Braillemon - Pokemon Port for the Blind and Visually Impaired

[charon the ferryman]

BRAILLEMON: POKEMON FOR THE BLIND AND VISUALLY IMPAIRED
Excuse the cheesy name, please. Harhar. Does not actually utilize Braille printing technology (might actually have connectivity to Braille displays
later though)

So what is this?!
Do you know that one guy who always wanted to be a Pokémon Master, but is blind as a bat
and can't even tell you what Pikachu looks like? Well THIS IS FOR HIM.

This game, programmed in Gamemaker 8.1,  utilizes the TTS extension to have menus and
text read to the player. It can be played completely without vision (and the game has
no graphics).

Why, you may ask?

I have three blind friends who are bored as all hell and they need something besides Monopoly
to play, of course!

Plot? Backstory?
You just turned 10! You are on your way to Professor Oak's lab to get your very first Pokémon.
It could be Bulbasaur, the Seed Pokémon. Or maybe Charmander, the Lizard Pokémon? Can't
go wrong with the Tinyturtle Squirtle though. Yup - that's right, this game is a port of
Pokémon Red and Blue for the Gameboy!

There are some differences though - the game is more like a blend between Red/Blue
and Gold/Silver.


FEATURES
Text to Speech functionality
Initial release will include 251 Pokémon and 249 moves.
EVs/IVs based on Gen III and higher formulas.
Accurate damage, stat, catch rate ect. formulas
Plotline based off of Pokemon R/B/Y

A preview video is here

CREDITS
Programmer:
Rachel Merryfield (Corvidae)
Kyle Frownfelter

Resources extracted from Pokémon Blue/Red by GAMEFREAK/Nintendo. Pokémon is
copyright GAMEFREAK 1995-2013.

Beta Testers:
...YOU?!

SUPER DOOPER SPECIAL THANKS TO KYLE FROWNFELTER FOR TAKING THE
TIME TO DEVELOP THE SAPI5 DLL, I OWE YOU ONE DUDE.
But I'm not blind! Can I play it too?
Of course! In the end I want to add networking capabilities to connect players of all
types, eyes functioning or not. The game will be condensed to be playable without
requiring graphics. Towns will be menu based, and routes will be greatly simplified. Items
and Trainers will be able to be detected from sound.

If you get an error after booting up saying that you don't have a Text to Speech engine
installed, make sure you read through readme.txt and TTS_help.html provided in the file.
Check your Text to Speech settings and see if they work. The game uses the
Microsoft voices as default and hasn't been tested with anything else just yet.

ANY OTHER ERRORS SHOULD BE POSTED HERE! Braillemon.exe will produce an error
log for every error that pops up in a session, so post its contents there so I can
fix it!

In fact, it'd really benefit me if you want to test this with perfectly fine vision, it allows
me to test on even more kinds of computers! Make sure your Text-to-Speech software
is configured or else this program will not run.



Downloads?
Hold your horses! This is in DEVELOPMENT for a reason! The game is going to be in a
development phase for a while, so some features may not be implemented yet. This page
will show development additions. There will also be an update file included in releases to
show what's new!

MOST RECENT UPDATE
https://www.dropbox.com/s/l4eyvtbabkbykaa/0.0.0.8.zip

previous builds available upon request

I am in need of non-blind testers who are willing to try this audio game
who are familiar with Pokemon to point out any awkward glitches or
unusual mechanics that stick out to you.
Thank you in advance for your comments. It's programmed all from scratch
with no external tools, bar those produced by Kyle Frownfelter, the other
programmer on the project. So catching those bugs is important!

[Daddy Poi's Oily Gorillas]

Seeing as this is for the blind. I'm guessing all dialogue will be voiced? Who do you think is going to voice the game? And/or will all the voices be masked? I watched the first few minutes of Corvidae's video, and noticed the voices are "crappy" as she says.

(Note that I haven't downloaded the game yet.)

A preview video is here

Or you could put the link in [ youtube][/ youtube] tags.

Rachel Merryfield (Corvidae)
Kyle Frownfelter

Ah, I know Corvidae as Charon the Ferryman. Now I sort of understand where the Ferryman part came from. But who is Kyle supposed to be? I take it that you copied/pasted this from pokecommunity.

[Atrius (He/Him)]

I think this is a great idea, opening up the series to a group of people who get excluded from video games the majority of the time.  The demo seems to work very well, my only gripe is that it feels like I have to hit Enter to make it continue more often than I should, especially during battles.

