
Playing roguelikes when you can’t see - Red_Tarsius
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/04/05/playing-roguelikes-when-you-cant-see/#more-439407
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cavanasm
I'm fully sighted, but the concept of visual free or visual agnostic games has
been something I've wondered about for a while. I hadn't considered the
viability of heavily menu based RPGs before, but reading about it, it seems
plainly obvious (kind of embarrassed I'd never considered that).

I really want to see (or find time to make myself) a first person game with no
visuals and all the gameplay feedback through binaural audio, but I'm not sure
of the technical details necessary for the audio part, and I have no idea how
playable such a game would necessarily be.

~~~
throwanem
Such a game appears to exist: [https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/scared-
of-the-dark-a-...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/scared-of-the-dark-
a-look-at-the-audio-game-papa-sangre/)

If you try it, I'll be interested to know how you find it!

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j_s
I am interested in "eyes closed" interfaces, while I try to go (back) to
sleep. Also, my eyes are the first to get too tired since the rest of me is
usually just sitting there. Another application is while driving (work commute
is 1.5hrs round-trip daily), but distraction is not a good idea.

If anyone has any pointers to audio versions of Hacker News I can catch up on
daily that would be nice; I waste a lot of time here. Also any way to listen +
learn details on highly technical topics, such as React or machine learning,
today's top buzzwords.

I've started with "Morse Toad", a free Android app to learn morse code. I plan
to use morse code for input. Output will probably be primarily audio, possibly
with a few vibrations (morse code again?). Unfortunately this app requires
input via the on-screen keyboard.

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mikelovesr...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mikelovesrobots.morsetoad)

------
mwcampbell
Also check out this comment thread started by a blind HN community member who
played nethack::

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10664126](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10664126)

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JauntTrooper
When I was younger I played on a text-based MUD called WotMUD (Wheel of Time)
for years. It was like an early MMORPG you could play on telnet. To this day
it is the most fun and intense game I've ever played.

I had several blind friends on the MUD, and I remember talking to them about
their setups. One owned the braille keyboard described in the article. I
thought was so cool that we could share a game experience together.

It's still around and active in case folks are interested: www.wotmud.org

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fencepost
Looking at the picture of the braille display and seeing the comments on how
expensive they are makes me wonder: is there a more general-purpose larger
display that simply provides a large grid of raised/raisable bumps along those
lines?

I can't imagine that the mechanical aspects would be that complex if the bump
size was large enough, and even 4 "colors"/heights might be feasible (flat,
low, medium, high). The electronics seem like they'd be almost trivial, and
I'd imagine that it wouldn't be difficult to incorporate some level of
touch/pressure sensitivity, possibly with detection of pressure down on an
actuator holding a pin up.

Heck, if individual of perhaps 16x16 could be made then a "grid" of those
could provide quite a possible display capability.

~~~
fencepost
As a minor update, I was thinking about something similar to the 2002
prototype mentioned in this article:
[http://newatlas.com/go/8267/](http://newatlas.com/go/8267/) with a couple of
things licensed out 10 years ago (to a company that currently appears to only
have a font that they license).

Seems to me that you might even be able to build something that would identify
as a VGA monitor, either monochrome or in one of the legacy 4-color modes at a
low resolution.

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YCode
Amazing people can listen to that 10x fast audio reading of the characters on
the screen and manage to play the game like that.

Hearing the audio I could barely even keep up with it. It's like watching two
people play chess entirely in their heads.

~~~
kbenson
It seemed to maybe be getting easier, then right before the talking started I
recognized "Lichen is hit. Lichen is killed." I'm not sure if I was actually
getting a tiny bit more used to it, or that was a particularly easy piece to
understand, or the lack of subsequent high speed speech allowed my brain to
take a second to process it, or some combination of the above.

Listening again, I still can't recognize anything except until the end. For
this, I also imagine a slow ramping up of the speed helps. That way you know
what messages might be said, so it's easier to pattern match on the fly.

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evdev
In my college software engineering course we built a game for the blind. It
had full 3D graphics.

I always felt a pang of guilt that we were walking away from the project when
the class was over, since some of the kids did like it.

~~~
mrskeltal
Can you elaborate a little on how it is supposed to work?

~~~
evdev
It was a track runner with three parallel tracks, "bombs" and "coins"
approached you, making sounds either in front of you, to your left and right.
Your job was to avoid bombs and get coins.

Pretty simple "action" game for the visually impaired. The joke is that we
spent an absurd portion of the time on the visualization. The justification
was that it would also have appeal for the sighted.

