Hi Cara, Yes, precisely. During my development of Montezuma's Revenge and later Mysteries of the Ancients I ran into a number of cases where something as simple as height couldn't be translated perfectly into an audio equivalent. Using pitch is helpful, but still wasn't a perfect solution in all cases.
For example in Montezuma's Revenge the gems are sort of hanging there in the air and you had to jump up and collect them. In the audio version they were purposely put on the same level or height because it was for all intents in purposes too difficult to have too many gems on the screen at various heights like in the original. I know in the original some gems were higher up on the screen making it difficult to get them without a higher jump or a running jump to grab it. I think James and I both felt having to do that would complicate matters from an audio only perspective. Besides that gems were also hanging out over pits, hanging between two ropes, etc meaning that you had to often times climb up to a certain height and jump out and catch it in the air. This was a tricky problem since all we can really do is adjust the panning, volume, and pitch of the gem making it somewhat tricky to exactly indicate in audio where that gem is in relation to the player. Using virtual 3d was no help because all that really did is increase or decrease the volume depending on height. Therefore we had to fall back on spoken feedback to render a more precise idea of where that gem was on the screen than just relying on audio alone. In Mysteries of the Ancients I had some other more interesting challenges dealing with height related issues. I had thought about making the fire pits more dangerous by having them throw fireballs at the player like in a few mainstream games I had played. If I used pitch to indicate fast or slow fireballs I could no longer rely on pitch to indicate weather the fireball should be ducked or jumped. If I had used that particular hazard I would either have to make all fireballs move at a static speed and use the pitch to indicate height, or I would have them come at the player from a static height and use the pitch for speed. I could not do both in audio. Cheers! On 5/20/14, Cara Quinn <[email protected]> wrote: > Thomas, excellent points! > > Some of the simplest concepts can be extraordinarily difficult to translate > into audio with any sense of simplicity and intuitiveness. > > For example, I believe Dark has alluded to this in the past; the concept of > displaying the height of an object in a game with pitch is fine and has been > used many times before. What about if one does not wish to use pitch so that > the object's sound remains consistent? What then? > > This is where some very innovative approaches need to come in. > > You're right. Designing a great game is one thing but designing it to be > great in audio is a whole other level of accomplishment! > > Thanks, > > Cara :) --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
