I reckon that if you do it properly, you''ll be able to do a fun game without graphics. When people listen to the radio they have a certain type of fun, and they''re not watching anything. Look into it and you might be able to come up with something quite evolutionary.

Hi Kneelz,
experimenting with input and output modes for games and designing games which would work well with them is a neat idea and could come up with some very new experiences.

I was recently thinking about something which didn''t use graphics, (I read this) did you know that the first concept for Alone in The Dark, was to have the player in a pitchblack house and they would rely on sound to play! But they decided that they would need an amazing sound system to make such a game work.

Also on TV the movie The Juror (with D. Moore) had sculptures which the audience had to reach in and feel, and they would experience a range of tactile experiences (a bit like the tale of the 3 blind men and the elephant).. well, we don''t have the hardware to create that.. but it sounds like a really cool type of game could be made with that type of concept (what precisely, I don''t know).

Nethack has an optional output mode to Braille reader hardware!

An interesting idea!

There a some samples of already successful games relying mainly on audio. Do you remember You don''t know jack? It had nearly no graphics.
You had to listen to Jack, which (or better who) was the main attraction of the game.

But why deny all the graphics? When speaking of a RPG, think of supporting (supporting, not essential!) still graphics in the background.
Like a slideshow of paintings, suiting the given situation. This would also attract not blind audience. Who wants do see a windows desktop while playing?
Without raising some prejudices, I believe that seeing people got usually less imagination than blind ones. So show you care for those which have to actually look at Gates'' creation.

And furthermore, when targeting also blind people, think of how they can start the program easily (hotkey under windows?), and an audio guided installer.

Good luck,

Ingo aka [Stony]


~~~
A bus-station is where a bus stops.
A train station is where a train stops.
On my desktop there is a workstation...

A nice concept, I think it would be fun to play out a game by audio.

Just a few points to look at:
How will you describe the game, if it is primarily a game for the blind, you will want to use very little sight descriptions and exsensuate the smell, touch and sound senses. If you want both, you will want to describe how things look. A cool Idea would be two modes, one for seeing people and one for blind. This way, sobody who can see will get more sight related descriptions whereas a blind person won''t.

All great games start the same way!

I''m sure a manual written in braille would take care of detailed descriptions of what the game is.

I shall make the following recomendations:

Make something in the style of those early text adventures. Should be simple enough to impliment.

If you''re specificly targeting the blind, would it be unreasonable to assume they''d already have some sort of speach recognition software installed? Rather than write something new, could you just tap into that like a com object?

Display? Well, if you model it after ye olde text adventure, you may as well include the text display and input. But an alternative might be to have like a visualization feature of in and out going sound.