Re: First person spatial audio - Constraints vs freedom
Let's talk about Wayfar 1444. Wayfar 1444 has lots and lots of problems. It's a text-based mud written in moo and with terrible lag and the admin doesn't seem to know what he's doing.
But it's basically factorio except the worlds are smaller and minus most of the fun mechanics. People play it because there's no accessible Factorio.
People love Shadow Rine, which is a link to the past. I had enough vision for a link to the past, so I know what I'm talking about. They're of similar complexity, though Shadow Rine is slower because some of the accessibility navigation tools and audio don't quite let it be as fast, and there's a few things it doesn't do. In order to participate in this experience, people install hacky screen reader add-ons that send the clipboard through Google translate because it's Japanese only and basically the only thing like it there is.
There's another mud called Conquest. Yet another the admin doesn't seem to have a clue, so much so that the mechanics incentivize not logging in (yes, really). People play it because it's the only online game we have with a reasonably complex combat system now that Godwars 2 is dead, even though 90% of the experience is you set up stuff and walk away for a week.
People put up with a lot just to get at a reasonably complex game around here. I could probably list off more. There's maybe 20 games of reasonable quality, from the perspective of putting stuff next to what sighted indie devs do.
I think it's reasonable to sacrifice/simplify navigation if you're focusing on something else. If it's some really complicated RPG with cool combat or something, maybe. Shifting the complexity around so that thing a is simple because thing b is really complicated makes a lot of sense. But planning to remove complexity from the start is kind of defeating yourself before you've even begun, when it comes to the perspective of enticing us.
That's not to say that fixing the UI is unwelcome. Every sighted game ever has that breadcrumb trail to get you to your quest objective nowadays. There's a huge problem with UX. Something that I'll bring up again here, since you probably won't otherwise see it/figure it out: all of us with the skill to do games justice don't because at that point we have the skill to have a programming dayjob. This definitely applies to me. Consequently most of the games are written by people who haven't really had any experience, and the UX follows. But the answer isn't simplify, it's like: use a proper translation framework, so that people in any-language-but-this-one aren't using the clipboard to do shitty Google translations; provide the aforementioned quest guidance; if it's first person provide a third person map like what BK3 and Shadow Rine do. And so on. There's lots of room for innovation. I'm just not sure how much of that is compatible with "I'm sighted and I also want to play without graphics" because that's equivalent to "I'm missing 20 years of practice dealing with this".
I live alone in downtown Seattle. No help from anyone sighted for months because of the pandemic. The same skills that make this not that big of a deal, in particular the ones that let me walk to Walgreens, are the same skills audiogames demand of me. I know that this is objectively a difficult thing, but the real world version of this is mildly annoying at best and not something I really even think about, and the audiogame version is against an already-simplified world with bunches of navigation metadata added or whatever and which is also designed to be actively fun.
Hopefully this provides a bit more perspective. I'll stop now, until there's more concrete questions or whatever else.
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