Innovation Friday - Audio Gaming

For my Innovation Friday project, I chose to work on a project that is designed to be complete auditory. It was an niche that I really wanted to investigate. More than most of the games I've found in the audio game genre, I wanted to work specifically with the blind to see just how flawed my audio assumptions are. As a sighted person, I know that I'm going to make some pretty huge leaps in logic that do not gel with the real auditory experiences of the blind. And that's why I'm going to need their guidance to make this project really useful. But getting to that point will be a lot of hard work on my part.

The core subject, a cave-in, may change if it is not a strong representation of the direction that we need to take, but I needed a starting point. I wanted to choose a naturally dark environment with low-levels of auditory cueing to avoid confusion.

Since everyone says you have to have a screenshot in a blog, here’s a screenshot of my game:



There are a number of things that you can tell about this image. First, you'll notice that it's a big black screen. There are no visuals in this game, so this makes sense. Players will navigate the world to get out of the caved in area by using only audio cueing. Second, you'll notice that I'm using UDK. I wanted to choose a high-fidelity visual engine to represent my non-graphical world. :)

I could just have easily have used CryEngine 3, Unity, Shiva, or Torque 3D for it. But one of the things that we are really pushing is learning new things or using traditional things in new ways for Innovation Friday. And I really wanted to work with Unreal to get a strong feel for their workflow and editor. It has been quite a while since I've done anything significant with it. Plus, using a strong visual engine like UDK in a project without any visuals fits using traditional things in new ways.

Project Goals:
Create an auditory game that provides a significant emotional experience for the player. Unlike Deep Sea, where the player is in a sensory deprivation mask, I cannot make the same judgements. So I’ll be using 3D positional audio that is pretty standard across the board in game engines.

Work with blind players to reveal sighted assumptions about audio processing and design.

Release Information:
Any UnrealScript will be released under the Unreal Technologies license and be available publicly for anyone wanting to use UDK to create audio experiences. You can’t really release anything UDK under an OSI license due to Epic’s licensing restrictions, but the spirit of the MIT license is in this release. I want people to be able to use anything I create here for free or commercial products.

All documentation and assets will be released under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license so that they can be used in open source or commercial projects. I’m still in the process of putting the repo together and figuring out the best method to share everything.

Where to Go from Here:
As I create UDK environments to test audio, I will be updating the documentation and levels and posting them to whichever repo solution I decide on. That way everyone can download and follow along as I run into walls and try to figure out ways around them.

Unfortunately, due to taking some personal time off this week, I could not participate in Innovation Friday. But I will be back at it next week. I will have the repository created, most likely on github or Assembla (or both since I can tie them together), and update it regularly throughout the day.

But I wanted to let people know some of what I'm working on during Innovation Friday.

All About This Game
1: Innovation Friday - Audio Gaming
2: Innovation Friday - Audio Gaming and a Lot of Learning