Or the accessibility of sound. There are many ways sound can be used to make a game playable by the blind. There are games that rely on sound for the entire user interface, usually having to do with the player lining up a sound in the stereo field and blasting away at it or using it to solve a puzzle. There are games with rich sonic backgrounds that integrate smoothly into the game and allow you to navigate obstacles and blow things up. My favorite example of this would be GMA Tank Commander. The sound in All inPlay’s games is a bit different.
We use sound to help communicate what’s happening in the game to the player, much as all games do. But our sounds need to tie in with the speech of the game to give the player a complete picture of the state of the game. This somewhat limits me as to how rich I can make the sound field of the game, because players need to be able to hear the speech output. Of course, our games to this point haven’t exactly lended temselves to lots of background sound. In fact, with All inPlay Poker I experimented with background sounds to go along with the game’s wild west theme. It’s a stereo sound field in which the usual shananagans of a wild west saloon occur with random frequency. As neat as it was, surveys said people got sick of it and turned it off more often than not. On the other hand, we don’t want sonicly boring games where the sound is just window dressing and is largely irellevant. My goal is to create sounds that tell you as much as possible about what’s going on without the need for speech, so that eventually players will be able to switch to the expert speech mode and still be completely cognicent of the state of the game. Who’s turn is it? How much time is left? How much money is in the pot? Who’s in the lead?
Another important design conwsideration not limited to accessible games is to create sounds that can be repeated on a regular basis without driving the player nuts. I don’t want people to shut off the sound the third time they play the game. Our nifty sound engine lets me vary the frequency of each sound, which helps aleviate this problem. We also use more than one sound for some of the events in the game, such as winning or losing in Poker and Crazy Eights.
All these things are going through my head as I design and integrate the sounds for our next game. We’ll be telling you exactly what that game is as we get closer and closer to releasing a public beta, as we always do. Stay tuned.
