Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[rajmund]

Hi,
Register at qcsalon.net , there's one right there.

Sent from a BrailleNote

- Original Message -
From: "goshawk on horseback" I don't know what you think about this idea, but one thing that 
has been

lacking so far, is an accessible monopoly game for the iPhone.

Simon


- Original Message -
From: "Marty Schultz" Thanks for all your input.  I will send your comments around to 
the
testers, and get their feedback, and implement those ideas.  I 
haven't
done much with breakout or hopper recently, since I'm building 
pool /

billiards.
I've been getting several requests for both snakes and ladders, 
and for

more trivia games.
There are already slews of trivia games that are accessible, and 
I

imagine snakes and ladders would get boring quickly.
So,  I was thinking of combining those two together, but I have 
no idea

if that would be fun.
The idea would be that you could only move ahead in snakes and 
ladders

if you answered the trivia question correctly.
I could also make variants of the game more child educational by 
having

another option to test arithmetic, or spelling.
Any thoughts?

On 3/31/2016 7:21 PM, dark wrote:
Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games 
from
Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often 
paying for the
coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to me 
personally.


Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and 
how much
random fun sliding around looking for animals was, especially in 
the
matching, indeed I like the fact that the game uses the touch 
screen so

uniquely.

I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an 
animal
lover and because she's getting used to the hole touch screen 
concept on
her Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she really rather 
enjoyed it
(indeed she got far more addicted than I expected and spent half 
an hour

trying to beat her previous high score).

Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was 
"why are
there no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite 
disappointed, and
in fairness I can see her point sinse while it's very cool to 
have Sea
lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a farm, not to mention 
loons (good
company for me), it would be rather logical to have a farm dog 
or cat :d.


I also did have a couple of thoughts myself.

Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if 
we could
make the information spoken more concise, and thus be more able 
to get
higher scores.  So instead of hearing "bullfrog to the north 
west"  have a
setting to just hear "bullfrog, northwest" or maybe even 
"bullfrog n w"


Secondly,  I wonder why some aspects of the game which are 
controlled in
settings have not been used to create different various types of 
game to

play?

For example, instead of having the player choose how many 
animals, have
games with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 minutes 5 
animals, 3

minutes 6 animals.

It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of 
animals while
playing, so that players have to more quickly make judgements on 
the fly
and cannot prepare for new sorts of animals turning up.  So for 
example
have a game that starts with four types of animals, and then add 
another
kind after a predetermined time, say 2 minutes, then another 
kind after

another two minutes and so on until the player messes up.


Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the 
spoken
instructions were not factors used to create harder games to 
challenge the
player, as opposed to be alterable in settings.  Personally I'd 
much rather
myself have the option to get higher scores on different modes 
of play
than to have the same modes of play but need to alter a setting, 
sinse it
creates more variation in the game and gives me more options 
when I start,
not to mention making the game progressive by giving harder 
levels so that
I can advance to the next hardest category when the previous one 
becomes

too easy (I really like the setup in Hopper and Pong for this).

I've actually thought the same in breakout, that the speed of 
the ball and
whether the paddle grows when it hits the back wall should be 
factors that
alter in different levels, however Blindfold Barnyard, sinse it 
is based
on managing increasing levels of more complex circumstances 
would be a

really nice game to play around with in this way.

INdeed, speaking of complexity,  there could be some rather fun 
ways to

expand the game.

Firstly, at the present moment there is no reason why a player 
cannot
simply keep clearing one fence of a given animal type and 
accumulate more
and more score on another fence.  I was thinking therefore of 
inserting a
factor which forced players to keep evolving which fence they 
stuck

animals too.

What I was thinking is that at various intervals, a player could  
hear a
wind sound and be told "wind from the north" (or whichever 
direction).  At
this point, if a player didn't imm

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[goshawk on horseback]

whilst it may not be absolutely necessary, good soundscapes and voice 
acting, does improve a game quite a bit.

Simon


- Original Message - 
From: "Devin Prater" 
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2016 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do


Why would you need soundscapes and voice acting? A dark room is text, and 
does just fine. Touchmint’s games are mostly text, and do mostly fine as 
well. Nano empire is wonderful, and is text also. I’m saying that you don’t 
need expensive acting and sound do make a good game.
Sent from my Mac.

Devin Prater
r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com



> On Apr 13, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Darren Harris 
>  wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have 1 thing to say about replayable games,
>
> Swamp. That's a 1 man band doing all that, look at how good a game that 
> is?
> Now have something like that on the iPhone and that would be awesome.
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy 
> Brown
> Sent: 13 April 2016 18:36
> To: gamers
> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do
>
> In response to Marty's post, I know that this is exactly the sort of
> situation we have with Valiant Galaxy Associates.  Our company
> consists of two people.  We began with a large project that took 3
> years to get to commercial release and which is due to have an update
> relatively soon in our schedule.  Our next two games were much simpler
> and rolled out quickly, but only because we could reuse and centralize
> a lot of the code.  We're still in the process of making a centralized
> platform so we can roll out more of the smaller games as well as work
> on more ambitious games.
>
> Our hope is to eventually have more games in play, let the smaller
> ones carry the load while we develop long term bigger games.
>
> I disagree with you about the RPG as being simple to convert Dark:
>
> You can convert the mechanics relatively easily, but then you have to
> have the mechanics integrate with a group of player actions and
> possible results.  Essentially you write an Choose Your Own Adventure
> novel on top of the mechanics, get it all to integrate, and then have
> to still work out why it's not working over 60,000-250,000 words of
> text and god only knows how much mechanical issues.  This doesn't take
> into account sound scape or voice acting.
>
> It's not undoable, and I think we should see more of those types of
> games myself, but the question is how much complexity can you build
> from a small production standpoint and still stay sane, productive,
> and on top of customer service.  It's not like you release a game and
> it's a never go back to proposition.  Further, if you want to keep the
> costs reasonable, you have to make choices.  You can't release a
> professionally produced sound scape, voice acting, music background,
> story, proofreading, and fully tested and stable code and charge only
> 10 dollars for it.  A lot of the sorts of games that people cite when
> they mention this genre are games that originally retaled for well
> over $35 or 40 U.S. or, have monthly subscription charges that come to
> the same thing.  While Marty's assessment that most blind people don't
> like RPG's might be skewed, he is right that most blind people will
> not pay for the kind of quality that most would like to demand.  Not
> in my experience in any case.  That said, I know all the developers on
> list attempt to put out as professional and interesting a game as they
> can.  Remember too, that by moving his company to an IOS focus, Marty
> is not breaking new ground in terms of style of game perhaps, but by
> moving into the mobile app market he has broken ground for blind
> people and audio games in terms of providing well received simple
> games that are inexpensive.  That is a huge step from the any audio
> game is either cheap and developed as a labor of love by one
> programmer or $40 and developed to be profitable, or at least,
> hopefully profitable.
>
> As usual, my two cents.  I'll expect change from that please :)
>
> Take care,
>
> Jeremy
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> In the fight between you and the world--back the world! Frank Zapa
>
> ---
> Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org
> If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to
> gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
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> If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the 
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> please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
>
>
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> If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to 
> gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
> You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at
> http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org.
> All messag

Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the games as I do

[goshawk on horseback]

given the current cost of other titles, I have to say that it would probably 
have to offer something rather special and/or spectacular for a good amount 
of people to pay out that sort of a price, and would have to be all 
inclusive, no more paying out for any sort of upgrades or subscriptions 
after that sort of outlay.

Simon


- Original Message - 
From: 
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 3:50 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the games as I do


I didn't say they didn't like it; I just said that from the email I've 
received, I get far fewer requests for RPGs than other games (about 1 in 30 
is a RPG request).  Sports games abound, but when I push back and ask how 
the game would be played, I usually don't get a response.  A classic 
suggestion is a basketball shooting game; I think it sounds pretty boring, 
after playing it for  a few minutes.

Building out an RPG would take months, and I can't see how to do any return 
on that investment.  Assume that the game would sell for $20, of which apple 
keeps $7.  Assume a programmer earns $40/hour.  A game that takes a month to 
build (and I think an RPG would take far more than that) would need to 
generate 6,400 after apple's cut, or about $9100.  At $20 per game, 500 
people would have to purchase it just to break even.  Given that 80% of the 
people never purchase, I would need 2,500 downloads to break even.

I am working with the programmer who built park boss, and I will probably 
port that over to the iPhone.  I've built a framework to mix my 
infrastructure with C++ code, so it might not be overly complex.  Since park 
boss is in the direction of an RPG, or at least closer to a SIMS 
environment, I can see how that game goes to try to project how any RPG 
would go.  Do you think this market could handle an RPG game for $40 to $50?



- Original Message - Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the 
games as I do
From: "dark" 
Date: 4/13/16 7:34 am
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 

@Marty, Blind people don't like rpgs? not true.

 Go and check audiogames.net and observe the amount of people who reply to
 rpg related topics, or indeed post a topic and ask. I suspect the
 information you got from that statement was from a local focus group, ie,
 society or association for the blind. Unfortunately, such places tend to
 have a generally older population who are primarily interested in
 traditional type games, however for younger gamers (and indeed those more
 likely to own Ios devices), something a little more modern and complex 
would
 appeal more, indeed part of the problem with audiogames development is that
 there is a large amount of traditional games available and not so much that
 is none traditional, ie, I can think of about 8 versions of blackjack over
 the years, but not one single version of a modern fantasy board game like
 Talisman, much less a ccg, collectable card game.


 I'll also add that rpgs don't need to be as complex as the games produced 
by
 companies like namco and squaresoft. dungeons and dragons do very well with
 basic mechanics, indeed most of what an rpg does mechanically can be
 represented by dice rolls and risk assessments, the one difference is that
 you have story and atmosphere added to that, as well as player progression
 over time.

 You might begin therefore by adapting some of the multiplayer fantasy 
themed
 card and board games for Ios, games like heroes of the multiverse or
 talisman, or creating your own along similar lines if copywrite is an 
issue.
 These would be mechanically similar to games like roadtrip, hearts or dice
 poker, just with more text involved, eg, a player would encounter a monster
 with a description of it's stats and be required to roll dice for combat, 
or
 a player would encounter a magical object card and decide whether to take 
it
 with them or not.

 While I do enjoy the games in the collection thus far, I am a little sorry
 none are games intended for longer or more complex play. There's nothing
 wrong with a game of hearts, blackjack etc or a quick arcade game, however
 unfortunately there has already been a lot of that sort of thing produced,
 indeed I do wonder if some people are taking the attitude "well there are
 several versions of hearts for pc, why should I pay to have one on my
 Iphone?"

 this isn't meant as an attack, as I said I enjoy the games for what they
 are, it just saddens me to see developers now producing exactly the same
 sorts of games we were seeing in the community 10 years ago, especially 
with
 the greater distribution and easier development inherent on Ios, indeed 
it's
 a little ironic that with one exception all of the more complex games we've
 seen recently for Pc or Ios have been games produced by sighted developers
 who have accidently created accessible games, or have included access
 requests in games that are %80 accessible such as adventure to fate, where
 as games produced with the express intent

Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[goshawk on horseback]

I don't know what you think about this idea, but one thing that has been 
lacking so far, is an accessible monopoly game for the iPhone.

