Hi everyone, Some of you may be happy to know I've reached some decisions regarding the wrestling game I plan to make. I've reviewed all of the messages on the subject and have carefully considered all of the suggestions, ideas, and comments put forth on the subject. As this is to be an open source project and something we will all enjoy I've decided to go ahead and implament many of your suggestions and ideas as follows.
First, there was quite a bit of debate on what wrestlers should be added, weather they belong in this game, etc. I've decided that I'm going to go ahead and take the "all stars" type approach which would have a full roster of old favorites like Hulk Hogan, Junkyard Dog, and Andre the Giant as well as new top stars like the Miz, Rae Mystereo, Edge, and John Sena, etc. Given the fact that this is an open source project, a community project in a sense, it is only fair to include as many stars as possible and let the user, you, decide how to play the game. For example, since I'm a big fan of the older stars like Hulk Hogan I might create a card of only old wrestlers like Hulk Hogan vs King Kong Bundy, Junkyard Dog vs Randy Savage, Tito Santana vs Greg "the Hammer" Valentine, and so on. Someone who is more familiar with the 90's stars might want to create a card with Stone Cold Steve Auston, the Rock, Owen Hart, Sean Michaels, etc. Then, the complete fantasy gamer might want to create fantasy matches like Andre the Giant vs Big Show or formar women's champion, Rockin' Robin, vs current women's champion, Eve Torrez. In other words customize and play the game however you like. You might ask why I changed my mind. Well, as I said I saved most of the messages on this topic before we lost the thread to other subjects, and Phil's arguments were very convincing. Phil pointed out that when playing a game like Baseball most people weren't too concerned about sticking strictly to baseball cannon, and chose to play the game from a fantasy baseball point of view rather than a strictly purest point of view. It was his belief that the same sort of thing would happen to my wrestling game. People would not like it as well if I chose to use only certain wrestlers I personally liked, but left out newer wrestlers that maybe someone else liked better. He has a good point. Fact of the matter is I now think I was letting my feelings about a purest game effect my decision making process in this regard. Yes, it is possible to do both, and with a little bit more effort on my part I can let the end user pick and choose what wrestlers they wish to use. It doesn't have to be as one-sided as I think I lead everyone to believe. I simply have to let you choose the wrestlers you want to play from the main roster like Piledriver and Wrestling League Manager does and you can play the game the way you like, and I canplay the game the way I like. That's fair for everyone. Second, there was a little bit of discussion on main events. Since I am no longer sticking to any specific era, time, or place it has freed me up to think about these other issues more clearly. In short, I think I will eventually add all the Pay Per View main events such as Summer Slam, Wrestlemania, Backlash, Night of Champions, Surviver Series, Royal Rumble, etc which will be a huge improvement over Piledriver as you can only enter those events if and when you become a top tear wrestler. If your wrestlers standings are low you will have to bring up your standings before he or she enters a main event calaber match. This will make the game more like Jim's NFL were you have to win several matches before even entering the main event matches or get your first title shot. In otherwords a career/season mode for wrestlers. Third, there was quite a bit of discussion about user interface elements. Well, I've decided for the time being to start with a text-based game. One reason for that is I've been writing some text games like USA Blackjack which appears to be fairly accessible with current versions of Jaws, Window-Eyes, and NVDA. My wrestling game should be as equally accessible provided you have a decent up to date screen reader. If your screen reader has issues with the command prompt Window that's unfortunate but I've got to think of what works for most people here. Plus I've tested USA Blackjack with Speakup for Linux, and the game is fairly accessible on Linux as well. So it is my feeling that text is the most accessible option for all involved. Another big up for using text is braille support. I know this often doesn't get mentioned much, but deaf-blind gamers really don't get a lot of games that targets their special needs. Over the last few years the Audyssey list mainly talks about audio only games, I.E. games full of sound and speech, but completely leaves out a community of potential gamers who can't hear or have difficulty hearing the games. By making it text and with a screen reader like Jaws, Window-Eyes, orca, BrailleTTY, etc we can create a game that is 99% accessible for everyone blind, sighted, deaf, deaf-blind, motion impaired, you name it. Universal accessibility is something that truly gets overlooked all too often by us accessible