the day. It had basic spherical collision detection, a flexible system for creating ship components, autopilot-driven shuttle routes, etc. I credit that for honing my skills, and don't want other blind developers to lose those sorts of opportunities because we've determined that blind people have to stick to building apps and other non-games.
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