Simon


- Original Message - 
From: "Marty Schultz" 
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2016 12:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts


Thanks for all your input.  I will send your comments around to the
testers, and get their feedback, and implement those ideas.  I haven't
done much with breakout or hopper recently, since I'm building pool /
billiards.
I've been getting several requests for both snakes and ladders, and for
more trivia games.
There are already slews of trivia games that are accessible, and I
imagine snakes and ladders would get boring quickly.
So,  I was thinking of combining those two together, but I have no idea
if that would be fun.
The idea would be that you could only move ahead in snakes and ladders
if you answered the trivia question correctly.
I could also make variants of the game more child educational by having
another option to test arithmetic, or spelling.
Any thoughts?

On 3/31/2016 7:21 PM, dark wrote:
> Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games from 
> Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often paying for the 
> coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to me personally.
>
> Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and how much 
> random fun sliding around looking for animals was, especially in the 
> matching, indeed I like the fact that the game uses the touch screen so 
> uniquely.
>
> I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an animal 
> lover and because she's getting used to the hole touch screen concept on 
> her Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she really rather enjoyed it 
> (indeed she got far more addicted than I expected and spent half an hour 
> trying to beat her previous high score).
>
> Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was "why are 
> there no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite disappointed, and 
> in fairness I can see her point sinse while it's very cool to have Sea 
> lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a farm, not to mention loons (good 
> company for me), it would be rather logical to have a farm dog or cat :d.
>
> I also did have a couple of thoughts myself.
>
> Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if we could 
> make the information spoken more concise, and thus be more able to get 
> higher scores. So instead of hearing "bullfrog to the north west"  have a 
> setting to just hear "bullfrog, northwest" or maybe even "bullfrog n w"
>
> Secondly,  I wonder why some aspects of the game which are controlled in 
> settings have not been used to create different various types of game to 
> play?
>
> For example, instead of having the player choose how many animals, have 
> games with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 minutes 5 animals, 3 
> minutes 6 animals.
>
> It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of animals while 
> playing, so that players have to more quickly make judgements on the fly 
> and cannot prepare for new sorts of animals turning up. So for example 
> have a game that starts with four types of animals, and then add another 
> kind after a predetermined time, say 2 minutes, then another kind after 
> another two minutes and so on until the player messes up.
>
>
> Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the spoken 
> instructions were not factors used to create harder games to challenge the 
> player, as opposed to be alterable in settings. Personally I'd much rather 
> myself have the option to get higher scores on different modes of play 
> than to have the same modes of play but need to alter a setting, sinse it 
> creates more variation in the game and gives me more options when I start, 
> not to mention making the game progressive by giving harder levels so that 
> I can advance to the next hardest category when the previous one becomes 
> too easy (I really like the setup in Hopper and Pong for this).
>
> I've actually thought the same in breakout, that the speed of the ball and 
> whether the paddle grows when it hits the back wall should be factors that 
> alter in different levels, however Blindfold Barnyard, sinse it is based 
> on managing increasing levels of more complex circumstances would be a 
> really nice game to play around with in this way.
>
> INdeed, speaking of complexity,  there could be some rather fun ways to 
> expand the game.
>
> Firstly, at the present moment there is no reason why a player cannot 
> simply keep clearing one fence of a given animal type and accumulate more 
> and more score on another fence. I was thinking therefore of inserting a 
> factor which forced players to keep evolving which fence they stuck 
> animals too.
>
> What I was thinking is that at various intervals, a player could  hear a 
> wind sound and be told "wi

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[Jeremy Brown]

As to rpg's and replayability, I want to take issue with at least two
of your examples Dark.

Fallthru was replayable, but the essential shape of the game stayed
the same.  Once you beat it, the general plan to beat it was the same.
Some locations moved a little, but the general challenges were the
same, and while individual map features changed, the same strategies
won the game.  I think using it as an example of replayability is
somewhat misleading.

The Wastes presents the problem of having everything random.  There's
no reliability for a player to build on.  You don't ever learn the map
because the map changes game to game.  Your tactics have to change
whether you have the super overpowered weapon of death, or are
fighting with your bare fist.  I myself find that somewhat
frustrating.  It's a fun game, and I don't detract from the work put
into it by any means, but it's replayable only because you're drawing
random cards from a deck every time.

To me, designing a single person RPG with replayability would demand
some randomness of course, but you'd have to put some steady elements
in as a place to start from, or you'd lose players who don't like the
chaos factor.  For myself, I'd want alternate reactions to different
options etc for each encounter, each situation.  That's a lot of work.
A lot of planning.  I could slap together a random generator that
would produce an ok game that was replayable because of randomness,
but to me that's not an RPG.  That's the old random dungeon generator
at the back of the first ed. dmg that people would use when they
couldn't get a group together.

That said, I see some ways it could be done, but the problem would be
the time expenditure--to do it well.

As to several people commenting on cheapness or text in place of audio
etc.  I agree, one can play text games just fine, but if we're going
to do that we can go back to the old IF titles and forget a real rpg.
If you want to have real interaction you'll end up having to create a
complex interaction engine.  The reason why Eamon for instance worked
so well was that at the core of it were only about 40 commands, most
of which you never used.

As to the sounds issue: putting together a cheap game with good
sounds, music, and sound scape is difficult unless you have lots of
free time, a good recording set up, and plenty of stuff to provide
foley effect with.  For example, with Interceptor, we purchased a
number of the sounds we used.  That's another thing that must be taken
into account.

I think we need more large scale well designed RPG's but I think that
we do need to go into that expectation open eyed.  Entombed was a
decent start and it was $40.  Marty's estimate sounds high to me for
an IOS app, but it sounds reasonable as a complex Windows platform
game.  So, we can jettison everything but text, go the random shuffle
and draw approach, and produce a mildly amusing but ultimately
frustrating game, or we can invest a lot of time, effort, and work
into producing a complex game with good acting and music and sounds,
and then we have to charge more, or somehow, sell more units.

>From a developer standpoint, if you are actually trying to make a
profit, the RPG looks like a bad bet.  Now, that said, if you had 30
or 40 smaller games that could support you while you did it, it might
be doable.  If you had a consortium of small developers that could
agree on a language, a story, and delegate parts of the game
effectively, it might be produced cheaply.

Just a few thoughts as usual.  I eagerly await disagreement.

Take care,

Jeremy


-- 
In the fight between you and the world--back the world! Frank Zapa

---
Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org
If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
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/gamers@audyssey.org.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list,
please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.

Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[rajmund]

Hello,
That, I'm not sure of.  I say what I've said in the past, not if 
you can play against others.


Sent from a BrailleNote

- Original Message -
From: Marty Schultz But won't that make snakes and ladders boring after a while.  
It's all

chance, no luck.
I'm concerned the game will wear out in about 5 or 10 times 
playing it.



On 4/18/2016 12:50 PM, rajmund wrote:
Hi,
I'd make them 2 games.  I'd rather throw dice, than answer 
questions.


Sent from a BrailleNote

- Original Message -
From: Marty Schultz Thanks for all your input.  I will send your comments around to 
the
testers, and get their feedback, and implement those ideas.  I 
haven't
done much with breakout or hopper recently, since I'm building 
pool /

billiards.
I've been getting several requests for both snakes and ladders, 
and for

more trivia games.
There are already slews of trivia games that are accessible, and 
I

imagine snakes and ladders would get boring quickly.
So,  I was thinking of combining those two together, but I have 
no idea

if that would be fun.
The idea would be that you could only move ahead in snakes and 
ladders

if you answered the trivia question correctly.
I could also make variants of the game more child educational by 
having

another option to test arithmetic, or spelling.
Any thoughts?

On 3/31/2016 7:21 PM, dark wrote:
Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games 
from
Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often 
paying for
the coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to me 
personally.


Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and 
how
much random fun sliding around looking for animals was, 
especially in
the matching, indeed I like the fact that the game uses the 
touch

screen so uniquely.

I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an 
animal
lover and because she's getting used to the hole touch screen 
concept

on her Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she really rather
enjoyed it (indeed she got far more addicted than I expected and 
spent

half an hour trying to beat her previous high score).

Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was 
"why are
there no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite 
disappointed,
and in fairness I can see her point sinse while it's very cool 
to have
Sea lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a farm, not to mention 
loons
(good company for me), it would be rather logical to have a farm 
dog

or cat :d.

I also did have a couple of thoughts myself.

Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if 
we
could make the information spoken more concise, and thus be more 
able
to get higher scores.  So instead of hearing "bullfrog to the 
north
west"  have a setting to just hear "bullfrog, northwest" or 
maybe even

"bullfrog n w"

Secondly,  I wonder why some aspects of the game which are 
controlled
in settings have not been used to create different various types 
of

game to play?

For example, instead of having the player choose how many 
animals,

have games with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 minutes 5
animals, 3 minutes 6 animals.

It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of 
animals
while playing, so that players have to more quickly make 
judgements on
the fly and cannot prepare for new sorts of animals turning up.  
So
for example have a game that starts with four types of animals, 
and
then add another kind after a predetermined time, say 2 minutes, 
then
another kind after another two minutes and so on until the 
player

messes up.


Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the
spoken instructions were not factors used to create harder games 
to

challenge the player, as opposed to be alterable in settings.
Personally I'd much rather myself have the option to get higher 
scores
on different modes of play than to have the same modes of play 
but
need to alter a setting, sinse it creates more variation in the 
game
and gives me more options when I start, not to mention making 
the game
progressive by giving harder levels so that I can advance to the 
next
hardest category when the previous one becomes too easy (I 
really like

the setup in Hopper and Pong for this).

I've actually thought the same in breakout, that the speed of 
the ball
and whether the paddle grows when it hits the back wall should 
be
factors that alter in different levels, however Blindfold 
Barnyard,

sinse it is based on managing increasing levels of more complex
circumstances would be a really nice game to play around with in 
this

way.

INdeed, speaking of complexity,  there could be some rather fun 
ways

to expand the game.

Firstly, at the present moment there is no reason why a player 
cannot
simply keep clearing one fence of a given animal type and 
accumulate
more and more score on another fence.  I was thinking therefore 
of
inserting a factor which forced players to keep evolving which 
fence

they stuck an

Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[Marty Schultz]

I've gotten lots of negative feedback for games that require 2D or even 
3D sound, since a reasonable (i'm not sure how big, but they are vocal) 
part of the users have an audio issue, and they only way they can play 
the 2D games is via blue tooth speakers separated by several feet, so 
instead of using their ears to locate the sound, they turn their head so 
their good ear can detect which speaker the sound is coming from.


And many people complained if ear buds are a requirement of the game.



On 4/18/2016 2:53 PM, Kenneth Downey wrote:

Agree with Dark on all points here,  but I do think that abbreviating things 
too much could get confusing. I would stick With something like sheep 
northwes!, or better yet, two sheep and a dog northwest. The more these kinds 
of info can be concatinated the better. Alternatively, you could say, sheep 314 
which would mean that there's a sheep at 314 degrees. This would be much more 
precise than the cardinal directions, but the player should be able to choose 
which method they want. Also, how far away is the animal! We could invent a new 
type of measurement, like a minicubit and minispan. The bigger one would be 
four fingers touching and laid out in a straight line on the screen. The 
smaller one would be one single fingertip, and the player would customize both 
measurements before starting the first game.
Of course there is an even simpler way, a way all blind people know by the time 
we get out of high school, the coordinate system. You could simply say, sheep 
at E4 and boom, it would be very easy to find.
A final method, and I am not sUre which 3D engine Bryan Smaart used for Ear 
Monsters, but animals would be extremely easy to find without much vocal 
feedback
These are the ways I know for giving info about things on a screen.
Sent from my iPhone


On Apr 18, 2016, at 11:50 AM, rajmund  wrote:

Hi,
I'd make them 2 games.  I'd rather throw dice, than answer questions.

