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[Developing] BRAILLEMON: Pokémon port accessible for the blind and visually impaired

SereneAmbience

Founder of Pokémon Ambient
81
Posts
12
Years
I would have to say, I love this idea! I too have friends that are visually impaired. They also love the idea of Pokemon and wish they could play the games or TCG as I do. Mostly they are in love with my stuff animals! The Text-to-Speech command I have yet to hear of, but I think its wonderful. Especially for a project such as this. =)

You seem also very in control of the project! Props!
 

Varion Bluefire

A.K.A The Glitch
655
Posts
10
Years
  • Age 29
  • Seen Jan 3, 2015
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant!

When you said you were making games for blind people, and a pokemon game, I didn't think to think you meant both in one (...stupid me...)

Unfortunately I have a 64bit system, so I can't test this Tech Demo according to your first post.
 
60
Posts
10
Years
  • Seen Jul 2, 2013
ooh this sounds really nice! im gonna play and see if it works....
welp i guess i have a 64-bit system
 
60
Posts
10
Years
  • Seen Jul 2, 2013
ok i tried to play but i tapped the arrows and they just made noises hELP ME
 

Corvus of the Black Night

Wild Duck Pokémon
3,416
Posts
15
Years
Do you mind describing exactly where this happened? From the sounds of it it sounds like you're in the overworld, which is just a demo map. If this is the case, Route 1's theme from R/B/Y should be playing as the BGM. The sound is a "footstep" sound and it is meant to indicate to a player when they have moved. Since it's a demo map (and a tech demo as a whole) there's not much you can do besides check out the menus (press spacebar). If you walk into certain areas, you might hear a repeating sound that kind of sounds like a rubbing sound - this means you're in tall grass (but nothing actually happens there yet).

Statistics and other things ARE dynamically updated - pretty cool! This means that the game actually generates the data instead of using hard coded stand-ins. So these important functions are already programmed into the game in the background.

Sprites were disabled to help non-blind testers give out their ideas too for navigation, which may be why you're confused. However, there's not really much to it because it's just a big room. No items or trainers are programmed yet. More accessibility tools will be added later.

If this is not the case, please describe where this is happening.
 

Corvus of the Black Night

Wild Duck Pokémon
3,416
Posts
15
Years
Just a status update! Thought I'd let everyone know that the menu is pretty much done and I'm just working on the wild pokemon battles right now. Once I get things going I might even upload another demo that lets you actually battle Pokemon!
 
2
Posts
10
Years
  • Seen Sep 2, 2013
Hi.
Before we get into what I think of this amazing Pokemon game Let me tell you two things:
1. I'm blind. I think I'm the first blind person to comment on this thread so yay for me! :)
2. There's a great site called.
audiogames.net
or, If you want to jump strate to the forum go to
forum.audiogames.net

(I can't post links yet so hope that helps)
Maybe your friends would like to check the site out to?

Now to the game.

I've always wanted to play Pokemon as a kid but couldn't.
I recently tried a rom download of a pokimon game and got quite far with a walk through.
I herd about your game from a member of the forum I've posted about above and tried it.
First let me say that for someone who it seems has never herd of audiogames, this is a great and amazing game and I can't wait to be able to complete routes, beat gyms and all the rest of the stuff I wasnt' able to do when I was younger.

here's what I think is good and what I think could do with a little improvement.

the good stuff: the menus work great, the different sound of the Pokemon is a great thing and the way of playing the game is really easy and amazing.

I have a question, because I haven't got very far, can you walk onto more than one map and do pokimon's attacks sound different the fervor you go?

Here's the part I don't like writing about. :( the stuff that needs improving.
well it's only two things I think. 1. the walking sound. I don't know about others but for me at least it's a bit to loud. if you could make it so you could maybe turn it off so it sounds like you do when you walk in Pokemon blue or any other game, that would be nice.
Or maybe a keystroke that would allow you to turn the sound on and off?
2. when you "white out" in the game doesn't that mean you faint and end up in the hospital?

I can't wait to see more of this game, and will be looking out for more amazing updates.
Keep up the great work.
Brad, AKA Audiogamer22
 
1
Posts
10
Years
  • Seen Jun 25, 2013
Hello there

I too am a visually impaired
gamer,and must say I am quite excited to see such a project in development.
As brad pointed out, there is a website audiogames which has audio games blind gamers can play,and active forums where all things related to gameing are discussed. Just google it,beeing a new user and all,not allowed to post links.
I gave the demo a go yesterday,my yesterday anyway. :p And it was quite awesome!
I would like to test this in any case,and would be happy to offer suggestions as and when they are needed.
The game works quite well after installing sapi4,however if it can be done,I would suggest using sapi5 engine instead. as it comes installed with most windows OS's 7 and such.
That said, there were a few bugs that I found while playing. when my bulbasaur fainted,I did switch to a new pokemon,however when I encountered a wilde pokemon after defeating the other one, it said go,0 and such. in miost dialogs it started calling bulbasaur as 0. like 0 fainted and so on.
as for your visually impaired testers not beeing able to see the error dialogs? there is a easy fix, don't know how much work would that be,though. you could have the game create a error log and have the contents of the error dialogs pasted in the log. and then your testers could just forward the log to you.
I will be eagerly looking forward to talking to you and any further development on this!
Falcon wings.
 

