Hi Shaun, About the early growth of the industry it is true that the industry sprang up really fast once it really got going. At first it was just three or four developers like PCs Games, Kitchens Inc, GMA, and a couple of others writing games for Dos. Then around 1999 or 2000 the audio games industry really took off with the introduction of VB 6 and DirectX 8. I'd say in the space of about five years between 99 and 2004 the audio games industry was truly born. Jim Kitchen began porting all of his games to Windows. GMA also ported their games like Trek and Lone Wolf to Windows as well as came out with Shades of Doom and Tank Commander.BSC Games got started and put out a good solid half a dozen releases like Troopanum, Hunter, Pipe, Deekout, Bobby's Revenge, and so on. ESP, then owned by James North, came out with an impressive catalog of games including Dynaman, Alien Outback, Monkey Business, ESP Pinball Classic, ESP Whoopass, etc. Liam started L-Works and came out with Egg Hunt, Lockpick, Super Liam, and the Great Toy Robbery. Robert Betz, AKA Games for the Blind, was putting out a handful of card and board games. When you look at it objectively just in that period of time between 1999 and 2004 almost all of the major audio game releases were developed and released, and after that the industry has rapidly slowed and stopped since then. There are, of course, some good reasons for that slow down in development.
First of all, many of the original founders like ESP, BSC Games, Robert Betz, Bavisoft, etc are no longer around. With ESP we are fortunate that James North turned his games over to Josh for development, but in the case of BSC, Robert Betz, and a few other developers we aren't that lucky. Even if they had turned the source code for their games over to someone else it would have to be rewritten which brings me to the second reason game development has slowed. Back in the late 90's and early 2000's a developer's options were simple. They could go the advanced route and develop their games in C++ the hard way using DirectX etc or they could use Visual Basic with DirectX which was a much easier choice. Jim Kitchen, GMA Games, ESP, BSC Games, Robert Betz, and so forth all took the VB 6 option which was completely reasonable for the time. However, in 2008 Microsoft officially scrapped VB 6, and unfortunately the majority of those developers had not switched to .NET or some other modern alternative so that their older games will have technical problems with newer versions of Windows. Fixing said issues requires a complete rewrite in VB .NET or something else compatible with Windows 7 and Windows 8 which will take considerable time and effort to do. On top of the language issue we are now faced with the fact Windows is not the only operating system we need to concern ourselves with. A number of blind users have gone Mac, and that is a new market that hasn't been fully supported yet. There are iOS devices like iPhones and iPads which have exploded onto the market with hundreds of blind customers asking for more games. There is a minority market that includes myself running Linux which is reasonably accessible and is one more market ripe with potential customers. The bottom line I have spent more time on trying to figure out how to develop games for these new platforms than I have in writing games. Josh also has also put considerable time and effort into developing cross-platform tools for Mac, Windows, and iOS that took something like two or three years to get to a state where he could put out Silver Dollar and Change Reaction. The bottom line cross-platform development is hard, is a lot of work, and wasn't even an issue 10 to 15 years ago when the audio games market was made up exclusively of blind Windows users. In short, between the loss of developers and the change in technologies this loll in game development should not come as any big surprise. Its more complicated than it use to be, and we don't have as many people working on it as we use to. I'm hoping that BGT and other technologies like it will help with the problem, but the tool is only as good as the developer using it which is one more problem we have against us. For example, take the discussion a few days ago with John about math and such. If a new developer doesn't have the mathematical skills etc to competently develop a certain type of audio game BGT is not going to help with that. It will be up to us more skilled developers to train and teach the next generation of game developers so they know what they are doing which takes time and energy too. Cheers! On 8/7/13, shaun everiss <[email protected]> wrote: > true paul. > I suspect that the industry grew fast maybe to fast in the first 5 > years of opperation and now it may actually be at its natural speed. > Saying that part of me is hoping that this slump will actually reverse. > Though on that note sighted friends I do things with have been > slowing down on games. > the new games are far to expensive for some and they wait for them to > drop down a bit. > Yes some of us complain about 30 or 40 dollar games but I have known > games for the sighted to be 80 dollars pluss to the 100 or 140 > dollar range so in that respect we are getting off quite well. > Ofcause with blindsoftware going which was sad, and others it is just > another movement in the history of bind gaming. > Ofcause every time a dev goes especially if they take their licenced > games with them it opens up the possibility of making sinular games by > others. > Then we have games like dragon pong which has no single player port > and another dev wrote with permition a simular port of the game with > maybe not as many chars but the same none the less so there you go. > I guess I was hoping for more fast paced action though who could keep that > up. > Its probably that the industry moves but you don't notice it if you > don't actively watch it. > OOn an interesting note I have been getting bored of audio games so > dropped back to the roots of the industry and went back to interactive > fiction. > the inform7 zblorb games on ifarchive are quite good, I am starting > to play a new series of things. > --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. 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