Sent from a BrailleNote

- Original Message -
From: Marty Schultz http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org.
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Blindfold Racer - free iPhone/iPad app where you drive with your ears, 
not your eyes www.BlindfoldRacer.com 


Learn about how we built it for blind & visually impaired kids, teens & 
adults as a STEM project.

Follow the blog: BlindfoldGames.org 
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Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[Marty Schultz]

But won't that make snakes and ladders boring after a while.  It's all 
chance, no luck.

I'm concerned the game will wear out in about 5 or 10 times playing it.


On 4/18/2016 12:50 PM, rajmund wrote:

Hi,
I'd make them 2 games.  I'd rather throw dice, than answer questions.

Sent from a BrailleNote

- Original Message -
From: Marty Schultz Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games from 
Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often paying for 
the coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to me personally.


Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and how 
much random fun sliding around looking for animals was, especially in 
the matching, indeed I like the fact that the game uses the touch 
screen so uniquely.


I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an animal 
lover and because she's getting used to the hole touch screen concept 
on her Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she really rather 
enjoyed it (indeed she got far more addicted than I expected and spent 
half an hour trying to beat her previous high score).


Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was "why are 
there no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite disappointed, 
and in fairness I can see her point sinse while it's very cool to have 
Sea lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a farm, not to mention loons 
(good company for me), it would be rather logical to have a farm dog 
or cat :d.


I also did have a couple of thoughts myself.

Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if we 
could make the information spoken more concise, and thus be more able 
to get higher scores.  So instead of hearing "bullfrog to the north 
west"  have a setting to just hear "bullfrog, northwest" or maybe even 
"bullfrog n w"


Secondly,  I wonder why some aspects of the game which are controlled 
in settings have not been used to create different various types of 
game to play?


For example, instead of having the player choose how many animals, 
have games with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 minutes 5 
animals, 3 minutes 6 animals.


It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of animals 
while playing, so that players have to more quickly make judgements on 
the fly and cannot prepare for new sorts of animals turning up.  So 
for example have a game that starts with four types of animals, and 
then add another kind after a predetermined time, say 2 minutes, then 
another kind after another two minutes and so on until the player 
messes up.



Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the 
spoken instructions were not factors used to create harder games to 
challenge the player, as opposed to be alterable in settings. 
Personally I'd much rather myself have the option to get higher scores 
on different modes of play than to have the same modes of play but 
need to alter a setting, sinse it creates more variation in the game 
and gives me more options when I start, not to mention making the game 
progressive by giving harder levels so that I can advance to the next 
hardest category when the previous one becomes too easy (I really like 
the setup in Hopper and Pong for this).


I've actually thought the same in breakout, that the speed of the ball 
and whether the paddle grows when it hits the back wall should be 
factors that alter in different levels, however Blindfold Barnyard, 
sinse it is based on managing increasing levels of more complex 
circumstances would be a really nice game to play around with in this 
way.


INdeed, speaking of complexity,  there could be some rather fun ways 
to expand the game.


Firstly, at the present moment there is no reason why a player cannot 
simply keep clearing one fence of a given animal type and accumulate 
more and more score on another fence.  I was thinking therefore of 
inserting a factor which forced players to keep evolving which fence 
they stuck animals too.


What I was thinking is that at various intervals, a player could hear 
a wind sound and be told "wind from the north" (or whichever 
direction).  At this point, if a player didn't immediately move all 
animals on that fence to the barn, the fence would be blown down, all 
the animals run away and she/he would lose them.  This would be 
complicated by the fact that the wind could blow at random intervals, 
and at any time, meaning higher scores were far more difficult.



Another thought I had which may be used either instead of, or as well 
as the wind idea, is the idea of animal feed to earn bonus points.
The basic idea would be to again give players another factor to manage 
according to which fence which animal got hitched to.  the idea is 
that at times (or on specific levels), players would hear a truck 
sound and would be announced "insert animal name food at insert 
direction fence", eg "Canary food at east fence"


For the next short while, say several seconds, players wou

Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[dark]

Hi.

Trivial pursuit or some other board game varient could be fun, though I 
don't know about finding questions, actually having a submission option for 
trivia questions might be good.


There used to be a rather cool  online game called jungle hunt which 
combined a board game and dice rolling, with questions on trivia and little 
minigames such as rock paper scissors, higher lower, spinning a roulette 
wheel  or guess the number. That was actually pretty cool, and something 
like that might be rather fun, especially if there were some interesting 
board sounds and different themes.


Actually I've always rather liked the idea of the console party games like 
Mario Party on the nintendo which have a board game combined with random 
minigames, trivia questions, fruite machines and such and are played with 
friends, sinse randomness of little challenges means you don't always know 
what you'd get, plus there is the random fun of playing with others and 
getting little cards like switching the amount of stars you have with 
another player or something else random. If you were looking into 
multiplayer that would be pretty cool.


As to accessible trivia games, there actually aren't as many as you'd think. 
Trivia crack used to work well, though recently they've gone into this hole 
weerd trading card thing which I don't really get and which doesn't seem so 
accessible, which is why I've not done a page on audiogames.net. Jim Kitchin 
had a great trivia engine which people could submit games for for windows, 
and of course there is freerice.com, which is good in so many ways, not the 
least because of what it generates in terms of helping to ease world hunger.


Btw, just tried Blindfold pinball last night. Very cool, I love all the 
different sounds and such and look forward to seeing more machines, it's 
also nice to play with separate flippers, reminds me of the old pinball 
dreams and pinball fantasies games on the Amigar.


The only thing I would suggest would be instead of changing the soundscape 
and machine layout and type separately, it might be nice if different 
machine soundscapes had different layouts, say for example there was a space 
themed machine where you had one huge bonus point deathstar style space 
station at the top, and needed to hit it fairly exactly in the center, or 
maybe an animals one with different square pens made of of bumpers to 
represent different zoo or farmyard enclosures that you had to get the ball 
in.


I would also suggest you consider changing some of the basic in game sounds 
such as the ball firing and drain sounds to represent different machines, 
eg, I recall an old starwars themed table my brother used to play in an 
arcade that began with the lightsaber activation sound when you fired the 
ball, and had darth vader taunting you when you lost it.


All the best,

Dark.
- Original Message - 
From: "Marty Schultz" 

To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2016 12:52 AM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts


Thanks for all your input.  I will send your comments around to the 
testers, and get their feedback, and implement those ideas.  I haven't 
done much with breakout or hopper recently, since I'm building pool / 
billiards.
I've been getting several requests for both snakes and ladders, and for 
more trivia games.
There are already slews of trivia games that are accessible, and I imagine 
snakes and ladders would get boring quickly.
So,  I was thinking of combining those two together, but I have no idea if 
that would be fun.
The idea would be that you could only move ahead in snakes and ladders if 
you answered the trivia question correctly.
I could also make variants of the game more child educational by having 
another option to test arithmetic, or spelling.

Any thoughts?

On 3/31/2016 7:21 PM, dark wrote:
Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games from 
Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often paying for the 
coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to me personally.


Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and how much 
random fun sliding around looking for animals was, especially in the 
matching, indeed I like the fact that the game uses the touch screen so 
uniquely.


I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an animal 
lover and because she's getting used to the hole touch screen concept on 
her Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she really rather enjoyed it 
(indeed she got far more addicted than I expected and spent half an hour 
trying to beat her previous high score).


Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was "why are 
there no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite disappointed, 
and in fairness I can see her point sinse while it's very cool to have 
Sea lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a farm, not to mention loons 
(good company for me), it would be rather logical to have a farm 

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[Marty Schultz]

I would attempt an RPG based around a card game, if someone could point 
me to one.  More often than not, I search for either programming code 
for an existing game, or for extremely detailed instructions, and then 
rewrite the entire thing for the iphone.


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Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[dark]

Hi Michael.


I actually see a text, or at least text and audio rpg as a much more 
possible thing and probably good for a developer because of the possible 
expantions and such available, I also think it would be very good for 
development of audiogames in general because as I said, I do get a little 
disappoited with seeing the same sorts of games.
this isn't to say there's anything wrong with what we've had, heck I played 
blindfold pinball for a good while yesterday, was very glad to buy the 
upgrade packs and completely enjoyed the game, only that I'd love to see 
something more complex available, and when I look around and consider indi 
games like! Adventure to fate, the wastes or a dark room I really see a way 
forward if people would take it, which would show that it was! possible.


All the best,

Dark. 



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Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[Michael Feir]

Hi Dark. Excellent points there. You and I agree in most respects. One can 
indeed create great games without needing to incurr vast expense. I think 
there's a very real game between what's possible with one or two individuals to 
create and make accessible versus the expectations. As blind people grow more 
aware of what their sighyed counterparts are playing, they simply don't realise 
what's involved in driving the economics of production. I would absolutely love 
it if a developer created an text or audio rpg made from the ground up to be 
fully accessible. However, I think it far more likely that as with King of 
Dragon Pass, we'll be given access to a game devised for sighted players. I 
guess we'll see going forward.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 18, 2016, at 3:43 PM, dark  wrote:
> 
> Hi Michael.
> 
> I disagree on costs there.
> You can use mostly text for the interface with some sound effects, and use 
> the mechanics of the game to create replay. Look at the way dos rpgs did it, 
> games like fallthru, and more recently a dark room, not to mention the 
> wastes, heck the wastes random generation system is so extreme your unlikely 
> to see the same object or location in two different games.
> Plus, those sorts of games could potentially be far more expandable with new 
> items, quests etc, simply by tweaking the properties and descriptions of 
> certain items, and thus can create far morr prophet through in game sales. 
> Online games manage it all the time with a lot of free players, the principle 
> difference being those are not as focused on story or single player 
> experience as opposed to beating up other people online, though if a 
> developer did it wouldn't be a problem.
> 
> King of dragon pass is hugely complex and took a lot of work and is a massive 
> achievement, but nobody says every rpg needs to be like that, look at some of 
> the tabletop games like talisman which are currently available, or look at 
> how well a simple game like nano empire which had progress, description etc 
> worked, heck the developer of nano empire could easily expand the game quite 
> a bit just using the same framework he created.
> 
> I must confess this is one thing that frustrates me a little. There are indi 
> devs out there creating graphical rpg games. Kings quest, atic adventures 
> etc, just check the ap store and you'll find hundreds.
> 
> Yet whenever someone says an accessible rpg designed for blind people it's 
> "oh no, the cost is too much, stick to the same sorts of games we've had 
> before"
> 
> This isn't to say there's anything wrong with traditional or arcade style 
> games, I just find it considerably frustrating that there isn't more 
> available.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Dark. 
> 
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Re: [Audyssey] advice on games such as hopper pong and break out.

[dark]

Hi Ian.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "which method" In games like audio 
defense zombie arena or blindfold breakout, I tend to hold the phone in 
front of me and physically turn my upper body at the waste, indeed in zombie 
arena it's necessary to actually turn round a full 360 degrees.


I also find zombie arena requires me sometimes to hold my phone like a gun 
and quickly turn and aim, but generally in games like Blindfold Pong I can 
get away with just holding the phone streight and turning.


All the best,

Dark.
- Original Message - 
From: "Ian McNamara" 

To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 8:37 PM
Subject: [Audyssey] advice on games such as hopper pong and break out.



