Blind, a game based purely on sound by Yue Peng Toh (Ken) with sound clips from free-loops.com and code help from Dev Hub(http://www.sdltutorials.com/sdl-soundbank/).
I wanted to create a simple yet intriguing gameplay experience based purely on sound. Most existing games we play are primarily visual-driven. This game on the other hand aims to use sound to drive the game instead. The goal is to get the user to generate an outline of his immediate surroundings and make careful decisions based only on what he/she can hear. A secondary goal to this is to place the player in the shoes of a blind person, and show the difficulties one can face due to the lack of the all-important ability to see.
Basically the player is thrown into the center of a dark room and has no (visual) way of making out what is in the room. The aim is to turn on all the lamps in the room which are scattered all over the place. These lamps have a characteristic beeping sound to help the player uncover their positions. However, there is an equal number of traps on the floor. These traps emit another sound too. Admist all the confusing beepings from each lamp/trap, the player must tread carefully and try to locate the lamps without stepping on the trap. The player must take advantage of the 2D-audio realism employed in the game to help him/her win the game (see Novelty for details).
The novelty in the game is in the deployment of 2D audio to help the "blind" user's experience. Sources(lamps/traps) too far away will intuitively have a lower intensity and vice versa. Therefore users can ascertain if he is near a lamp if it beeps louder when its nearby and the beep decreases in volume when he moves away. Directional panning is also employed here. That is, the direction the user faces at any point of time affects the sound heard.Players will be encouraged to rotate in 1 of the 4 allowed directions to determine where the sounds are coming from.
Also players are motivated to find as many as lamps as quickly as they can because once a lamp is found, its beeping stops, reducing the intermingling of all the interacting sounds.
In my opinion, this game has achieved the goal of producing a sound-driven gameplay. Players do get a "lost and blindfolded" feeling as they waddle through the room (aimlessly and setting off traps if they don't bother to listen). There is (deliberately) few visuals and players do need to rely solely on their sense of hearing to find the lamps.
A lot of tweaking has to be done to make the game optimally fun. I reduced the trap sound volume to make lamps stand out more. I also increased the zone of lamp detection to make it easier because it sometimes sound as loud when the user is 3 pixels away from the source. The number of lamps vs traps is also another tweakable option. I am using 8,5 and it seems to give a rather good result.
Ideally, I would like the lamps and traps to be spread out. The randomization of these positions in each game meant that the game is always different and hence fun to replay. Clustering is usually not a problem and increases the fun element in this game. I introduced the rectangular game area, but I do not want people to brute force all spaces. Hence I make the character small as compared to the playing field, with traps littled around everywhere to combat this.
Finally, some additional stages and difficulty levels can be added. I think, scores can be given, if desired, based on the time the player took to solve the level. I also thought of the possibility of lighting up the lamp each time and revealing an area to aid the player, but there will need to be further balancing tweaks if I incorporate this.