Re: New Infinite Apocalpytic Procedural Ascii Game "The Wastes"
@Orin, the problem with most roguelikes (indeed the roguelike genre), is that they display everything with ascii graphics, ie, you have the arrows and you move your character on screen up down left and right, and all the monsters and stuff are represented by keyboard symbols. With a screen reader ascii graphics are rather unusable sinse sitting and listening to hash hash hash hash at hash hash dot dot bar one hash hash dot dot bar, isn't very informative as to what is happening.
This ascii display is exactly what "Roguelike" actually means, sinse the original game rogue displayed things like that. There are it is true several very awesome roguelikes in terms of style and random generation that to be honest I'd give my back teeth to play, from Nethack with it's dungeons and puzzles, to the more freeform Dungeon Crawl stone soop, and the extremely unique and now highly massive ascii graphics stratogy building game dwarf fortress. The problem is as I s aid, Ascii graphics and screen readers don't mix, though if ever someone makes a tactile screen display that can show more than 80 characters in a streight line you can bet roguelikes will be a major deal in accessible games.
In fairness I will say I have heard of a few blind people who have successfully played roguelikes with an 80 character braille display, but looking at a massive and often very, very complex dungeon or other ascii graphic layout which could be as large as 300 x 100 characters with a braille display that can only show 80 characters in a streight line is pretty dam slow, so slow indeed and requiring so much memorization of layout that it alls outside the access criteria of this site, ie, playable with same effort as a sighted person.
The only actual roguelike I've ever myself been able to play is Angband, (and some Angband mods), and that thanks to a lucky set of accidents involving Supernova speaking in game messages automatically, and a ver
y large set of graphic tyles which I can see with my remaining vision, however there is no way you could play Angband without the graphic tyles just with the in game text. Indeed though I've tried a couple of other roguelikes for the same circumstances, Dungeon crawl stone soop and Nethack I've had the same problems, indeed in Nethack weerdly enough when using the large graphic tyles Sn wouldn't read the text properly which was weerd (and the graphic tyles had horrible contrast anyway).
So, until that full screen tactile display appears, methinks we'll have to give roguelikes a miss.
Games with the same roguelike style random generation of in game monsters, locations and objects and tactical combat but with a more traditional described interface in real English language rather than the ascii graphics are sadly very rare indeed. Thus far Kerkerkruip, (as well as some of victor's other beta projects like idols of war), The wastes and one thus far ve ry early alpha game with a name like dungeon cyoa (even though it wasn't a gamebook), which a topic was posted about a while ago are the only ones I know. You might also count wumpus 2000, though there the random generation of locations is pretty limited (for more see the Wumpus 200 entry on the db).
If however this other game you speak of has propper text descriptions rather than using the top down ascii graphics of a roguelike, definitely let us know, as I love this style of game as you can probably gather .
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