Hello all,

in these games where you can use the phone as a lining up device or 
turning your body which method do you generally find most affective?


Kind regards.

Ian McNamara
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Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[dark]

Hmmm, Charlse, my point wasn't about platforms, it was that we've been 
seeing the same sorts of games again and again on different platforms, even 
though technology has supposedly improved.


All the best,

Dark.
- Original Message - 
From: "Charles Rivard" 

To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 5:21 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do


To my way of thinking, the more platforms a game is available on, the 
better.  I'm not sure where you're coming up with the fact that the games 
are from the days of DOS, other than the fact that they use text, which is 
what an RPG uses, right?  If that is so, then a game from the days of DOS 
isn't such a bad idea, seeing as this is what you want.





If you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished!!
-Original Message- 
From: dark

Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 11:04 AM
To: Gamers Discussion list
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

I agree.

Alsoo as I said, building an rpg doesn't take as long as you would think,
heck most of the mechanics as I've said are basic dice ones.


I also suspect an rpg would necessarily sell more copies sinse it is a 
type
of game not available elsewherein the community, while we have a huge 
amount

of traditional and word games, plus of course, rpgs are far more open to
expanttion, not to mention being far more likely to be bought by the 
sighted

public (nano empire and a dark room both did hugely well).

I do like what's been done thus far, but I m finding it a little 
frustrating
that we're still seeing roughly the same amount of complexity from 
dedicated
developers of games intended for blind people we were seeing ten years 
ago,

or heck back to the dos days.

All the best,

Dark.


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Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[dark]

Hi Michael.

I disagree on costs there.
You can use mostly text for the interface with some sound effects, and use 
the mechanics of the game to create replay. Look at the way dos rpgs did it, 
games like fallthru, and more recently a dark room, not to mention the 
wastes, heck the wastes random generation system is so extreme your unlikely 
to see the same object or location in two different games.
Plus, those sorts of games could potentially be far more expandable with new 
items, quests etc, simply by tweaking the properties and descriptions of 
certain items, and thus can create far morr prophet through in game sales. 
Online games manage it all the time with a lot of free players, the 
principle difference being those are not as focused on story or single 
player experience as opposed to beating up other people online, though if a 
developer did it wouldn't be a problem.


King of dragon pass is hugely complex and took a lot of work and is a 
massive achievement, but nobody says every rpg needs to be like that, look 
at some of the tabletop games like talisman which are currently available, 
or look at how well a simple game like nano empire which had progress, 
description etc worked, heck the developer of nano empire could easily 
expand the game quite a bit just using the same framework he created.


I must confess this is one thing that frustrates me a little. There are indi 
devs out there creating graphical rpg games. Kings quest, atic adventures 
etc, just check the ap store and you'll find hundreds.


Yet whenever someone says an accessible rpg designed for blind people it's 
"oh no, the cost is too much, stick to the same sorts of games we've had 
before"


This isn't to say there's anything wrong with traditional or arcade style 
games, I just find it considerably frustrating that there isn't more 
available.


All the best,

Dark. 



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[Audyssey] advice on games such as hopper pong and break out.

[Ian McNamara]

Hello all,

in these games where you can use the phone as a lining up device or turning 
your body which method do you generally find most affective? 

Kind regards.

Ian McNamara
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Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[Kenneth Downey]

Agree with Dark on all points here,  but I do think that abbreviating things 
too much could get confusing. I would stick With something like sheep 
northwes!, or better yet, two sheep and a dog northwest. The more these kinds 
of info can be concatinated the better. Alternatively, you could say, sheep 314 
which would mean that there's a sheep at 314 degrees. This would be much more 
precise than the cardinal directions, but the player should be able to choose 
which method they want. Also, how far away is the animal! We could invent a new 
type of measurement, like a minicubit and minispan. The bigger one would be 
four fingers touching and laid out in a straight line on the screen. The 
smaller one would be one single fingertip, and the player would customize both 
measurements before starting the first game.
Of course there is an even simpler way, a way all blind people know by the time 
we get out of high school, the coordinate system. You could simply say, sheep 
at E4 and boom, it would be very easy to find. 
A final method, and I am not sUre which 3D engine Bryan Smaart used for Ear 
Monsters, but animals would be extremely easy to find without much vocal 
feedback 
These are the ways I know for giving info about things on a screen. 
Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 18, 2016, at 11:50 AM, rajmund  wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> I'd make them 2 games.  I'd rather throw dice, than answer questions.
> 
> Sent from a BrailleNote
> 
> - Original Message -
> From: Marty Schultz  To: Gamers Discussion list  Date sent: Thu, 31 Mar 2016 19:52:23 -0400
> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts
> 
> Thanks for all your input.  I will send your comments around to the
> testers, and get their feedback, and implement those ideas.  I haven't
> done much with breakout or hopper recently, since I'm building pool /
> billiards.
> I've been getting several requests for both snakes and ladders, and for
> more trivia games.
> There are already slews of trivia games that are accessible, and I
> imagine snakes and ladders would get boring quickly.
> So,  I was thinking of combining those two together, but I have no idea
> if that would be fun.
> The idea would be that you could only move ahead in snakes and ladders
> if you answered the trivia question correctly.
> I could also make variants of the game more child educational by having
> another option to test arithmetic, or spelling.
> Any thoughts?
> 
> On 3/31/2016 7:21 PM, dark wrote:
> Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games from 
> Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often paying for the 
> coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to me personally.
> 
> Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and how much 
> random fun sliding around looking for animals was, especially in the 
> matching, indeed I like the fact that the game uses the touch screen so 
> uniquely.
> 
> I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an animal lover 
> and because she's getting used to the hole touch screen concept on her 
> Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she really rather enjoyed it (indeed 
> she got far more addicted than I expected and spent half an hour trying to 
> beat her previous high score).
> 
> Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was "why are there 
> no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite disappointed, and in 
> fairness I can see her point sinse while it's very cool to have Sea lions, 
> Dolphins and rattle snakes on a farm, not to mention loons (good company for 
> me), it would be rather logical to have a farm dog or cat :d.
> 
> I also did have a couple of thoughts myself.
> 
> Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if we could 
> make the information spoken more concise, and thus be more able to get higher 
> scores.  So instead of hearing "bullfrog to the north west"  have a setting 
> to just hear "bullfrog, northwest" or maybe even "bullfrog n w"
> 
> Secondly,  I wonder why some aspects of the game which are controlled in 
> settings have not been used to create different various types of game to play?
> 
> For example, instead of having the player choose how many animals, have games 
> with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 minutes 5 animals, 3 minutes 6 
> animals.
> 
> It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of animals while 
> playing, so that players have to more quickly make judgements on the fly and 
> cannot prepare for new sorts of animals turning up.  So for example have a 
> game that starts with four types of animals, and then add another kind after 
> a predetermined time, say 2 minutes, then another kind after another two 
> minutes and so on until the player messes up.
> 
> 
> Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the spoken 
> instructions were not factors used to create harder games to challenge the 
> player, as opposed to be alterable in settings.  Pers

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[Bryan Peterson]

It depends on the game. RPG's don't always use text only.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 18, 2016, at 10:21 AM, Charles Rivard  wrote:
> 
> To my way of thinking, the more platforms a game is available on, the better. 
>  I'm not sure where you're coming up with the fact that the games are from 
> the days of DOS, other than the fact that they use text, which is what an RPG 
> uses, right?  If that is so, then a game from the days of DOS isn't such a 
> bad idea, seeing as this is what you want.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> If you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished!!
> -Original Message- From: dark
> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 11:04 AM
> To: Gamers Discussion list
> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do
> 
> I agree.
> 
> Alsoo as I said, building an rpg doesn't take as long as you would think,
> heck most of the mechanics as I've said are basic dice ones.
> 
> 
> I also suspect an rpg would necessarily sell more copies sinse it is a type
> of game not available elsewherein the community, while we have a huge amount
> of traditional and word games, plus of course, rpgs are far more open to
> expanttion, not to mention being far more likely to be bought by the sighted
> public (nano empire and a dark room both did hugely well).
> 
> I do like what's been done thus far, but I m finding it a little frustrating
> that we're still seeing roughly the same amount of complexity from dedicated
> developers of games intended for blind people we were seeing ten years ago,
> or heck back to the dos days.
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Dark.
> 
> 
> ---
> Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org
> If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
> You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at
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> If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list,
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> 
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> If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
> You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at
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> All messages are archived and can be searched and read at
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Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[rajmund]

Hi,
I'd make them 2 games.  I'd rather throw dice, than answer 
questions.


Sent from a BrailleNote

- Original Message -
From: Marty Schultz Thanks for all your input.  I will send your comments around to 
the
testers, and get their feedback, and implement those ideas.  I 
haven't
done much with breakout or hopper recently, since I'm building 
pool /

billiards.
I've been getting several requests for both snakes and ladders, 
and for

more trivia games.
There are already slews of trivia games that are accessible, and 
I

imagine snakes and ladders would get boring quickly.
So,  I was thinking of combining those two together, but I have 
no idea

if that would be fun.
The idea would be that you could only move ahead in snakes and 
ladders

if you answered the trivia question correctly.
I could also make variants of the game more child educational by 
having

another option to test arithmetic, or spelling.
Any thoughts?

On 3/31/2016 7:21 PM, dark wrote:
Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games 
from Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often 
paying for the coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to 
me personally.


Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and 
how much random fun sliding around looking for animals was, 
especially in the matching, indeed I like the fact that the game 
uses the touch screen so uniquely.


I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an 
animal lover and because she's getting used to the hole touch 
screen concept on her Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she 
really rather enjoyed it (indeed she got far more addicted than I 
expected and spent half an hour trying to beat her previous high 
score).


Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was 
"why are there no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite 
disappointed, and in fairness I can see her point sinse while 
it's very cool to have Sea lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a 
farm, not to mention loons (good company for me), it would be 
rather logical to have a farm dog or cat :d.


I also did have a couple of thoughts myself.

Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if 
we could make the information spoken more concise, and thus be 
more able to get higher scores.  So instead of hearing "bullfrog 
to the north west"  have a setting to just hear "bullfrog, 
northwest" or maybe even "bullfrog n w"


Secondly,  I wonder why some aspects of the game which are 
controlled in settings have not been used to create different 
various types of game to play?


For example, instead of having the player choose how many 
animals, have games with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 
minutes 5 animals, 3 minutes 6 animals.


It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of 
animals while playing, so that players have to more quickly make 
judgements on the fly and cannot prepare for new sorts of animals 
turning up.  So for example have a game that starts with four 
types of animals, and then add another kind after a predetermined 
time, say 2 minutes, then another kind after another two minutes 
and so on until the player messes up.



Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the 
spoken instructions were not factors used to create harder games 
to challenge the player, as opposed to be alterable in settings.  
Personally I'd much rather myself have the option to get higher 
scores on different modes of play than to have the same modes of 
play but need to alter a setting, sinse it creates more variation 
in the game and gives me more options when I start, not to 
mention making the game progressive by giving harder levels so 
that I can advance to the next hardest category when the previous 
one becomes too easy (I really like the setup in Hopper and Pong 
for this).


I've actually thought the same in breakout, that the speed of 
the ball and whether the paddle grows when it hits the back wall 
should be factors that alter in different levels, however 
Blindfold Barnyard, sinse it is based on managing increasing 
levels of more complex circumstances would be a really nice game 
to play around with in this way.


