The path to the scriptures is at your feet.
Text/Autumn Autumn
If the above picture, which is almost pure black, is the entire interface of a game, I believe many people will ask: how to play this?
In fact, this is not a game prepared for normal players in the usual sense, but the MMORPG "Listening to the River" developed by the mental interaction team for the visually impaired group, and the game has received millions of downloads and served about 120,000 visually impaired users.
So, how did this "invisible" game work? What's the story behind the game? After the public welfare game forum at the China Game Industry Annual Conference last December, Grape Jun chatted with Tang Monk, CEO of Mind Interactive.
01 An "invisible" game
As the name suggests, the overall gameplay of Listening to the Jianghu is a martial arts MMORPG game built for 3D sound, and players will play as a martial arts master with amnesia to break through the rivers and lakes.
Because it is a blind game, the team has made a lot of efforts in auditory performance, just entering the game, there are "thunder, wind, birds, sharp arrows shuttle" 3D sound effects through the ears, a tense and exciting jianghu rushed to the face.
All the characters in the game have voices, and in addition, the team also implanted sound effects from real-life scenes such as markets, hotels, mountains, rivers, lakes, animals, etc., making the game environment more immersive and dynamic.
In the course of the game, various voices will outline a plot twist for the player, for example, in the first chapter of the game, the protagonist temporarily lives in the cottage due to amnesia, and the owner of the village asks the protagonist to do three months of chores on the grounds of informing him of his origin. During this time, the protagonist becomes a confidant with the servant Susu in the cottage. Three months later, the protagonist asks the owner of the village but is deceived, at this time, Susu tells the protagonist's true identity...
Just taking out the game plot is about the same as a high-quality radio drama
Tang Monk said that auditory expression is the most important design direction of "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes", "how to pass all the information to the user without dead ends through sound, and let the sound have a sense of space and tension as much as possible, and how the user responds." There is hardly a single product to refer to in this regard. ”
Because there is no visual expression, the game is still difficult for normal people to get started. For example, in the early stages of the game, players must first be exposed to basic movements, item use, equipment wear and other tutorials - compared to ordinary MMOs, these contents are particularly cumbersome.
If you don't calm down, normal people estimate that even the novice tutorial will be difficult to complete the experience
As for why the game chose to swipe the screen instead of voice interaction, Tang Monk said, "It is more convenient for blind players to use screen swipe gestures." Because their hearing is very sensitive, the content they listen to must be particularly fast, which is about 10 times faster than that of the average player, and if the game uses voice commands, it will not keep up with their rhythm. ”
Different speech rates in the game settings
In order to take care of the blind game experience, the game battle is mainly turn-based, after entering the battle, the player can choose the skill and target according to the steps to fight, or long press the screen to open the automatic battle; in the story mission, the player can also double-click the screen to open the shortcut gesture and choose the automatic pathfinding.
Automatic pathfinding and combat
In addition to the sound expression and operation mode, the gameplay structure of "Listening to the River" is basically the same as that of the normal MMORPG game, and also includes social systems such as friends, leaderboards, teams, gangs, etc., and even in comparison, it will pay more attention to social.
In the words of Tang Monk, "Listening to the Jianghu" is more like a highly immersive audio community than an MMORPG game, "Some of the game's built-in social systems are exposed through voice playback; in addition, we will also recommend friends through the big data of the user model, and everyone is very happy when this system is made, chatting in the game every day." “
Tang monks said that the biggest problem for the visually impaired group at present is loneliness, and they want to really do something together, but they will not be able to achieve it in life because of various restrictions.
"This is also where we are different from other games, few people in normal games reveal their true identity; but the visually impaired group is different, they play games second, carrying out a pleasant social is the core appeal, we will pay more attention to designing some of the games that require social interaction, to help them transform from virtual social to real social."
02 How to develop an "invisible" game
When asked why the team started playing blind games, Tang said they had crossed paths with the visually impaired community a long time ago and had given them some items as gifts. But later, when chatting, these people said that their biggest problem was the lack of spiritual life and entertainment. Since then, he has decided to make a game that blind people can play.
However, this idea alone is not enough, it was 2017, there was almost no game on the market dedicated to the visually impaired, so the team's research and development road was quite bumpy, in the words of the producer of "Listening to the River", "every step has to step on the pit." ”
The producer told us that the worldview and cognition of the inherently blinded player are different from those of normal players. "For example, an apple, we all know what it looks like, but without touching, the innately blind group cannot fully understand the apple." Therefore, from the beginning of the project, "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes" needs to consider the world view and information acceptance ability of the visually impaired group.
In order to solve this problem, the team has conducted a number of surveys, such as confirming whether the user is congenitally blind, the length of time to use the smartphone, the martial arts works understood, the sensitivity to different styles of music, etc., and then selected the user according to these feedback data, thus determining the martial arts theme that is more in line with the user's needs and has a broad cognitive basis, so that both the innate and the acquired blinding users can easily and relatively low threshold to enter and operate the game.
But this is just the beginning. When designing the interaction pattern, the team also needs to filter and iterate on the interaction scheme based on the maximum compatibility, and each version must be made into an interactive video for users to test and verify, so that it can cover user groups with different characteristics.