game developers. So as part of our open source initiative we want to start a new universal accessibility campaign in the process. Finally, cross-platform support. I know this isn't worth a hill of beans to some of you, but it is never-the-less a valid issue. All too often accessible games are designed with the largest target market in mind, I.E. Microsoft Windows, and those of us who use Mac OS, Linux, or want more games for our new Apple IPhone simply get forgotten and left out in the cold. Part of that is do to the skill of the developer. If someone only can program with a proprietary technology and language like Visual Basic they don't have the skills to write cross-platform games to begin with. Plus even if they know C++, Python, Java, etc they still have to access to the target environment to do proper testing and development to insure the product works as expected in that environment. If they only have and use Windows they aren't going to run out and pick up a brand new MacBook just to write games for, and they aren't going to buy a new Del Netbook with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled either. As a result those of us non-Windows users always get the short end of the stick as far as new accesible games goes, and we have to resort to compromises like running Windows through a virtual machine, or purchasing a separate laptop with Windows just to stay current with accessible Windows games. I'm not blaming anyone for this, but merely pointing out that this problem does exist. Since I am one of the few accessible game developers effected directly by this problem I'm obviously in a good position to change things a little. Like Josh from Draconis I've got plans in the works to begin porting all of my products to non-Windows platforms as soon as humanly possible. Games like Final Conflict are already in the rewrite process, and once I release the Windows version of MOTA I'll be working on a non-Windows port. Since this wrestling game will be a brand new product from USA Games it only makes sense to start it with cross-platform support in mind rather than writing it for Windows using this or that proprietary technology like Sapi only to rip it out and start over again using Speech-Dispatcher etc for Linux. Unfortunately, adopting a cross-platform design is sometimes a bit of a lowest common denominator approach which is why some developers don't like creating cross-platform apps. For instance, the issue of text vs speech. I don't personally have a problem with making the game self-voicing, but there is no standardized way of doing that for multiple platforms. Windows has Sapi, Linux has Speech-Dispatcher, and Mac OS has its own Speech API. This puts the developer in the position of deciding to write a piece of middleware for each operating system's proprietary speech API, or using some open source alternative like ESpeak, Festival, and so on. Anyone who has heard ESpeakor Festival knows they are almost as bad as Microsoft Sam which makes them less than ideal for a high-quality product. However, with a game like we are talking about there is a simpler solution and that is to just send the text to the console and let the screen reader do its job. Every operating system in existance will happily display text to the screen using cout, printf, puts, or any other print text function. So why not use it? The same could be said for keyboard input. There are cross-platform libraries like SDL that can do this for games, but that is overkill for what we need here. What I've done is I've taken the standard MS Dos input/output header, conio.h, and written a cross-platform version of that library for use on Mac OS and Linux platforms since input is handled a bit different on those operating systems than on Dos/Windows. Its not the best input method available, but it is cross-platform. The way it works is it basically uses standard ascii keycodes for most of the common keys and returns its keycode to the application. Since the ascii key codes are standardized across all platforms that means I can quickly and easily get access to the letters a through z, numbers 1 through 0, as well as other keys like enter, tab, space, escape, and so on. The only keys I can't get easy access to are the arrow keys, page up, page down, home, end, or the function keys simply because those return a hardware specific scan code. For that you need something like SDL, SFML, DirectX, whatever but that's overkill for this wrestling game or a simple game like Blackjack. So this lowest-common denominator approach works fine for this kind of project were it wouldn't be good for a game like Mysteries of the Ancients. Were I writing something like that I'd certainly use something like SDL for event driven input complete with arrows, function keys, and so on. I just don't think it is necessary for every game though. So in conclusion there you have it. That's my decision and how I plan to write the game. I think this will probably be the best design approach for everyone involved. What do you think? Cheers! --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. 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