Re: Platformer audio cues list
This is pretty much what I was thinking, when I first got here.
In practice, things get a bit weirder.
It doesn't help that a lot of those features--slopes, conveyer belts--haven't really been implemented in audio games at all (not for lack of trying on my part, at least).
I've made like 3 (well, I guess 3.5) games that would qualify as Audio-only platformers. (Well, one of them has braille support.) I handled each of them differently, and none of them is as successful as Bokurano Daibouken 3. I think I'll describe them in chronological order?
First: I tried to make Super Mario Bros. accessible. It worked like this:
There's a cursor one can move around, by holding an extra key and using the directional controls. I very foolishly called it "the accessible camera" and now everyone's calling similar things cameras even though they're more like an extendable hand. Basically, it moves around block b y block, and plays a sound to indicate what sort of thing is there (a tone for empty space, brick and bump and coin and pipe sounds as appropriate). It speaks the names of enemies and powerups.
While just walking normally, there are cues that play every step, to indicate platforms, walls, and dropoffs. These can all be muted. They only play when Mario takes a step. In practice, one must filter out a lot of noise.
Enemies make sound when moving.
Mario makes sound when walking (luckily there are sounds in the game itself that work surprisingly well for this, even before Mario 3).
Moving platforms make sound, and just for clarity, the sound is different depending on the direction.
One can press a key that will announce the positions of everything in the on-screen area. In practice, just listing everything is annoying, and most games make it more like a menu. I personally want more games that are perfectly playab le without this sort of thing, but my efforts in that direction appear fruitless.
Complaint number 1: all the cues were annoying when playing at once, so I added another command to play them in sequence, without needing to move. And here we see the biggest disadvantage to audio compared to video: serial Vs Parallel.
Complaint number 2: Making sense of levels with lots of complex jumps (any of the x-3 levels, especially) is tedious and confusing, so I added a command to the cursor that would play cues for the current column. I have never seen this feature anywhere else, but most audio platformers aren't complex enough to need it.
I was hoping to use similar features for a bigger original project. In that case, I added lots of ledge sounds, dependent on terrain (rocks, dripping water, creeking metal/wood, etc). I proved disastrously useless o n the scale I was working with, and never got released.
I tried something similar with Sonic the Hedgehog, which confused people less but didn't make it to completion:
when approaching a section of track, a sound plays to indicate its slope. Basically, I used short musical sequences, with changes in pitch indicating hte shape of the slope, but also using stereo.
In addition, there was also a command to have Tails fly along the current section of track, so one can hear its shape more continuously.
Optionally, pitch could be mapped to vertical position. I did not handle this well, and just jumping could do some weird things to pits.
The only additional sound I added for movement was the landing sound (basically just using Knuckles' landing sound from Sonic3K for every case of someone landing). The only real complaint I ever got was not adding a sound for basic movement (I avoided adding this bec ause the only obvious option was the spin sound, which... spinning needs).
All enemies make sound. If it can be linked to movement or attacks, great.
Rings and springs make filtered versions of their typical interaction sounds.
Pits use the noise that the original games use for water/wind/etc, always.
There's some bird-whistle-sound used with end-of-level easter eggs in the original game. I applied it to platforms, most of which are one-way.
Object viewer with track size and angle. This was much cleaner than the Mario version, but horribly distracts from a high-speed game like Sonic.
I also made a brawler with platforming elements. The physics was pretty buggy and you got flight far enough in that it didn't really matter, but it worked like so:
Big things you could climb on (buildings in the background, for example) echoed footsteps. This turned out distract ing and I made it optional.
I used a looping wind-ish sound to indicate the edges of platforms. I am apparently terrible at picking these sounds, since no one ever seemed to notice it.
Enemies and other NPCs occasionally speak, even if they aren't moving. This isn't common enough because gathering voices is harder than it seems.
This game was entirely object-based, not tile-based. Some objects could have sounds attached to them, which loop and move if ever the object moves.
Object viewer again. This time, I tried to focus on making it more like "looking"; basically, you would hold alt and press a direction (or the spacebar, for something centered on the player character), and get a list of everything in a box oriented in that direction. It's kinda confusing, so I eventually modified it so that it would play a tone at the position of objects as you navigate the list. (Bokurano Daibouken 2 did that fi rst, and it speeds up searching the list considerably.)