For example, the final confirmed interaction scenario has different operations of clicking, double-clicking, and single-finger and two-finger, although somewhat complicated, but this is a decision made by the team after considering different application scenarios. At the same time, the team will also adjust the shortcut gestures of different frequencies of use according to the user's usage data.
Some operational details are also difficult problems that have plagued the team for a long time, such as whether to use the sound effect of up or down to open the menu, what perspective the player should be based on to move back and forth, left and right, and so on.
In addition, there are blind members of the development team of mental interaction, so they need to adjust the game development tools to maximize the role of sound, so that they need to reconstruct 20%-30% of the development tools.
Visually impaired employees are developing features
Game development interface
In the testing stage, because normal people can not participate in the game test, the team can only ask the blind users around to help test, in order to communicate more accurately, the team also needs to consult and confirm with them one-on-one, to understand which step of the game and what environment they have difficulties.
Sound employees for the experience of the real feelings of users,
Frequent wearing of eye masks is required for gaming
The most impressive thing is that in a mission plot, the player needs to walk into the stables to complete the task, the environment setting of this scene is relatively simple, and the key sound effects are relatively clear, but when recycling, the team found that the samples of different age groups are very different, and older users will always be stuck in this mission level.
"One of them was an aunt in her 60s who kept trying during that time, and we talked to her on the phone every day and taught her how to play. After many subsequent optimizations, we upgraded the single sound effect at the entrance of the stable to two sound effects, and this matter was over. ”
In the end, it took about two and a half years for the game to be developed.
After the game is launched, they also need to be continuously optimized according to the characteristics of the visually impaired community. For example, the most mentioned are the speed of narration and auxiliary voice. The above said that the speed of speech that blind people can hear is about 10 times that of normal people, which is also the current technical upper limit of mental interaction, but many users say that the speed of speech is still a bit slow. To solve this problem, the team is doing optimizations almost every month.
In addition, the team also independently developed an MMORPG called "Listening to the Jianghu: The Comeback", which has been upgraded in terms of the professional design and gameplay depth of the "Listening to the Jianghu", mainly serving high-end players in the visually impaired community.
Surprisingly, however, the paid design of the game went relatively smoothly. Tang Monk said that our users need a normal game experience rather than being given, so we will allow users to get a differentiated experience by recharging, and also give free users more benefits to experience more content. "As long as we can provide more help to more users at reasonable profits, this is also the value of mental interaction, and there are many more things we need to do."
After day-to-day optimization and iteration, "Listening to the River" has now exceeded one million downloads, serving about 120,000 visually impaired users, and the daily frequency of the built-in chat system can reach 218,000, so far, there have been nearly 100 pairs of blind people in their games to know, interact, become partners.
"The most impressive is a Beijing guy and a Tianjin girl, they met when the game was just launched, three months later the blind guy drove alone to Tianjin to meet the woman's parents, both parents are also very happy, the two quickly got results, we also received the first thank you letter and wedding photos." This incident is also the first time that we have a relatively big touch, and we feel that our work is quite meaningful. ”
03 Work in more "invisible" places
In addition to "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes", mental interaction invests a lot of other things.
Tang Monk said that in the past, when everyone mentioned the employment of blind people, they most likely thought of masseurs and tuners... But according to the current situation of the market, they have explored some new employment directions, including blind programmers, blind anchors, blind new media operations and so on. These positions are also closely related to their business.
About 1/3 of the members of mental interaction are visually impaired employees, including the server-side master of their games, who are also blind programmers. In addition to the game, they also developed a blind social software "Love to Laugh", as of now, the love of laughter platform has 90,000 registered users, the platform has more than 80 blind anchors. Although the content of the live broadcast is not the same as that of normal anchors, they can bring blind groups to meet online and chat together, just like a party.
E-sports for the blind is also one of the main employment directions they are currently exploring, and Tang Monk said that this is the need of a younger blind group. "They know normal people's esports and want to be esports players, so why can't we do it?"
To this end, another team of Mind Interactive spent 1 year developing a blind chicken game called "Glory Battlefield", and began to promote the blind e-sports competition in 2020. Up to now, Mind Interactive has held four e-sports competitions, with more than 600 blind professional players participating, and the blind anchors under the platform can also participate in the commentary of the event.
For a company with just over 30 people, it's naturally difficult to do so much business at the same time. Tang Monk even said that for a while he felt too bitter and a little regretful, "because this field really lacks a lot of things, from front-end tools, to products, to user services, all to do." To this end, they have also developed a free accessibility software, the Mental Accessibility Assistant.
The most emphasized words of the Tang monks in the interview are that they have done so much, in fact, they want more people to know that blind people are no different from normal people, and they can also go online and entertain. Although the domestic online services for the disabled have actually led the world, many ways of living and playing are not yet known to more blind people and families.
At the end of the interview, Tang Monk told me that the reason why he gave himself this name was because the things that mental interaction did were as arduous and long as learning from the scriptures, and they needed to face the "ninety-nine eighty-one difficulties". At first, when I heard this statement, I felt that they were exaggerating the difficulties they had encountered; but then I found that they were indeed like the Tang monks, helping the world in their own way—perhaps the path to learning the scriptures was at their feet.
Game Grape Recruitment Content Editor,
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