Hi Cara, Same here. I have been really interested in recreating some classic arcade games for the Atari 2600 etc myself and adapting certain game mechanics and visual aspects of the game to audio does seem to be quite challenging. Especially, when certain things would not necessarily have an audio equivalent thus requiring some creativity to make it accessible.
It seems to me your discussion of Tempest is just precisely the sort of problem where audio doesn't have exactly a 1 to 1 comparison. The problem is one of perspective. In Tempest a sighted person can just glance down at the bottom of the tube to see x number of dots to gauge how many enemies will be coming at him/her in a few seconds. However, they are not constantly looking at them or have to focus on them making it easier for them to effectively concentrate upon the enemies at hand. The problem here is in audio the only way to convey distance is by lowering the volume of sounds and possibly using pitch to denote speed. If they are very far away chances are they won't be heard at all or be so slight that they can't be heard over the enemies closer to hand as well as the battle noise. there is no way to just glance over outside the current battle area to see or hear where they are in relation to everything else. Plus there is no way to just turn on sound when a gamer wants to hear them or turn off the sounds of the enemy ships out of combat range when they want to focus all of their attention on the enemies in firing range. It seems to me the only practical solution is having to fall back upon speech to gather the relevant information. A long range scan of some kind that can announce x number of ships at x distance away would be more precise than trying to get that info out of audio alone. Perhaps not as nice as being able to see or hear all the enemies far away, but the problem is that we just can't accurately represent the same perspective in audio as in video without resorting to some spoken feedback to fill in the gaps where audio fails. A classic case in point is various status information. In a lot of games they have little color bars running along the bottom of the screen showing the amount of power, health, etc the player has remaining. Obviously, the only way we can really get access to that information is to have the game speak it aloud. However, my issue is not having to speak that information aloud, but with how much information is spoken. What I am getting at is that some developers give a bit too much information. In Shades of Doom, for example, when a gamer presses the h key it says something like 95 percent. Well, that is useful, is a way of handling the problem, but most ,mainstream games are not that precise. The health meters etc are only an approximation, a visual representation, of the health remaining so it might be better if the health status were a bit vague such as saying good, fair, poor, or critical rather than just spitting out the exact percentage. Something else is the fact while we can speak the color of the health and other status bars that in of itself would have no meaning for a fully blind gamer. Particularly one who has been blind all his/her life. In a typical mainstream game a sighted player would immediately understand if their health bar is blue that means excellent health, if green that means good, yellow for fair, and red for critical. that's so common that it really doesn't have to be explained, but would probably need to be explained to a blind gamer just because it makes no difference to them what color the health bar is. So in the end when I was experimenting with this I found the only way to get the information across without giving away too much information is to come up with key words that gives an approximate status like excellent, good, fair, poor, and critical rather than an exact percentage. That is the closest I have come to making the health meters etc accessible and as accurate to the mainstream games as possible. Cheers! On 5/20/14, Cara Quinn <[email protected]> wrote: > HI Thomas, > > Very much agree here. :) > > this is really a close topic to my heart in that adapting some earlier > arcade games into audio is something I am really thinking about of late. > > Even adapting some of these simple games proves to be a serious task. > > As an example, how would we here, consider adapting a game like Tempest? > > for those not familiar with this title, you start the game with your view > facing down the length of what is essentially a tube. You are looking down > the inside of this tube. Your ship is also facing down the tube but is > located on the top edge of it, which is the edge nearest to your point of > view. > > So when you move left or right, your ship actually moves counterclockwise or > clockwise respectively, so it travels around the top edge of the tube. > > When you fire, you are firing away from you down the length of the tube. > > the enemies which are attempting to dispatch you are traveling up the inside > of the tube toward you. So you need to move clockwise or counterclockwise to > maneuver your ship in front of them, and fire on them. > > While you do this, you can see in the distance, at the opposite end of the > tube, several very small dots which are flying around. These dots are > actually the enemies very far away which move to the areas on the tube where > they will then travel up toward you. So it is possible to see and avoid > these enemies before they even begin their ascent. > > While it is technically not necessary to see these enemies at that stage to > play the game successfully, I describe all this to present this as an audio > question. > > I am trying to think how I would possibly adapt any of this scenario to > preserve any part of this style of gameplay without dumbing it down to the > point of inanity. ;) > > I do have some ideas and am very interested in hearing what you all think... > > I thought there was a project in the works from a developer on this list > over the years, emulating this type of gameplay, but have heard nothing > about this of late so thought this would be an interesting thought > experiment... > > For those of us really seeking a particular type of gaming experience, it > can be very important to preserve a proper type of game mechanics. -Or at > least be able to bring something special of that experience over into > audio. > > Thanks, > > Cara :) > --- > iOS design and development - LookTel.com > --- > View my Online Portfolio at: > > http://www.onemodelplace.com/CaraQuinn > > Follow me on Twitter! > > https://twitter.com/ModelCara --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. 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