INdeed, speaking of complexity,  there could be some rather fun 
ways to expand the game.


Firstly, at the present moment there is no reason why a player 
cannot simply keep clearing one fence of a given animal type and 
accumulate more and more score on another fence.  I was thinking 
therefore of inserting a factor which forced players to keep 
evolving which fence they stuck animals too.


What I was thinking is that at various intervals, a player could  
hear a wind sound and be told "wind from the north" (or whichever 
direction).  At this point, if a player didn't immediately move 
all animals on that fence to the barn, the fence would be blown 
down, all the animals run away and she/he would lose them.  This 
would be complicated by the fact th

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[Charles Rivard]

To my way of thinking, the more platforms a game is available on, the 
better.  I'm not sure where you're coming up with the fact that the games 
are from the days of DOS, other than the fact that they use text, which is 
what an RPG uses, right?  If that is so, then a game from the days of DOS 
isn't such a bad idea, seeing as this is what you want.





If you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished!!
-Original Message- 
From: dark

Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 11:04 AM
To: Gamers Discussion list
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

I agree.

Alsoo as I said, building an rpg doesn't take as long as you would think,
heck most of the mechanics as I've said are basic dice ones.


I also suspect an rpg would necessarily sell more copies sinse it is a type
of game not available elsewherein the community, while we have a huge amount
of traditional and word games, plus of course, rpgs are far more open to
expanttion, not to mention being far more likely to be bought by the sighted
public (nano empire and a dark room both did hugely well).

I do like what's been done thus far, but I m finding it a little frustrating
that we're still seeing roughly the same amount of complexity from dedicated
developers of games intended for blind people we were seeing ten years ago,
or heck back to the dos days.

All the best,

Dark.


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Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the games as I do

[john]

I write this as someone without an apple device, so this is purely opinion 
and nothing else.
I doubt that I would pay $40-50 for any audiogame, unless it was utterly 
spectacular (I'd pay substantially more than that if somebody wrote an 
accessible mass effect or halo, for example, but I didn't buy entombed, and 
that was purely based on price).
It might be looking into the success of something like 3-d velocity. That 
was a really well done game, with a price of around $43 (originally $50). 
Once again quite a bit more than I was willing to pay, but I do know at 
least some folks did it, so perhaps it would be representative of the 
community's willingness to buy more expensive titles.
I think though, that if you really want a product to sell, you're going to 
have to go beyond the current games we have - provide some new mechanic or 
concept that nobody else has come up with yet.

John

--
From: 
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 10:50
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the games as I do

I didn't say they didn't like it; I just said that from the email I've 
received, I get far fewer requests for RPGs than other games (about 1 in 30 
is a RPG request).  Sports games abound, but when I push back and ask how 
the game would be played, I usually don't get a response.  A classic 
suggestion is a basketball shooting game; I think it sounds pretty boring, 
after playing it for  a few minutes.

Building out an RPG would take months, and I can't see how to do any return 
on that investment.  Assume that the game would sell for $20, of which apple 
keeps $7.  Assume a programmer earns $40/hour.  A game that takes a month to 
build (and I think an RPG would take far more than that) would need to 
generate 6,400 after apple's cut, or about $9100.  At $20 per game, 500 
people would have to purchase it just to break even.  Given that 80% of the 
people never purchase, I would need 2,500 downloads to break even.

I am working with the programmer who built park boss, and I will probably 
port that over to the iPhone.  I've built a framework to mix my 
infrastructure with C++ code, so it might not be overly complex.  Since park 
boss is in the direction of an RPG, or at least closer to a SIMS 
environment, I can see how that game goes to try to project how any RPG 
would go.  Do you think this market could handle an RPG game for $40 to $50?



- Original Message - Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the 
games as I do
From: "dark" 
Date: 4/13/16 7:34 am
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 

@Marty, Blind people don't like rpgs? not true.

 Go and check audiogames.net and observe the amount of people who reply to
 rpg related topics, or indeed post a topic and ask. I suspect the
 information you got from that statement was from a local focus group, ie,
 society or association for the blind. Unfortunately, such places tend to
 have a generally older population who are primarily interested in
 traditional type games, however for younger gamers (and indeed those more
 likely to own Ios devices), something a little more modern and complex 
would
 appeal more, indeed part of the problem with audiogames development is that
 there is a large amount of traditional games available and not so much that
 is none traditional, ie, I can think of about 8 versions of blackjack over
 the years, but not one single version of a modern fantasy board game like
 Talisman, much less a ccg, collectable card game.


 I'll also add that rpgs don't need to be as complex as the games produced 
by
 companies like namco and squaresoft. dungeons and dragons do very well with
 basic mechanics, indeed most of what an rpg does mechanically can be
 represented by dice rolls and risk assessments, the one difference is that
 you have story and atmosphere added to that, as well as player progression
 over time.

 You might begin therefore by adapting some of the multiplayer fantasy 
themed
 card and board games for Ios, games like heroes of the multiverse or
 talisman, or creating your own along similar lines if copywrite is an 
issue.
 These would be mechanically similar to games like roadtrip, hearts or dice
 poker, just with more text involved, eg, a player would encounter a monster
 with a description of it's stats and be required to roll dice for combat, 
or
 a player would encounter a magical object card and decide whether to take 
it
 with them or not.

 While I do enjoy the games in the collection thus far, I am a little sorry
 none are games intended for longer or more complex play. There's nothing
 wrong with a game of hearts, blackjack etc or a quick arcade game, however
 unfortunately there has already been a lot of that sort of thing produced,
 indeed I do wonder if some people are taking the attitude "well there are
 several versions of hearts for pc, why should I pay to have one on my
 Iphone?"

 this isn't meant as an attack, as I said I enjoy the games

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[john]

Dealing with hackers is development time, very much development time indeed. 
Its just writing a lot of security code, and not game mechanics code.

--
From: "dark" 
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 12:07
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

Actually Kennith, Swamp wasn't in development that long.

From the initial very simple offline version to the first multiplayer server
took roughly two months, and in four everything was up and running.
yes, there's been massive expantions with maps and weapons and accounts and
what not, and yes hacker trouble, but don't mistake that for the development
time, had aprone been charging for the game earlier he could've been earning
money on it pretty dam soon.

all the best,

dark.
- Original Message - 
From: "Kenneth Downey" 
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 4:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do


> Yes, but think about how many years Swauk was in development… And it was a
> free game… For a long time anyway, until stupid hackers started messing
> everything up… Can you imagine swab for the iPhone! Anyway, it's back to
> blindfold pinball for me now… I'm addicted!
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>> On Apr 14, 2016, at 6:56 AM, Devin Prater  wrote:
>>
>> Why would you need soundscapes and voice acting? A dark room is text, and
>> does just fine. Touchmint’s games are mostly text, and do mostly fine as
>> well. Nano empire is wonderful, and is text also. I’m saying that you don’t
>> need expensive acting and sound do make a good game.
>> Sent from my Mac.
>>
>> Devin Prater
>> r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
>>
>>
>>
>>> On Apr 13, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Darren Harris
>>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have 1 thing to say about replayable games,
>>>
>>> Swamp. That's a 1 man band doing all that, look at how good a game that
>>> is?
>>> Now have something like that on the iPhone and that would be awesome.
>>>
>>> -Original Message-
>>> From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy
>>> Brown
>>> Sent: 13 April 2016 18:36
>>> To: gamers
>>> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do
>>>
>>> In response to Marty's post, I know that this is exactly the sort of
>>> situation we have with Valiant Galaxy Associates.  Our company
>>> consists of two people.  We began with a large project that took 3
>>> years to get to commercial release and which is due to have an update
>>> relatively soon in our schedule.  Our next two games were much simpler
>>> and rolled out quickly, but only because we could reuse and centralize
>>> a lot of the code.  We're still in the process of making a centralized
>>> platform so we can roll out more of the smaller games as well as work
>>> on more ambitious games.
>>>
>>> Our hope is to eventually have more games in play, let the smaller
>>> ones carry the load while we develop long term bigger games.
>>>
>>> I disagree with you about the RPG as being simple to convert Dark:
>>>
>>> You can convert the mechanics relatively easily, but then you have to
>>> have the mechanics integrate with a group of player actions and
>>> possible results.  Essentially you write an Choose Your Own Adventure
>>> novel on top of the mechanics, get it all to integrate, and then have
>>> to still work out why it's not working over 60,000-250,000 words of
>>> text and god only knows how much mechanical issues.  This doesn't take
>>> into account sound scape or voice acting.
>>>
>>> It's not undoable, and I think we should see more of those types of
>>> games myself, but the question is how much complexity can you build
>>> from a small production standpoint and still stay sane, productive,
>>> and on top of customer service.  It's not like you release a game and
>>> it's a never go back to proposition.  Further, if you want to keep the
>>> costs reasonable, you have to make choices.  You can't release a
>>> professionally produced sound scape, voice acting, music background,
>>> story, proofreading, and fully tested and stable code and charge only
>>> 10 dollars for it.  A lot of the sorts of games that people cite when
>>> they mention this genre are games that originally retaled for well
>>> over $35 or 40 U.S. or, have monthly subscription charges that come to
>>> the same thing.  While Marty's assessment that most blind people don't
>>> like RPG's might be skewed, he is right that most blind people will
>>> not pay for the kind of quality that most would like to demand.  Not
>>> in my experience in any case.  That said, I know all the developers on
>>> list attempt to put out as professional and interesting a game as they
>>> can.  Remember too, that by moving his company to an IOS focus, Marty
>>> is not breaking new ground in terms of style of game perhaps, but by
>>> moving into the mobile app market he has broken ground for blind
>>> people and audio games in terms of providing well r

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[Michael Feir]

In Marty's cost breakdown, he didn't even bring in voice acting and
sound effects. That's just for his efforts making the game so he feels
propperly compensated. To create an rpg takes a whole lot of careful
thought. Writing a scifi, fantasy or mystery story capable of
branching and changing based on the player's actions is hard work and
takes time. Add to that programming and then balancing the system.
Very few individuals would have all the necessary skills to pull this
off well That's why most high-quality rpgs are made by companies
employing many people.

I'd cheerfully fork over $10 for something with the replayability of
King of Dragon Pass even without fancy sound and music. Even that game
had an artist, a music composer, and others involved in its creation.
It was based on an already fully developed world and rpg system.
However, at the level Marty is asking, $40 or $50, my expectations are
very high. The game had better be fully accessible, have music, acting
and sound, offer tremendous replay value. It had better be the holy
grail of games. I'd want extras like a "making of" documentary. After
I paid that much, don't even think about charging a subscription or
microtransactions. It had all better be included. That would be the
second most expensive app I've ever bought. The only thing more
expensive that I'm aware of is KNFB Reader. That app has literally
life-changing possibility and is something I used almost daily to read
my mail. I can look at it as a long-term investment making it
unnecessary to ever update Kurzweil 1000 or buy an OCR scanner. As
long as I have an iPHONE, I'm covered. If I'm going to spend that much
on entertainment, it had better be very polished and very captivating.

The most expensive games I find in the sighted world top out at around
$25 or so. I don't think I've ever come across a game priced higher.
Some games offer the ability to buy expansions and other extra content
in order to help support their production cost. That model certainly
seems to work for companies. Those companies can expect far more
people to purchase what they produce. Especially the ones with good
track records.

