Re: Code 7 - A fully-voiced text adventure
Hi Kevin,
thanks for all these explanations. Knowing the inspiration behind the accessibility efforts is really interesting and pretty unique and admirable, to tell the truth. There have been countless occasions in history as well as at present where a blind individual or accessibility advocate tried to contact a large mainstream dev trying to ask them to add at least marginal accessibility to their best selling titles, and in many cases these were even very realistic, well founded and technically achievable changes that wouldn't require that much extra work for a big, well established company, yet no big studio has responded to these inquiries positively yet as far as I'm aware of. On the other hand, there have been quite a couple of indie devs who were just as fantastic as you are in this regard, or even developed their games with blind accessibility in mind since the very beginning and it worked perfectly. So that really leaves a lot of bitterness and sadness to
feel towards the big budget companies and a lot of respect and admiration for the indies. And, if you sum it up, to hear that your inspiration was in fact a mention in a documentary that interactive fiction used to be very popular among blind people, which led you to the idea of trying it to get distracted from the endless stress of the campaign, and the result, the very first prototype and your very first attempt at implementing accessibility support if I understand it correctly, being this brilliant, that's just amazing! :-)
I do understand the stress around the campaign. I'll certainly be tweeting about it both in Czech which is my native language and in English a lot. That's about the most I can do at the moment, I'm afraid, but I won't give up. :-) This just mustn't be done on a smaller scale, that would be an eternal pity. :-) I'm crossing my fingers for you!
When you do have the time, perhaps after the campaign is over, I think i t would really be a good idea to check out some of the more advanced audiogames such as Shades of Doom, GMA Tank Commander, Swamp, Entombed, Manamon, Psycho Strike or The Gate and others. Everyone would recommend you different titles based on their personal preferences but there is certainly quite a lot to choose from in each major genre by now, and the ways these games implement certain navigational or spatial challenges is really innovative and interesting, to say the least.
The problem with Sapi voices is that there are quite a lot for every major language, including mine. In fact, I prefer to use a Czech voice for all my work, including even programs that are written in English. :-) Everyone is just used to a different voice, and being forced to use a voice that you don't understand well, don't like, or that just lags like hell on your system, can be a major annoyance to some. I mean, I completed the demo even with Microsoft Zira, so clearly that's not the c ase with me, but being able to choose whichever of the available voices that you desire is pretty much a standard feature in mostly any other audiogame or even a general purpose program with Sapi support that I've seen so far, so I really hope you will be able to do something about this when time permits.
Keep up the great work! I'll be spreading the word about the game everywhere. I can see it already.
*Stops a random passerby on the street*
Hey, have you heard about this cool adventure called Code 7? Two awesome guys from Germany are developing it and it's pretty cool. And you know what, it even has Sapi support so that you can play it all fine even when you are blind. Go back it on Kickstarter. Thanks. What do you say? You have no idea what I'm talking about? You don't care for stupid computer games atall? Well, doesn't matter, just support this campaign, I say, or else! :-D :-D :-D
Lukas
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
