Re: Kickstarter Project for "A Hero's Call" from Out of Sight Games
Exodus: I forgot to mention earlier that I totally agree with you that we want to avoid the "blind protagonist" trope. Mostly because the way you interact in a game like AHC is not the way blind people interact with the world, per se, so explaining away lack of visuals as "the player is blind" is not only cliche, but it's a bit counterintuitive, and creates untrue stereotypes about blindness. I think this trope has merits, but only when done well. There's a game I heard of called "Beyond Eyes" which, very unfortunately, was designed for sighted players, where the protagonist has lost her vision and, as you explore, the sounds you hear cause graphics to be painted onto the screen, and the objects you "see" will change as you learn more about them. That, to me, is a much better way of handling a blind protagonist than telling sighted players, "Sure, you can see the walls, and the doors, and you can tell where you're going, and that fireplace is giving off extra light...but you're blind, that's why the innkeeper doesn't look very realistic."
As for DSP and the sort of "technical sound design" you're talking about - I agree that this is an area where there's room for huge improvement, and an area where audio-intensive games could really benefit. Unfortunately, just as it takes a lot of time, effort, and expense to develop ultra-realistic graphics, it also takes a lot of time, effort, and expense to develop ultra-realistic audio. I wouldn't say that triple-A games have audio like this just because they have the fanciest libraries - but because they have the resources to dedicate to this kind of intensive sound design, including time and manpower. That's not to say that small indie teams shouldn't push the envelope - they should, and we intend to. But there's definitely a spectrum. It's one thing to get ambient reverb settings based on location; it's another to get sound interacting realistically with the environment, traveling around corners, passing through doors, etc. For example, one thing we tried some time ago was getting sound to filter and attenuate when it's heard around corners. The thought process was that if I lose sight of a sound source, I'm still going to be able to hear it - just not as clearly as if I was staring it in the face. We ran into two major problems. First of all, it actually made the soundscape much more confusing and cluttered - you simply heard too much, all of the time, and couldn't create an accurate picture of what was around you because your ears struggled to differentiate the filtered and attenuated sounds from the normal ones. A sighted player might not have this trouble because they wouldn't see the sound source so they'd unconsciously acknowledge that it's out of sight, but we don't have that ability. The second problem was that it was taking an absurd amount of processing power. Both of these are problems that could be solved with enough time and manpower, but for a small indie team, we you always have to weigh the reward versus the cost, and in this case the cost seemed far greater than the reward.
Also, it's worth noting that a lot of the specific mainstream game features you've mentioned are features designed for a specific scenario, rather than something universally coded into the game engine. That's another good way to create that sense of realism - find something that happens frequently, or is a major part of gameplay, and figure out how you can specifically make that thing sound more realistic.
In terms of special item pack distribution...it's a little odd to me that, out of everything, this has become the topic we're all talking about. To me, it's really not that exciting. Ian will come up with the best way to do it, from a technical standpoint, based on how we� 39;re distributing the game, and then I'll take that and figure out the best way to implement whatever technical method he gives me in a thematically appropriate way.
Regarding Steam distribution - I'm not opposed to that at all, and in fact one item on our to-do-list is to look into this prospect more; the only thing likely to prevent us from pursuing a Steam Greenlight campaign would be if there are significant technical difficulties in getting the game to run on Steam, since it is a custom game engine. However, I can't speak to the accessibility of Steam, but I know the way that many blind gamers react to it, so we definitely don't want to limit ourselves to any one distribution platform if e can help it - meaning if we did sell through Steam, we'd also want the ability to sell through our server, and so on. Meaning any features can't be solely dependent on Steam.
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