On 4/14/16, Devin Prater  wrote:
> Why would you need soundscapes and voice acting? A dark room is text, and
> does just fine. Touchmint’s games are mostly text, and do mostly fine as
> well. Nano empire is wonderful, and is text also. I’m saying that you don’t
> need expensive acting and sound do make a good game.
> Sent from my Mac.
>
> Devin Prater
> r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
>
>
>
>> On Apr 13, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Darren Harris
>>  wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have 1 thing to say about replayable games,
>>
>> Swamp. That's a 1 man band doing all that, look at how good a game that
>> is?
>> Now have something like that on the iPhone and that would be awesome.
>>
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy
>> Brown
>> Sent: 13 April 2016 18:36
>> To: gamers
>> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do
>>
>> In response to Marty's post, I know that this is exactly the sort of
>> situation we have with Valiant Galaxy Associates.  Our company
>> consists of two people.  We began with a large project that took 3
>> years to get to commercial release and which is due to have an update
>> relatively soon in our schedule.  Our next two games were much simpler
>> and rolled out quickly, but only because we could reuse and centralize
>> a lot of the code.  We're still in the process of making a centralized
>> platform so we can roll out more of the smaller games as well as work
>> on more ambitious games.
>>
>> Our hope is to eventually have more games in play, let the smaller
>> ones carry the load while we develop long term bigger games.
>>
>> I disagree with you about the RPG as being simple to convert Dark:
>>
>> You can convert the mechanics relatively easily, but then you have to
>> have the mechanics integrate with a group of player actions and
>> possible results.  Essentially you write an Choose Your Own Adventure
>> novel on top of the mechanics, get it all to integrate, and then have
>> to still work out why it's not working over 60,000-250,000 words of
>> text and god only knows how much mechanical issues.  This doesn't take
>> into account sound scape or voice acting.
>>
>> It's not undoable, and I think we should see more of those types of
>> games myself, but the question is how much complexity can you build
>> from a small production standpoint and still stay sane, productive,
>> and on top of customer service.  It's not like you release a game and
>> it's a never go back to proposition.  Further, if you want to keep the
>> costs reasonable, you have to make choices.  You can't release a
>> professionally produced sound scape, voice acting, music background,
>> story, proofreading, and fully tested and stable code and charge only
>> 10 dollars for it.  A lot of the sorts of games that people cite when
>> they ment

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[dark]

Actually Kennith, Swamp wasn't in development that long.

From the initial very simple offline version to the first multiplayer server 
took roughly two months, and in four everything was up and running.
yes, there's been massive expantions with maps and weapons and accounts and 
what not, and yes hacker trouble, but don't mistake that for the development 
time, had aprone been charging for the game earlier he could've been earning 
money on it pretty dam soon.


all the best,

dark.
- Original Message - 
From: "Kenneth Downey" 

To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 4:58 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do


Yes, but think about how many years Swauk was in development… And it was a 
free game… For a long time anyway, until stupid hackers started messing 
everything up… Can you imagine swab for the iPhone! Anyway, it's back to 
blindfold pinball for me now… I'm addicted!


Sent from my iPad


On Apr 14, 2016, at 6:56 AM, Devin Prater  wrote:

Why would you need soundscapes and voice acting? A dark room is text, and 
does just fine. Touchmint’s games are mostly text, and do mostly fine as 
well. Nano empire is wonderful, and is text also. I’m saying that you don’t 
need expensive acting and sound do make a good game.

Sent from my Mac.

Devin Prater
r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com



On Apr 13, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Darren Harris 
 wrote:


Hi,

I have 1 thing to say about replayable games,

Swamp. That's a 1 man band doing all that, look at how good a game that 
is?

Now have something like that on the iPhone and that would be awesome.

-Original Message-
From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy 
Brown

Sent: 13 April 2016 18:36
To: gamers
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

In response to Marty's post, I know that this is exactly the sort of
situation we have with Valiant Galaxy Associates.  Our company
consists of two people.  We began with a large project that took 3
years to get to commercial release and which is due to have an update
relatively soon in our schedule.  Our next two games were much simpler
and rolled out quickly, but only because we could reuse and centralize
a lot of the code.  We're still in the process of making a centralized
platform so we can roll out more of the smaller games as well as work
on more ambitious games.

Our hope is to eventually have more games in play, let the smaller
ones carry the load while we develop long term bigger games.

I disagree with you about the RPG as being simple to convert Dark:

You can convert the mechanics relatively easily, but then you have to
have the mechanics integrate with a group of player actions and
possible results.  Essentially you write an Choose Your Own Adventure
novel on top of the mechanics, get it all to integrate, and then have
to still work out why it's not working over 60,000-250,000 words of
text and god only knows how much mechanical issues.  This doesn't take
into account sound scape or voice acting.

It's not undoable, and I think we should see more of those types of
games myself, but the question is how much complexity can you build
from a small production standpoint and still stay sane, productive,
and on top of customer service.  It's not like you release a game and
it's a never go back to proposition.  Further, if you want to keep the
costs reasonable, you have to make choices.  You can't release a
professionally produced sound scape, voice acting, music background,
story, proofreading, and fully tested and stable code and charge only
10 dollars for it.  A lot of the sorts of games that people cite when
they mention this genre are games that originally retaled for well
over $35 or 40 U.S. or, have monthly subscription charges that come to
the same thing.  While Marty's assessment that most blind people don't
like RPG's might be skewed, he is right that most blind people will
not pay for the kind of quality that most would like to demand.  Not
in my experience in any case.  That said, I know all the developers on
list attempt to put out as professional and interesting a game as they
can.  Remember too, that by moving his company to an IOS focus, Marty
is not breaking new ground in terms of style of game perhaps, but by
moving into the mobile app market he has broken ground for blind
people and audio games in terms of providing well received simple
games that are inexpensive.  That is a huge step from the any audio
game is either cheap and developed as a labor of love by one
programmer or $40 and developed to be profitable, or at least,
hopefully profitable.

As usual, my two cents.  I'll expect change from that please :)

Take care,

Jeremy




--
In the fight between you and the world--back the world! Frank Zapa

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Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[dark]

I agree.

Alsoo as I said, building an rpg doesn't take as long as you would think, 
heck most of the mechanics as I've said are basic dice ones.



I also suspect an rpg would necessarily sell more copies sinse it is a type 
of game not available elsewherein the community, while we have a huge amount 
of traditional and word games, plus of course, rpgs are far more open to 
expanttion, not to mention being far more likely to be bought by the sighted 
public (nano empire and a dark room both did hugely well).


I do like what's been done thus far, but I m finding it a little frustrating 
that we're still seeing roughly the same amount of complexity from dedicated 
developers of games intended for blind people we were seeing ten years ago, 
or heck back to the dos days.


All the best,

Dark. 



---
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You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at
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Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[Kenneth Downey]

Yes, but think about how many years Swauk was in development… And it was a free 
game… For a long time anyway, until stupid hackers started messing everything 
up… Can you imagine swab for the iPhone! Anyway, it's back to blindfold pinball 
for me now… I'm addicted!

Sent from my iPad

> On Apr 14, 2016, at 6:56 AM, Devin Prater  wrote:
> 
> Why would you need soundscapes and voice acting? A dark room is text, and 
> does just fine. Touchmint’s games are mostly text, and do mostly fine as 
> well. Nano empire is wonderful, and is text also. I’m saying that you don’t 
> need expensive acting and sound do make a good game.
> Sent from my Mac.
> 
> Devin Prater
> r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com
> 
> 
> 
>> On Apr 13, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Darren Harris  
>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I have 1 thing to say about replayable games,
>> 
>> Swamp. That's a 1 man band doing all that, look at how good a game that is?
>> Now have something like that on the iPhone and that would be awesome.
>> 
>> -Original Message-
>> From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Brown
>> Sent: 13 April 2016 18:36
>> To: gamers
>> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do
>> 
>> In response to Marty's post, I know that this is exactly the sort of
>> situation we have with Valiant Galaxy Associates.  Our company
>> consists of two people.  We began with a large project that took 3
>> years to get to commercial release and which is due to have an update
>> relatively soon in our schedule.  Our next two games were much simpler
>> and rolled out quickly, but only because we could reuse and centralize
>> a lot of the code.  We're still in the process of making a centralized
>> platform so we can roll out more of the smaller games as well as work
>> on more ambitious games.
>> 
>> Our hope is to eventually have more games in play, let the smaller
>> ones carry the load while we develop long term bigger games.
>> 
>> I disagree with you about the RPG as being simple to convert Dark:
>> 
>> You can convert the mechanics relatively easily, but then you have to
>> have the mechanics integrate with a group of player actions and
>> possible results.  Essentially you write an Choose Your Own Adventure
>> novel on top of the mechanics, get it all to integrate, and then have
>> to still work out why it's not working over 60,000-250,000 words of
>> text and god only knows how much mechanical issues.  This doesn't take
>> into account sound scape or voice acting.
>> 
>> It's not undoable, and I think we should see more of those types of
>> games myself, but the question is how much complexity can you build
>> from a small production standpoint and still stay sane, productive,
>> and on top of customer service.  It's not like you release a game and
>> it's a never go back to proposition.  Further, if you want to keep the
>> costs reasonable, you have to make choices.  You can't release a
>> professionally produced sound scape, voice acting, music background,
>> story, proofreading, and fully tested and stable code and charge only
>> 10 dollars for it.  A lot of the sorts of games that people cite when
>> they mention this genre are games that originally retaled for well
>> over $35 or 40 U.S. or, have monthly subscription charges that come to
>> the same thing.  While Marty's assessment that most blind people don't
>> like RPG's might be skewed, he is right that most blind people will
>> not pay for the kind of quality that most would like to demand.  Not
>> in my experience in any case.  That said, I know all the developers on
>> list attempt to put out as professional and interesting a game as they
>> can.  Remember too, that by moving his company to an IOS focus, Marty
>> is not breaking new ground in terms of style of game perhaps, but by
>> moving into the mobile app market he has broken ground for blind
>> people and audio games in terms of providing well received simple
>> games that are inexpensive.  That is a huge step from the any audio
>> game is either cheap and developed as a labor of love by one
>> programmer or $40 and developed to be profitable, or at least,
>> hopefully profitable.
>> 
>> As usual, my two cents.  I'll expect change from that please :)
>> 
>> Take care,
>> 
>> Jeremy
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> -- 
>> In the fight between you and the world--back the world! Frank Zapa
>> 
>> ---
>> Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org
>> If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to
>> gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
>> 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/gamers@audyssey.org.
>> If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list,
>> please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
>> 
>> 
>> ---
>> Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org
>> If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to 
>> gamers-uns

Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[Charles Rivard]

Spelling may be difficult if people are using only Voice-Over unless the 
rotor is used.  A simple example:  The question provided is: "What are the 
other words that sound like "to"?  Without knowing which word was provided, 
they won't know which two to give as answers because all three sound alike. 
It could be a time consuming game.





If you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished!!
-Original Message- 
From: Marty Schultz

Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2016 6:52 PM
To: Gamers Discussion list
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

Thanks for all your input.  I will send your comments around to the
testers, and get their feedback, and implement those ideas.  I haven't
done much with breakout or hopper recently, since I'm building pool /
billiards.
I've been getting several requests for both snakes and ladders, and for
more trivia games.
There are already slews of trivia games that are accessible, and I
imagine snakes and ladders would get boring quickly.
So,  I was thinking of combining those two together, but I have no idea
if that would be fun.
The idea would be that you could only move ahead in snakes and ladders
if you answered the trivia question correctly.
I could also make variants of the game more child educational by having
another option to test arithmetic, or spelling.
Any thoughts?