There was a pronounced "things below you have a lower pitch" effect. Most people don't like this, but I tend to think of this in the same way that most people tend to play the latest most dazzling 3D Graphics Extraviganzas: yeah, realism is great and all, but I like playability better. (but see below.)
The fourth was an experiment specifically to see if I could get away from Object Viewers and tile-by-tile cursors and things. It has been the least successful (I will never forget the "I don't know when to jump" response.)
That worked like this:
Still a slight-but-noticeable pitch effect to indicate belowness. I keep this for convenience, rather than necessity, because...
Camera panning. Like, real, "Disney games had this on the Sega Genesis" panning. The idea being that I couldn't portray the size of objects very w ell in audio, so panning the camera might help get a sense for the over all shape, so long as the sound is bound to the whole object and not a single point on it. (The sound_pool in the Blastbay Game Toolkit has a built-in means of applying shape to sounds. It's convenient enough that I ported it to work with Pygame, but no promises about my doing a good job at this.)
Wind plays at the edges of platforms. I tried to make this smart enough to find the real edge, and not just the edge of the current platform, but I kinda failed.
Everything makes sound. Everything. The tricky part was coming up with sounds that are both reasonable and not likely to blend with surrounding sounds.
To cut down on noise, the audio view is zoomed in quite a bit. The idea being to move the camera for anything out of range (for example, if you were at a dead end and couldn't hear a way out in your immediate area).
There was no way to distin guish one-way and all-way platforms outside of the level editor.
The only TTS feedback was for HUD things (weapon, health, score), and to identify whatever you happen to be standing on at any given moment.
I eventually gave up and added the cursor, since that's both really popular and really useful. Did not add any special features to it; it makes a different sound depending on whether it's hitting something solid, or items, or whathaveyou, but does not have the vertical scan from Mario.
Bokurano Daibouken 3 is the most popular Audio Platformer by far, though, so here's how it works:
your footsteps echo from dropoffs. This is simultaneously frustratingly unrealistic and so much cleaner than anything I tried.
There is a cursor, but it only makes 3 sounds: one for open space, one for something solid, and one for something solid that cannot be affected by a grappling hook (the hook sho ws up about a third of the way through the game).
Object viewer. It plays a chime to indicate position of enemies and items, but it plays a different one depending on whether hte object is above, below, or at the same level. Otherwise, the game just uses volume to indicate vertical distance from the player.
Enemies usually make sound.
Some items make sound, but others do not.
Part way through the game (I think it's rather early), you can by a Compact Sonar item. When active, it scans every second or so, and plays a sound to indicate if there is a wall ahead of you, or platform(s) above. It only does one sound for either of these, so there is no way to know if there are multiple platforms in a stack, or how high/thick the walls are.
When one falls from a ledge, it plays one of two sounds: a brief vocalization for very small drops, a cartoonish falling sound for longer ones (the sound is long enough that o nly the biggest drops reach the end; it stops on landing).
I forgot to mention footsteps, head-bumping and wall-bumping, but these are pretty much mandatory, however the other features turn out.
Bokurano Daibouken 3 is awesome and does not run into the information overload issue, but that could be entirely due to the lack of especially complex level designs. There are no one-way platforms, belts, or slopes, and most of the platforming-related challenges aren't so complex or time-sensitive as one would find in the likes of Megaman.
It's pretty hard to avoid at least one of the audio-specific features like the cursor or an object viewer. I would very much like to see a game that can manage this, and mainstream-quality complexity, all while still being playable with only audio. But if they can't be avoided, I'd at least like to see someone make them interesting enough that a sighted player might occasionally mess with them (Ma ybe the cursor sets off land mines or causes collapsing platforms to start collapsing? It'd take trial and error for a blind person to make it past those bits, but then a sighted player would probably get killed by an invisible land mine, and use the cursor to sweep ahead of them in their next try. Maybe darkness or smoke or other obscuring effects could come into play every now and then? I know there was at least one audio game that kept all the items silent unless you had a taurch.)
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