KingCharizard

C++ Developer Extraordinaire
1,229
Posts
14
Years
well this project is odd, I think its different... I really dont know what to say here i just wanted to say i find its weird and maybe useless
 

Varion Bluefire

A.K.A The Glitch
655
Posts
10
Years
  • Age 29
  • Seen Jan 3, 2015
well this project is odd, I think its different... I really dont know what to say here i just wanted to say i find its weird and maybe useless

For someone who can see, it would be useless.

I for one, find it a pretty good idea.
 
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Pharetra

zzzz
451
Posts
12
Years
  • Age 27
  • Seen Nov 23, 2021
Wonderful idea. I'm sure many people will be very grateful for your hard work. Keep it up :)
 
2
Posts
11
Years
  • Seen Jan 9, 2014
well this project is odd, I think its different... I really dont know what to say here i just wanted to say i find its weird and maybe useless

That was quite ignorant... Imagine if you were blind since you were born and all your friends played pokemon. I myself would wish I could experience what they do when they play the game. I support this all the way and hope its finished :)
 

YourFavorite

One who can't think of a title
32
Posts
13
Years
This is a really cool idea, so I thought I would test it for you... but when I tried to run it, it said that I don't have a compatible text to speech program. It said that I should install Microsoft SAPI 4, but I googled it and the website is totally confusing. Do you have a link to where I could get one that'll work with your game?
 

YourFavorite

One who can't think of a title
32
Posts
13
Years
Oh, whoops, that was in the error message, so I probably should've read it... Well in any case I managed to get it working. I found it really difficult to navigate around the map (perhaps because I'm not used to it?). I was really confused by the "tall grass" sound, because it sounded like someone was sawing something or something that I was supposed to go find, but I couldn't locate it from listening with my headphones.

I played this game called The Great White Peep where the main character was blind and so you had to navigate areas by listening to sound... there were a lot of ambient noises like fire crackling, brook noises, and all of the people were singing or chopping wood or something so that you could find them fairly easily. The only issue is that it wasn't friendly to blind people because the menus where you did actions were still visual, and the only way you knew you were close enough to talk to someone was when the menu option popped up. So perhaps you could have people on the map hum to themselves or something, and when you get near a person on the map, they say, "Hmm?", and stop humming (or whatever their other noise is) until you either talk to them or go away, to signify that you're in range?

The footstep sound was still pretty loud, and at first I thought it meant I was bumping into a wall. A bug(?) I found was that you still encounter wild pokemon even if you are bumping into a wall. I don't think that happens in the games.

For navigation help, I think it would be helpful to be able to tell what's in front of you by hitting enter (whether it's a cliff, a building, a fence, water, etc). Just something simple like, "you feel the water lapping against your toes" would suffice. It would also be really cool if you could have the pokemon in the front of the party be somewhat like your guide... so if you talk to someone and find out that Lavender Town is the next town you need to get to (for example), you could tell your pokemon that you want to go to Lavender Town or the nearest Pokemon center or whatever, and if you press a certain button (perhaps the "interact with front pokemon" button) it could say, "Bulbasaur is tugging you northwards" or whatever general direction you need to go from where you are. That way the game still requires some navigation, but if players get lost they have a way to get back on track.

Another thing I noticed is that without the GUI, it's a lot harder to gage the general state of the pokemon battle. Perhaps change how much health the enemy loses from an attack to a % of the full value (since players are "not supposed" to know how much health an enemy pokemon has), and add in a "status" button or menu option that just tells you what fraction of your pokemon's health is left, and what % of the enemy's health is left (and mentions any status effects the pokemon have). The traditional "low health beeping" noises would help here too, but basically I had no idea how low my bulbasaur was on health until it had already fainted. Knowing that one side or the other took 3 damage doesn't mean anything if I don't know the total health...