On 3/31/2016 7:21 PM, dark wrote:
Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games from 
Kidfriendly software to write up for audiogames.net, often paying for the 
coins and other upgrades when the game appealed to me personally.


Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and how much 
random fun sliding around looking for animals was, especially in the 
matching, indeed I like the fact that the game uses the touch screen so 
uniquely.


I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an animal 
lover and because she's getting used to the hole touch screen concept on 
her Iphone, I thought it might appeal, and she really rather enjoyed it 
(indeed she got far more addicted than I expected and spent half an hour 
trying to beat her previous high score).


Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was "why are 
there no dogs or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite disappointed, and 
in fairness I can see her point sinse while it's very cool to have Sea 
lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a farm, not to mention loons (good 
company for me), it would be rather logical to have a farm dog or cat :d.


I also did have a couple of thoughts myself.

Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if we could 
make the information spoken more concise, and thus be more able to get 
higher scores. So instead of hearing "bullfrog to the north west"  have a 
setting to just hear "bullfrog, northwest" or maybe even "bullfrog n w"


Secondly,  I wonder why some aspects of the game which are controlled in 
settings have not been used to create different various types of game to 
play?


For example, instead of having the player choose how many animals, have 
games with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 minutes 5 animals, 3 
minutes 6 animals.


It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of animals while 
playing, so that players have to more quickly make judgements on the fly 
and cannot prepare for new sorts of animals turning up. So for example 
have a game that starts with four types of animals, and then add another 
kind after a predetermined time, say 2 minutes, then another kind after 
another two minutes and so on until the player messes up.



Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the spoken 
instructions were not factors used to create harder games to challenge the 
player, as opposed to be alterable in settings. Personally I'd much rather 
myself have the option to get higher scores on different modes of play 
than to have the same modes of play but need to alter a setting, sinse it 
creates more variation in the game and gives me more options when I start, 
not to mention making the game progressive by giving harder levels so that 
I can advance to the next hardest category when the previous one becomes 
too easy (I really like the setup in Hopper and Pong for this).


I've actually thought the same in breakout, that the speed of the ball and 
whether the paddle grows when it hits the back wall should be factors that 
alter in different levels, however Blindfold Barnyard, sinse it is based 
on managing increasing levels of more complex circumstances would be a 
really nice game to play around with in this way.


INdeed, speaking of complexity,  there could be some rather fun ways to 
expand the game.


Firstly, at the present moment there is no reason why a player cannot 
simply keep clearing one fence of a given animal type and accumulate more 
and more score on another fence. I was thinking therefore of inserting a 
factor which forced players to keep evolving which

Re: [Audyssey] iDevice game thoughts - Re: Why I build the games as I do

[Devin Prater]

Besides that, having the game on the iPhone means that I have the game almost 
anywhere. No one really developed for mac, and only a few develop for PC, 
compared to the ones that have accessible games on iOS.
Sent from my Mac.

Devin Prater
r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com



> On Apr 13, 2016, at 2:57 PM, brennenki...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> To me if I ever playing RPG game I really would like to play something a 
> little less start than a lot of the RPG games that you see out there today
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Apr 13, 2016, at 1:04 PM, dark  wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Charlse.
>> 
>> I really don't see what is wrong with complex rpg games on the iPhone? look 
>> at king of dragon pass. True, casual games to whip a device out of your 
>> pocket and play are good, and there are plenty of good examples of such, 
>> however just because a device can! be a portable games playing device 
>> doesn't mean you can't use it at home, several days I've spent on Kodp, 
>> adventure to fate  and some of the choiceofgames interactive stories 
>> definitely show that.
>> 
>> All the best,
>> 
>> Dark.
>> - Original Message - From: "Charles Rivard" 
>> To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 5:40 PM
>> Subject: [Audyssey] iDevice game thoughts - Re: Why I build the games as I do
>> 
>> 
>>> For me, lengthy and complex role playing games are not for the iPhone. The 
>>> games that I would prefer are usually games that I must react to action or 
>>> use dice to score, or something along that nature.  A game such as chess or 
>>> checkers will work well, too, although I have to have a separate board for 
>>> scoping out my next move.  I find it very difficult to explore a board 
>>> using speech only.  I very much prefer to look at the whole board without 
>>> having to memorize where the pieces are.  Arcade games work well on an 
>>> iDevice, as well as a game in which you drive a vehicle on tracks.
>>> 
>>> I have seen books of instructions for Dungeons and Dragons and other such 
>>> games, and they! are! huge!!  There is no way that I'm going to remember 
>>> all of those rules, and games for iDevices work best if they don't require 
>>> months to play.  I can play Blindfold Pinball or Blindfold Bowling for 
>>> either a few minutes or a few hours, and ther is an end to each game.  In 
>>> an RPG, it takes forever, if there is even a victor.  I think it is a 
>>> personal opinion, but I just don't think that an RPG is best suited for 
>>> iDevice gaming.  Sports games or arcade games, and dice competition games 
>>> such as Dice World, or even sound oriented adventure games are more suited 
>>> for them.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> If you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished!!
>>> -Original Message- From: dark
>>> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 9:34 AM
>>> To: Gamers Discussion list
>>> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the games as I do
>>> 
>>> @Marty, Blind people don't like rpgs? not true.
>>> 
>>> Go and check audiogames.net and observe the amount of people who reply to
>>> rpg related topics, or indeed post a topic and ask. I suspect the
>>> information you got from that statement was from a local focus group, ie,
>>> society or association for the blind. Unfortunately, such places tend to
>>> have a generally older population who are primarily interested in
>>> traditional type games, however for younger gamers (and indeed those more
>>> likely to own Ios devices), something a little more modern and complex would
>>> appeal more, indeed part of the problem with audiogames development is that
>>> there is a large amount of traditional games available and not so much that
>>> is none traditional, ie, I can think of about 8 versions of blackjack over
>>> the years, but not one single version of a modern fantasy board game like
>>> Talisman, much less a ccg, collectable card game.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I'll also add that rpgs don't need to be as complex as the games produced by
>>> companies like namco and squaresoft. dungeons and dragons do very well with
>>> basic mechanics, indeed most of what an rpg does mechanically can be
>>> represented by dice rolls and risk assessments, the one difference is that
>>> you have story and atmosphere added to that, as well as player progression
>>> over time.
>>> 
>>> You might begin therefore by adapting some of the multiplayer fantasy themed
>>> card and board games for Ios, games like heroes of the multiverse or
>>> talisman, or creating your own along similar lines if copywrite is an issue.
>>> These would be mechanically similar to games like roadtrip, hearts or dice
>>> poker, just with more text involved, eg, a player would encounter a monster
>>> with a description of it's stats and be required to roll dice for combat, or
>>> a player would encounter a magical object card and decide whether to take it
>>> with them or not.
>>> 
>>> While I do enjoy the games in the collection thus far, I am a little sorry
>>> none are games intended fo

Re: [Audyssey] iDevice game thoughts - Re: Why I build the games as I do

[Devin Prater]

I like RPG games, but not the simple ones that only last a little while. 
Replayability is nice, and I appreciate it in games like Nano Empire, but I 
usually like ones that are long in the first place.
Sent from my Mac.

Devin Prater
r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com



> On Apr 13, 2016, at 2:57 PM, brennenki...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> To me if I ever playing RPG game I really would like to play something a 
> little less start than a lot of the RPG games that you see out there today
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Apr 13, 2016, at 1:04 PM, dark  wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Charlse.
>> 
>> I really don't see what is wrong with complex rpg games on the iPhone? look 
>> at king of dragon pass. True, casual games to whip a device out of your 
>> pocket and play are good, and there are plenty of good examples of such, 
>> however just because a device can! be a portable games playing device 
>> doesn't mean you can't use it at home, several days I've spent on Kodp, 
>> adventure to fate  and some of the choiceofgames interactive stories 
>> definitely show that.
>> 
>> All the best,
>> 
>> Dark.
>> - Original Message - From: "Charles Rivard" 
>> To: "Gamers Discussion list" 
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 5:40 PM
>> Subject: [Audyssey] iDevice game thoughts - Re: Why I build the games as I do
>> 
>> 
>>> For me, lengthy and complex role playing games are not for the iPhone. The 
>>> games that I would prefer are usually games that I must react to action or 
>>> use dice to score, or something along that nature.  A game such as chess or 
>>> checkers will work well, too, although I have to have a separate board for 
>>> scoping out my next move.  I find it very difficult to explore a board 
>>> using speech only.  I very much prefer to look at the whole board without 
>>> having to memorize where the pieces are.  Arcade games work well on an 
>>> iDevice, as well as a game in which you drive a vehicle on tracks.
>>> 
>>> I have seen books of instructions for Dungeons and Dragons and other such 
>>> games, and they! are! huge!!  There is no way that I'm going to remember 
>>> all of those rules, and games for iDevices work best if they don't require 
>>> months to play.  I can play Blindfold Pinball or Blindfold Bowling for 
>>> either a few minutes or a few hours, and ther is an end to each game.  In 
>>> an RPG, it takes forever, if there is even a victor.  I think it is a 
>>> personal opinion, but I just don't think that an RPG is best suited for 
>>> iDevice gaming.  Sports games or arcade games, and dice competition games 
>>> such as Dice World, or even sound oriented adventure games are more suited 
>>> for them.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> If you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished!!
>>> -Original Message- From: dark
>>> Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2016 9:34 AM
>>> To: Gamers Discussion list
>>> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the games as I do
>>> 
>>> @Marty, Blind people don't like rpgs? not true.
>>> 
>>> Go and check audiogames.net and observe the amount of people who reply to
>>> rpg related topics, or indeed post a topic and ask. I suspect the
>>> information you got from that statement was from a local focus group, ie,
>>> society or association for the blind. Unfortunately, such places tend to
>>> have a generally older population who are primarily interested in
>>> traditional type games, however for younger gamers (and indeed those more
>>> likely to own Ios devices), something a little more modern and complex would
>>> appeal more, indeed part of the problem with audiogames development is that
>>> there is a large amount of traditional games available and not so much that
>>> is none traditional, ie, I can think of about 8 versions of blackjack over
>>> the years, but not one single version of a modern fantasy board game like
>>> Talisman, much less a ccg, collectable card game.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I'll also add that rpgs don't need to be as complex as the games produced by
>>> companies like namco and squaresoft. dungeons and dragons do very well with
>>> basic mechanics, indeed most of what an rpg does mechanically can be
>>> represented by dice rolls and risk assessments, the one difference is that
>>> you have story and atmosphere added to that, as well as player progression
>>> over time.
>>> 
>>> You might begin therefore by adapting some of the multiplayer fantasy themed
>>> card and board games for Ios, games like heroes of the multiverse or
>>> talisman, or creating your own along similar lines if copywrite is an issue.
>>> These would be mechanically similar to games like roadtrip, hearts or dice
>>> poker, just with more text involved, eg, a player would encounter a monster
>>> with a description of it's stats and be required to roll dice for combat, or
>>> a player would encounter a magical object card and decide whether to take it
>>> with them or not.
>>> 
>>> While I do enjoy the games in the collection thus far, I am a little sorry
>>> none are games intended for longe

Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do

[Devin Prater]

Why would you need soundscapes and voice acting? A dark room is text, and does 
just fine. Touchmint’s games are mostly text, and do mostly fine as well. Nano 
empire is wonderful, and is text also. I’m saying that you don’t need expensive 
acting and sound do make a good game.
Sent from my Mac.

