Re: Joining our Beta Testing Team
Moderation!
@Crashmaster, while it is correct that usually this room is for new releases only, that is not a friendly way to gree new guests to the forum at all, especially with their mission statement and the fact that their first game is due out soon anyway. After all, no problem with bending the rules for a good cause, we do exist to promote audio games anyway.
@Audazzle, Welcome to the site. that is an interesting project, and mutual access to games is certainly a good idea, indeed sometimes I feel glad that i grew up in the 80's and early 90's when my limited vision was adequate to playing a number of 8 and 16 bit titles such as Metroid and Donkey Kong country that I could enjoy with friends, where as today with the rise of 3D and complex graphics I'd be entirely out of it (the number of games I could play dropped rapidly with the release of the ps1). I will also say however that the number of accessible games is growing all the time, indeed both yourselves and your daughter Dazy would be very welcome to check out this forum and the site database and see what is on offer currently.
About the current state of games playable by blind people and by sighted people visually, there are a good few browser based and now Ios mmorpgs such as Solara, Core exiles and Puppet nightmares that provide access to blind and Vi players through good image labelling and the fact they work through interfaces that inherently involve screen reader accessible text, the same is true for muds, ---- realtime text games, indeed some muds (such as the awsome Alteraeon), have gone out of their way to provide some great Vi access features to assure the same sort of participation you suggest.
Obviously however, text gaming is something of a minority interest when compared to games with full 3D graphics.
I don't agree that "audio games have graphics to alienate sighted players" Indeed, there have been some very notable sighte d developers of audio games, some for a mainstream gaming markit, such as the games from somethinelse, on the same basis that some sighted people still listen to radio plays, after all there are atmospheric and artistic properties that representing fully in sound has which graphical representation doesn't, Codename Cygnus for Ios or the Inquisitor games are good recent examples.
Then again, of course such things are minority interests and often exist as something of a novelty rather than the main focused interest video games are now, so it is an intreaguing idea.
There have been some audio games with placeholder style minimalist graphics such as Shades of doom, Time of conflict, Castaways and Swamp, (Swamp indeed the graphics are kept minimal so as not to provide sighted players with too much extra advantage in an online multiplayer fps environment), however to my knolidge, there have only been four real time action audio games with what you could call full graphi cs (albeit still limited by an indi development budgit), Sonic zoom, a fairly simple arcade title obviously aimed at younger children, the Gamevial accessible flash web games such as Rally racer and rebound, the Terraformers project and the more recent Ios title Nebula.
Terraformers I would highly recommend having a look at. While the gameplay is a little slow, and in some ways it feels more like a highly extended tech demo than a game, at the same time the atmosphere, music, and the uses of descriptions along with sounds to give a Vi player not only the same information but also the same ethos and ambience as a sighted person gets from the graphics is very well done, even if the grapics (at least what I can see of them which likely isn't a lot),are probably a step down from what is possible today (the game is 10 years old).
There is then NEbula audio game by Grey company released earlier this year for Ios. (I haven't unfortunately added it to the audiogames. net database yet, but you can find it on the Ios ap store, the developer is grey company). my problem with the game is that while the concept is interesting, a space invaders game with full graphics but one where nebulae obscure the screen occasionally forcing everyone to rely on audio, I personally didn't find the audio adequate to the task. For example, when an enemy ship fired, the sound of the shot did not indicate it's vertical position, so it was possible to hear a shot fired on the right of the sterrio field, think it was safe to move over there with the shot gone and still get hit, further, often the playing area got very crowded with sound sources without distinction. This could've been fixed with a bit of audio redesign (I actually wonder if the company updated the game to do so), but is one of the problems of trying to replicate information in a fully accessible audio form as well as graphically.
I do hope the project goes well, I've signed up t o the beta team and will be interested to try the game. Though sinse audio space invaders games have been the most common type of arcade title (they even have their own genre category on the site's game database), I will be interested to see what new features Jumping saucers brings to the table.
As to other contacts, well this site and the audeasy mailing lists are the main pages for audiogames discussion, but you might also want to talk to 7-128 software, Their website is here, sinse they have a lot of contacts and are very interested in access to games generally.
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