Playing roguelikes when you can’t see | Hacker News Reader

Playing roguelikes when you can’t see

rockpapershotgun.com

48 pointsRed_Tarsius14 comments

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.

Such a game appears to exist: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2011/01/scared-of-the-dark-a-...

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

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...

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10664126

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

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.

As a minor update, I was thinking about something similar to the 2002 prototype mentioned in this article: 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.

Comment from someone pessimistic because of experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13764689

Last month on Dot Watch – A braille and tactile smartwatch | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762768

Interesting, sounds like the combination of durable, compact and enough motion for raising pins just isn't there. That's a bit surprising, but I suppose most industrial applications where you need to raise/lower a pin repeatedly for millions of cycles don't also have the same kind of space constraints or have other options like air jets.

Thanks for catching that and pointing me to it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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