I also noticed that when I selected info about one of my pokemon, there was kinda a big long infodump. People going to this page are likely to be looking for one or two pieces of information, so it might be better to have another menu saying, "What would you like to know about your pokemon?" with options for nature, health, EXP, stats, etc. That way if they miss the info the first time, they don't have to listen to a long list of information to try to pick out what they're looking for again. I think it might also be useful to have a "repeat" button, in case someone misses what was just said, since text-to-speech can be kinda wonky sometimes (I almost missed Oak asking for his grandson's name, and probably would've been annoyed if I missed it and then was left sitting there wondering what to do next... but your target audience may be better at listening than me).

The project is still young and I realize it would take a lot of time to add some of these features, but I think you're making great progress so far~

EDIT: Oh, also, please please implement the Physical/Special split from 4th gen. It's a pretty important change in the mechanics.
 

Corvus of the Black Night

Wild Duck Pokémon
3,416
Posts
15
Years
I fixed a lot of your concerns, minus anything doing with the overworld, in the most recent release, actually:

Update up for download, using Dropbox out of request:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/phpvrfwmr28an1j/BRAILLEMON 0.0.0.6.zip

THIS UPDATE INCLUDES:
-Mainly just move stuff. Finished all the moves!
-a bazillion glitches fixed
-Added evasion checks (not that it mattered before considering no evasion moves were added yet)
-Fixed move calculation
-Weather Effects
-End Turn Effects
-added pretty sound effects
-Status effects
-Physical Descriptions for EVERY POKEMON
-SAPI5 COMPATIBILITY OH MY GOD - Special thanks to my main man Kyle Frownfelter for throwing this together

... damn son you're the best...

What am I looking for with you testers? Well...

Things as testers to look out for:

-If a certain sound is too loud.
-If, when you or an enemy uses a move, the following occurs:
[pokemon name] used [move name]

without any extra words or anything. It means the move nulled out.

-If, when you or an enemy uses a move, the following occurs:
[pokemon name] used null!
It means for whatever reason the blank move null was returned. It's an error checker.
-If the effect seems to work strangely.
-If any error dialogues pop up. They should pop up in the error log file.
-Anything else that pertains to battle that sticks out as unusual.

I will not respond to anything regarding:
-The overworld or its map. While suggestions are appreciated, this part of the game will not be completed for a while, and getting the battles working 100% is of more importance at the moment.
-If all your pokemon faint, there is nothing really coded to fix that. In the actual games you would be sent to the last healing place, but since that hasn't been coded yet nothing really happens. I know of this already so yeah. F3 on the overworld menu heals all your Pokemon though.
 
2
Posts
10
Years
  • Seen Sep 2, 2013
hi.
It's audiogamer22.
Wow, this update is awesome!

I understand that you won't be working on the over world just yet, but I really hope you do because I really can't wait to play this as a full game

Now for a couple things I've found.
1. The Pokemon, especially the Blind duck Pokemon, seems way to powerful.
The hit attack or bash attack, (I can't remember what it's called,) takes off 100 sometimes 120 points, this isn't good because In the sighted games, I'm sure there's not an attack that can take off that much, although I've not really played the sighted games that much so don't know much about that.
2. When battling a trainer, which is awesome by the way, I used a full health potion on my Bolbasaw and the game just sat there. It heeled the pore Pokemon but then just sat there.

I can't wait to play a route, it will be awesome.

Please keep this up I really don't want to see this stopping since it's an amazing game!
Brad

Hi.
Would it be possible to get the hmm, I don't know what it's called, but it's a slidy sound when you win battles and you're Pokemon are getting xp.
Thanks,
Brad
 
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Corvus of the Black Night

Wild Duck Pokémon
3,416
Posts
15
Years
Responses:

Yeah, the only reason why I'm holding off on the overworld is because I need to make sure the game's main engine is working 100% first. Once I start shaping up the game I'll close beta testing to a few testers.

1. The duck is at level 30 and the randomly generated Pokemon have levels 2-25, so this kind of overkill isn't unexpected. In addition he has the stats of a fully evolved Pokemon. The attack has 90 base power, normal type, with increased critical hits/flinch rate 10%. If later it causes serious balance issues I might bring it down but it's more of a basic clearing move at the moment.
2. Do you mind telling me exactly what led this to happen? The name of the item will help too (Was it full restore, full heal, ect.), and what slot Bulbasaur was in (was he the first pokemon, second pokemon, ect. I'll be checking that out today. I'm thinking I may have already fixed this issue but I'll need to check. It's probably caused by the battle being paused with no way to start it up again. It may also be caused by the fact that you're using an old, incompatible save file as well.

EDIT: I can't replicate the glitch you're talking about but I did find another pretty serious glitch. It might have been patched already though. Again, more details will really help me a ton.

EDIT EDIT: Something tells me it's with the AI of trainers. The game seems to crash under certain circumstances. I'm looking for ways to circumnavigate this.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: FINALLY fixed this nasty bug.
 
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