Re: Accessibility in video games
@18
In so far as I know, everything you've done isn't even close to the complexity of the games you're mentioning. You have to rewind the clock a lot further for that. I'm pretty sure that even half-life had a full physics engine approximating the real world, but it was at the beginning of that era so it's possible it didn't. I know half-life 2 did, though, being as I could play it; you might have made navigation accessible but not good enough to do a firefight. Games since then have developed larger, more complex environments. If you want to do something like a modern RPG then even figuring out the world map is a challenge--nothing like small islands of realistic geography to make your life fun.
You've shown that you can write a 3D game for the blind which can be played by a small minority of blind players, but Audioquake showed the same thing, and no matter how you slice it 3D games have moved on since then. Some game engines (Unity) are now used by self-driving car people. They have extra metadata and level designers could add extra things to the level to make it work, but solving the problem in the general case would solve it for the real world too.
If you/this thread wants my positive outlook? Reach out to people like Slay the Spire, be like "if you just added text to speech blind people could play" and start trying to make inroads there. There's enough things that could be made accessible that we don't need to chase the ones that can't, if we're going to chase it. We could and really should be aiming for the low-hanging fruit first. Hit up people making rhythm games. "have you seen Sequence storm?". Or people making fight games. If it weren't for the bullet hell aspects, I think you could almost, almost do undertale. But there's a whole world of games like that that are 2d and in something tile-based and all you'd need is Shadow Line levels of stuff to play them, but what everyone cares about are the big AAA 3D games that can't really be adapted even with near-infinite money. Game accessibility is doable. hell, if you went to indie studios doing popular-but-underpaying things and said "here is $20000 and here is how you make the game accessible" things would happen, no infinite money/hypothetical solutions required.
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