[Battle Starting sound, Enemy pokemon cry]
{Press Enter}
Wild level ?? male derpemon appeared!
{Press Enter}
Go blind duck!
{Press Enter}
[Blind Duck cry]
{Press Enter}
What will blind duck do?

I don't remember if this is what it was like in the original games, but it feels excessive here.


If you do decide to convert some of the dialogue to proper voice acting down the road I'd like to point you to Voice Acting Alliance Forums.  It's full of a bunch of aspiring voice actors, many of which are actually pretty good, who are willing to work for free just for the experience and to create samples of their work they can use as part of their resume later on.

[charon the ferryman]

Seeing as this is for the blind. I'm guessing all dialogue will be voiced? Who do you think is going to voice the game? And/or will all the voices be masked? I watched the first few minutes of Corvidae's video, and noticed the voices are "crappy" as she says.

The voices in the game are determined by your SAPI5 voice. Computers past XP use them. Basically it's text to speech. I run mine fast but some people run theirs very fast. Later I plan to add further accessibility by connecting to JAWS/NVDA (screen readers) as well as having Braille Display functionality for Easter Eggs. It won't be fundamental to the game though since Braille Displays are CRAZY EXPENSIVE

Ah, I know Corvidae as Charon the Ferryman. Now I sort of understand where the Ferryman part came from. But who is Kyle supposed to be? I take it that you copied/pasted this from pokecommunity.

Kyle is a blind guy who is working on the project as well and we so happen to be best friends we might be or might not be more than that. He's an excellent programmer. Kyle also assists with issues and helps with testing. AND HIS FAVOURITE POKEMON IS TANGELA.

I think this is a great idea, opening up the series to a group of people who get excluded from video games the majority of the time.  The demo seems to work very well, my only gripe is that it feels like I have to hit Enter to make it continue more often than I should, especially during battles.

[Battle Starting sound, Enemy pokemon cry]
{Press Enter}
Wild level ?? male derpemon appeared!
{Press Enter}
Go blind duck!
{Press Enter}
[Blind Duck cry]
{Press Enter}
What will blind duck do?

I don't remember if this is what it was like in the original games, but it feels excessive here.

I have like 6 blind people testing it regularly that I talk to on skype and they really preferred this because then they have control over progression of the battle without having to wait. This also takes into account variable text speeds and voice speeds, and eventually when JAWS is implemented I can test it without having to shovel insane amounts of money for a thing I won't even use. In the games this dialogue automatically progresses. I might take out the enters for the cry but that might be it. In earlier versions I had it progress without pressing enter.

If you do decide to convert some of the dialogue to proper voice acting down the road I'd like to point you to Voice Acting Alliance Forums.  It's full of a bunch of aspiring voice actors, many of which are actually pretty good, who are willing to work for free just for the experience and to create samples of their work they can use as part of their resume later on.

I might. I think I wanna leave it to SAPI5 for now though. Later speakstring.dll will have Braille Display and JAWS/NVDA support so yeah. I'm already using a ton of resources on sound bytes for the game so I'm kind of iffy on using voice acting, especially since SAPI/JAWS/NVDA has customization options. If anyone wants to use it we did port Speakstring.dll to be used with D&D interface as well as just regular gml. It reads strings to SAPI5. We ported it a long while back so I think it's an older version of it. (I think this version is incompatible with XP users, we should update the GEX but it's not really a pressing matter at this point).

Most of my updates for the game can be found on either Pokecommunity, Audiogames.net or Zonebbs. Audiogames is pretty much my current glitch/error/suggestion station right now since it receives glitch reports regularly. Zonebbs generates some people but haven't paid close attention to it there since like 0.0.0.6. Pokecommunity has my stub post that I post to other forums so I don't have to rewrite my crap but I need to update it more... and people have said some pretty dumb things in this thread... eagh.

[Atrius (He/Him)]

Well, I can't honestly say I know what it takes to make a game for the blind so my tips as far as that goes are pretty much useless.  If you ever reach a point where you don't know how to make GM do what you want it to I may be able to help though.

[charon the ferryman]

Well they help most with the interface, but what I really need help with right now is seeing how much this "feels" like a Pokemon game. Also if I need help with GM in any way I could contact you as well, too.

[Aile~♥]

One thing I would recommend is including actual voice acting for the player character in battles, one VA for male and one for female. (This also makes the "Are you a boy? Or are you a girl?" question relevant again.) This doesn't work when it comes to nicknames, but it should work for the default Pokémon names. This way, the "Go! Squirtle!" and "That's enough! Come back!" stuff doesn't end up being read out in an ugly computer voice.

