How to Make a Dungeon Crawler for Blind People

years ago when i was in college i stumbled across the audiogames.net forums a community of people who play and make audio games games whose main output is sound not graphics i was fascinated by this i had never even considered that that could be a possibility with games before and i wanted to try making one [Music] so i decided to make that my computer science capstone project and set about designing an audio game now obviously the easiest thing to do would be to make a text adventure with text-to-speech but that would be too easy i wanted to make a real-time first person dungeon crawler rpg i identified three key design challenges i needed to convey to the player what direction they're facing what's in front of them and how far away it is first for direction i decided to make the game 2d wolfenstein style 2d so you only have to worry about one rotational axis turning left and right then i came up with the idea to have an audio compass so i'd play a humming sound and have it pan left or right based on how east or west you're facing and i also have it pitch up and down based on how north or south you're facing and then combine these together gives you a quick way to tell which direction you're facing and then also later on while looking for sound effects i stumbled across a heartbeat loop sound effect and realized that would be way cooler to use than a [Music] hum however while using this i realized that it was not very precise for the average person to use this they'd only be able to figure out approximate directions so i decided to simplify the game even more by making so you can only face along the cardinal directions like how old school dungeon crawlers work and then when you turn to a new direction a voice clip plays saying the direction you're facing though i did keep the audio compass on top of this okay so next what's in front of you and how far away is it obviously i needed some kind of echolocation system my first design idea was to play two pinging sounds with time between them based on the distance in front of you the problem with this was that it was too slow it took forever to get the information you need so next i tried rapidly playing a clicking sound and playing it slower or faster based on the distance in front of you this gave you the information on distance much quicker but was not very precise at all telling the difference between and is too difficult and then i came up with a really interesting idea vowels i chose three vowel sounds at e and u and assigned distances to them how would be for two meters or less e for two to eight meters and ooh for anything beyond 8 meters then when you press the echo ok button one of those vowel sounds gets played based on the distance in front of you e e e i figured these three distance tiers were all the player really needed to know you know something is right up in your face in melee or interaction range but something is getting kind of close to you and if something is somewhere in the distance in front of you then i could also vary the rate i play these vowel sounds to help indicate where the distance falls in its tier so something is three meters from you e is played rapidly and if it's seven meters away from you he is played slowly and then for determining what is in front of you originally i was thinking of using specific sound cues for different objects and enemies that would play when you echolocated them like an enemy would have a zombie mode and a treasure chest would have coins clinking but that seemed like it would be really easy to mess up if there are other gameplay sounds playing the player might get confused and mix them up and i'm not the best sound designer in the first place so i didn't want to take that chance so i just played off the vowel system i assigned consonants to specific things and for enemy l for loot and k for interactable and then i'd combine those with the vowel distance sounds so for example if an enemy is 4 meters in front of me and i echolocate the sound knee is played and that works great i just had to make sure to only have you know a few different consonants to keep things simple for the player some people on the audio games forums play tested the system and reactions were mixed some really liked it others said they would have preferred a full text readout saying exactly what was in front of you which i previously decided not to do because i thought it would be too slow for conveying information so i figured the best solution would be to just offer two modes one the vowel system and the other full text readout mode that you could toggle to at any time but i never got around to adding the full readout mode one interesting problem i ran into after i had made the character controller and was testing it out was how to detect openings to the sides let's say you're traveling down a quarter and another one opens to your left how do you tell that it's there you could turn an echolocate down it but that would require you to acclicate in all directions every step you take so the solution i came up with was to have two raycasts to the sides connected to audio players that play a looping breeze sound effect in each ear then based on if the raycasts are hitting anything and how far that collision is they adjust the volume of the audio players so if there's an opening to your right you'll hear a breeze in your right ear if there's a wall there you won't hear a breeze in that ear a couple more things i did to make the game easier to navigate i made the game grid base so every cell is one meter and every time you move a footstep sound is played so that way you can know exactly how far you've traveled and also i would place unique sound effects around the map like dripping water or an echo when you walk to help the player identify where they are in a map i also use unique sound effects for enemies so you can distinguish between different kinds of enemies and you can also tell when they get alerted or take damage or whatever all right now for the inventory system it has three different tabs items which is everything you're carrying or have equipped stats such as current stats health melee ranged and magic also has what level you are how many experience points you need to get to the next and how many skill points you have available for upgrading stats and you get skill points when you level up and then finally the last tab is journal i made a bunch of voice clips that plays you explore different levels of the dungeon you can add atmosphere and exposition and stuff and in the journal you can play them back at any time it's pretty straight forward to navigate the inventory use the movement keys to switch between tabs and scroll up and down and voice clips will play saying what you have highlighted i originally wanted this to be text-to-speech but after a few weeks trying to get the festival text-to-speech library working and get oh i gave up and just recorded everything myself i made my own custom number synthesizer i just recorded a bunch of voice clips saying different numbers and wrote code to combine them together to output any number from 0 to 999 i also experimented with converting all numbers to be as short as syllable as possible so i could save them faster and the player would get that information quicker but it just seemed kind of pointless and confusing so i scrapped it i also added a basic sound puzzle to the game where you step on pressure plates to play different sounds and you have to match a melody playing in the background and then when you get it right it opens the door to the next area and yeah that was basically everything if you want more information i'll link my final capstone report in the description along with the source code the game is open source so feel free to use it to make your own dungeon crawler audio game and if you want to play the final game it's called tom singing catacombs i'll put a link in the description i also just recently set up a graphics wrapper for it so you can see what's going on when you play it i actually made a few videos about this game back when i had like 30 subscribers so i mean no one watched them but if you want to see those i'll put link in the top right some final thoughts i recommend every game developer make an audio game at some point it requires you to think so far outside of the box that it just forces you to be creative and it's also going to make you a lot better at sound design fun fact i pitched this game in a student entrepreneur competition at my college and got second place and won 500 and then afterwards the judges told me they couldn't decide between me and the guy who got first and ended up choosing him to be first just on a whim anyways thanks for watching subscribe for more game dev content like this and if you want to support me buy my games link in the description level up

Channel: Miziziziz

Views: 423,913

Keywords:

Id: DQkACHnK4Rs

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/divenorth]

Hey cool. I actually am interested in creating an audio only game too. Neat.

[u/morejuice]

What a fantastic idea and very creative. Great work, sir!

[u/hackerwarlord]

When I was thinking about abstract ideas for a game to make this is the first thing I thought of. Basically, you just take whatever your medium is, and you invert it. Usually you get something drastically different when you do this.

[u/WinRaRtrailInfinity]

He got 500 bucks for it too , nice