Devin Prater
r.d.t.pra...@gmail.com



> On Apr 13, 2016, at 3:29 PM, Darren Harris  
> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I have 1 thing to say about replayable games,
> 
> Swamp. That's a 1 man band doing all that, look at how good a game that is?
> Now have something like that on the iPhone and that would be awesome.
> 
> -Original Message-
> From: Gamers [mailto:gamers-boun...@audyssey.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Brown
> Sent: 13 April 2016 18:36
> To: gamers
> Subject: Re: [Audyssey] why i build the games the way I do
> 
> In response to Marty's post, I know that this is exactly the sort of
> situation we have with Valiant Galaxy Associates.  Our company
> consists of two people.  We began with a large project that took 3
> years to get to commercial release and which is due to have an update
> relatively soon in our schedule.  Our next two games were much simpler
> and rolled out quickly, but only because we could reuse and centralize
> a lot of the code.  We're still in the process of making a centralized
> platform so we can roll out more of the smaller games as well as work
> on more ambitious games.
> 
> Our hope is to eventually have more games in play, let the smaller
> ones carry the load while we develop long term bigger games.
> 
> I disagree with you about the RPG as being simple to convert Dark:
> 
> You can convert the mechanics relatively easily, but then you have to
> have the mechanics integrate with a group of player actions and
> possible results.  Essentially you write an Choose Your Own Adventure
> novel on top of the mechanics, get it all to integrate, and then have
> to still work out why it's not working over 60,000-250,000 words of
> text and god only knows how much mechanical issues.  This doesn't take
> into account sound scape or voice acting.
> 
> It's not undoable, and I think we should see more of those types of
> games myself, but the question is how much complexity can you build
> from a small production standpoint and still stay sane, productive,
> and on top of customer service.  It's not like you release a game and
> it's a never go back to proposition.  Further, if you want to keep the
> costs reasonable, you have to make choices.  You can't release a
> professionally produced sound scape, voice acting, music background,
> story, proofreading, and fully tested and stable code and charge only
> 10 dollars for it.  A lot of the sorts of games that people cite when
> they mention this genre are games that originally retaled for well
> over $35 or 40 U.S. or, have monthly subscription charges that come to
> the same thing.  While Marty's assessment that most blind people don't
> like RPG's might be skewed, he is right that most blind people will
> not pay for the kind of quality that most would like to demand.  Not
> in my experience in any case.  That said, I know all the developers on
> list attempt to put out as professional and interesting a game as they
> can.  Remember too, that by moving his company to an IOS focus, Marty
> is not breaking new ground in terms of style of game perhaps, but by
> moving into the mobile app market he has broken ground for blind
> people and audio games in terms of providing well received simple
> games that are inexpensive.  That is a huge step from the any audio
> game is either cheap and developed as a labor of love by one
> programmer or $40 and developed to be profitable, or at least,
> hopefully profitable.
> 
> As usual, my two cents.  I'll expect change from that please :)
> 
> Take care,
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> In the fight between you and the world--back the world! Frank Zapa
> 
> ---
> Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org
> If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to
> gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org.
> 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/gamers@audyssey.org.
> If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list,
> please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.
> 
> 
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Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the games as I do

[marty]

I didn't say they didn't like it; I just said that from the email I've 
received, I get far fewer requests for RPGs than other games (about 1 in 30 is 
a RPG request).  Sports games abound, but when I push back and ask how the game 
would be played, I usually don't get a response.  A classic suggestion is a 
basketball shooting game; I think it sounds pretty boring, after playing it for 
 a few minutes.
 
Building out an RPG would take months, and I can't see how to do any return on 
that investment.  Assume that the game would sell for $20, of which apple keeps 
$7.  Assume a programmer earns $40/hour.  A game that takes a month to build 
(and I think an RPG would take far more than that) would need to generate 6,400 
after apple's cut, or about $9100.  At $20 per game, 500 people would have to 
purchase it just to break even.  Given that 80% of the people never purchase, I 
would need 2,500 downloads to break even.  
 
I am working with the programmer who built park boss, and I will probably port 
that over to the iPhone.  I've built a framework to mix my infrastructure with 
C++ code, so it might not be overly complex.  Since park boss is in the 
direction of an RPG, or at least closer to a SIMS environment, I can see how 
that game goes to try to project how any RPG would go.  Do you think this 
market could handle an RPG game for $40 to $50?
 
 
 
- Original Message - Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Why I build the 
games as I do
From: "dark" 
Date: 4/13/16 7:34 am
To: "Gamers Discussion list" 

@Marty, Blind people don't like rpgs? not true.
 
 Go and check audiogames.net and observe the amount of people who reply to 
 rpg related topics, or indeed post a topic and ask. I suspect the 
 information you got from that statement was from a local focus group, ie, 
 society or association for the blind. Unfortunately, such places tend to 
 have a generally older population who are primarily interested in 
 traditional type games, however for younger gamers (and indeed those more 
 likely to own Ios devices), something a little more modern and complex would 
 appeal more, indeed part of the problem with audiogames development is that 
 there is a large amount of traditional games available and not so much that 
 is none traditional, ie, I can think of about 8 versions of blackjack over 
 the years, but not one single version of a modern fantasy board game like 
 Talisman, much less a ccg, collectable card game.
 
 
 I'll also add that rpgs don't need to be as complex as the games produced by 
 companies like namco and squaresoft. dungeons and dragons do very well with 
 basic mechanics, indeed most of what an rpg does mechanically can be 
 represented by dice rolls and risk assessments, the one difference is that 
 you have story and atmosphere added to that, as well as player progression 
 over time.
 
 You might begin therefore by adapting some of the multiplayer fantasy themed 
 card and board games for Ios, games like heroes of the multiverse or 
 talisman, or creating your own along similar lines if copywrite is an issue. 
 These would be mechanically similar to games like roadtrip, hearts or dice 
 poker, just with more text involved, eg, a player would encounter a monster 
 with a description of it's stats and be required to roll dice for combat, or 
 a player would encounter a magical object card and decide whether to take it 
 with them or not.
 
 While I do enjoy the games in the collection thus far, I am a little sorry 
 none are games intended for longer or more complex play. There's nothing 
 wrong with a game of hearts, blackjack etc or a quick arcade game, however 
 unfortunately there has already been a lot of that sort of thing produced, 
 indeed I do wonder if some people are taking the attitude "well there are 
 several versions of hearts for pc, why should I pay to have one on my 
 Iphone?"
 
 this isn't meant as an attack, as I said I enjoy the games for what they 
 are, it just saddens me to see developers now producing exactly the same 
 sorts of games we were seeing in the community 10 years ago, especially with 
 the greater distribution and easier development inherent on Ios, indeed it's 
 a little ironic that with one exception all of the more complex games we've 
 seen recently for Pc or Ios have been games produced by sighted developers 
 who have accidently created accessible games, or have included access 
 requests in games that are %80 accessible such as adventure to fate, where 
 as games produced with the express intention of writing games for blind 
 people have intended to be simpler.
 
 This isn't to say "where's audio final fantasy", only that some change and 
 advancement would be nice, especially if kidfriendly software are doing so 
 well as a company.
 
 All the best,
 
 Dark. 
 
 
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Re: [Audyssey] Blindfold Barnyard, some thoughts

[Marty Schultz]

Thanks for all your input.  I will send your comments around to the 
testers, and get their feedback, and implement those ideas.  I haven't 
done much with breakout or hopper recently, since I'm building pool / 
billiards.
I've been getting several requests for both snakes and ladders, and for 
more trivia games.
There are already slews of trivia games that are accessible, and I 
imagine snakes and ladders would get boring quickly.
So,  I was thinking of combining those two together, but I have no idea 
if that would be fun.
The idea would be that you could only move ahead in snakes and ladders 
if you answered the trivia question correctly.
I could also make variants of the game more child educational by having 
another option to test arithmetic, or spelling.

Any thoughts?

On 3/31/2016 7:21 PM, dark wrote:

Well as I said I've been playing through several of the games from Kidfriendly 
software to write up for audiogames.net, often paying for the coins and other 
upgrades when the game appealed to me personally.

Barnyard was one that surprised me for the idea of the game and how much random 
fun sliding around looking for animals was, especially in the matching, indeed 
I like the fact that the game uses the touch screen so uniquely.

I actually introduced my Fiance to the game today, sinse as an animal lover and 
because she's getting used to the hole touch screen concept on her Iphone, I 
thought it might appeal, and she really rather enjoyed it (indeed she got far 
more addicted than I expected and spent half an hour trying to beat her 
previous high score).

Her first comment however (which I promised to pass on), was "why are there no dogs 
or cats?" As a lover of both she was quite disappointed, and in fairness I can see 
her point sinse while it's very cool to have Sea lions, Dolphins and rattle snakes on a 
farm, not to mention loons (good company for me), it would be rather logical to have a 
farm dog or cat :d.

I also did have a couple of thoughts myself.

Firstly, sinse the game employs time limits, it might be nice if we could make the information spoken more 
concise, and thus be more able to get higher scores. So instead of hearing "bullfrog to the north 
west"  have a setting to just hear "bullfrog, northwest" or maybe even "bullfrog n w"

Secondly,  I wonder why some aspects of the game which are controlled in 
settings have not been used to create different various types of game to play?

For example, instead of having the player choose how many animals, have games 
with increasing numbers of animals, eg, 3 minutes 5 animals, 3 minutes 6 
animals.

It might also be fun to have games that alter the number of animals while 
playing, so that players have to more quickly make judgements on the fly and 
cannot prepare for new sorts of animals turning up. So for example have a game 
that starts with four types of animals, and then add another kind after a 
predetermined time, say 2 minutes, then another kind after another two minutes 
and so on until the player messes up.


Likewise, I rather wondered why both the size of animals and the spoken 
instructions were not factors used to create harder games to challenge the 
player, as opposed to be alterable in settings. Personally I'd much rather 
myself have the option to get higher scores on different modes of play than to 
have the same modes of play but need to alter a setting, sinse it creates more 
variation in the game and gives me more options when I start, not to mention 
making the game progressive by giving harder levels so that I can advance to 
the next hardest category when the previous one becomes too easy (I really like 
the setup in Hopper and Pong for this).

I've actually thought the same in breakout, that the speed of the ball and 
whether the paddle grows when it hits the back wall should be factors that 
alter in different levels, however Blindfold Barnyard, sinse it is based on 
managing increasing levels of more complex circumstances would be a really nice 
game to play around with in this way.

INdeed, speaking of complexity,  there could be some rather fun ways to expand 
the game.

Firstly, at the present moment there is no reason why a player cannot simply 
keep clearing one fence of a given animal type and accumulate more and more 
score on another fence. I was thinking therefore of inserting a factor which 
forced players to keep evolving which fence they stuck animals too.

What I was thinking is that at various intervals, a player could  hear a wind sound and 
be told "wind from the north" (or whichever direction). At this point, if a 
player didn't immediately move all animals on that fence to the barn, the fence would be 
blown down, all the animals run away and she/he would lose them. This would be 
complicated by the fact that the wind could blow at random intervals, and at any time, 
meaning higher scores were far more difficult.


Another thought I had which may be used either instead of, or as well as the