Likewise, including one VA for each of the enemy trainer types and having them say all the lines would be good too, if potentially a somewhat monumental project.

[charon the ferryman]

Again I'm a little iffy on VA because of the fact that it will occupy a lot more space than SAPI5/JAWS/NVDA, and you have a lot less control over things like speaking speed, voice, ect. Even though I'm just using Microsoft Anna which is a pretty mediocre voice (it's better than what SAPI4 had to deliver, but still), a lot of blindies have their own favourite voice that they use for everything. In fact we're trying to establish connectivity with JAWS/NVDA (screenreader applications) for this purpose, but it's a lot more convoluted than just SAPI'S "oh here's a string, read it".

The use of VA for cutscenes makes sense but I'm still iffy about it, but using it for battles? Well either I have to make a voice clip for each possible combination, or I have to make it so that the voice clips connect together. The former is way too clunky to even be useful, and the latter will lose the natural sounding nature of the voice anyhow, and not having the ability to have its speed settings changed, thus essentially actually being inferior to digitized voices. Your suggestion states that I must have two versions of each pokemon name (151 of them in this version), move name (252 in this version), item name (161 in this version), and every status effect and other battle condition. That's well over 1000 samples for something that blindies can't even have control over. In addition, if I tweak the writing to be gender neutral (which most of Pokemon really is) then a gender option won't really even be applicable, since obviously there is no graphics (besides the test graphics I use) that a player would really care about. As such, I will not be adding them since it will be incredibly clunky either way. Again, the game's dialogue being read by a screenreader application is designed to give more power to the player over options as opposed to just sounding "cool". Again, with 6 blindies under my belt testing this game, accessibility is already taken care of and they prefer options over VA. If they are desperate for a gender function then I can have it check for a list of commonly used male and female voices, and then allow the player to choose the most desirable one. In fact, I'm thinking about allowing the player to change the voice within the options menu.

However, I'm in dire need of people with knowledge of Pokemon to analyze the game's actual mechanics though. Testing things like items and moves and making sure they work correctly, that kind of stuff.

[Aile~♥]

For battles, I wouldn't use it for anything other than the stuff that implies that the trainer is talking. Stuff like "Go! {Pokemon}!", "Your opponent's weak! Get 'em, {Pokemon}!", "That's enough! Come back!", "Good job, {Pokemon}!", "Shoot! It was so close, too!", etc. Using it for "{Pokemon} used {move}." or "{Trainer} used {item}." would sound stupid in any case. So yes, you'd need two versions of all the send out/recall/Poke Ball escape quotes (and probably the "Gotcha!" when you catch a Pokemon, but use the chosen system voice for the rest of the "{Pokemon} was caught." part) and all 151 Pokemon names. Most of those types of quotes are primarily for aesthetics, anyway, as the player already knows that they just retreated their Pidgeotto to switch in Charmeleon, because that's what they selected in the menus.

Still, you raise good points, and ultimately it's up to you and your target audience, which I happen to not be a member of.

[Misery]

Just want to pop in and say I think this is a really interesting project, and it's cool that you're doing something for the blind people. I'm interested in trying it out, it's just that I'm way busy with other things for the time being (not including playing the new Pokémon games, haha. I don't have them yet). Thus, I can't really provide any constructive feedback yet.

Anyway, I imagine this will be very similar to a purely text-based game. I guess that's effectively what it is, except with listening instead of reading. So far it seems like you're doing pretty well, and since you have blind testers already, I'm sure you'll get to know what needs to be done for this to work.

[charon the ferryman]

Updated version: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5umh5p6dcvx0mb9/braillemonz.zip

We're still working on JAWS/NVDA support, my other programmer has been busy and his laptop is in an unusable state (the sound jack is jammed and he needs it for tts so yeah)

[Thunder-squall]

This is super cool.  Could you post links to threads on the other sites you mentioned, where this topic is discussed?  I don't want to retread conversations that are already being had.

As an aside: I'm a heavy podcast listener, and while audio books are neat, audio-games sound really, really interesting.  So people working on hands-free, screen-free games really interest me.

[charon the ferryman]

http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?id=12122

This is where I post most of my updates. If you plan on posting keep in mind most users of the forum are blind so yeah, keep things text based. lol

[charon the ferryman]

Just thought I'd let people know about a new release, if anyone is interested