A game that can be played without looking at it with an eye is being sought after by the visually impaired young people.
Close your eyes, put on your headphones, the sound of footsteps, the click of stepping on the surface of the water, the sound of breathing, the sound of gunshots, the whistling of shells... All kinds of sounds set up a battlefield in the dark, through the sliding screen gestures, players run, dodge, pick up equipment, find cover, launch attacks, enjoy the fun and excitement of the game.
In 2021, the blind tactical competitive game "Glory Battlefield", operated by Mind Interactive Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Mind Interactive"), was officially launched in the Love Talk and Laughter Community, and publicly organized e-sports events. Mind Interactive is a company that develops games for the visually impaired, and a group of young people paint colors for their game dreams in daxing starlight industrial park, providing more visually impaired young people with more colors in addition to black.
Recently, the Beijing Youth Daily reporter interviewed the post-90s blind game master Keke, asking him to share the bittersweet and bittersweet of "Glory Battlefield" from writing the program to the launch of the past year.
Rely on sound to build a blind "chicken eating" battlefield
When it comes to tactical competitive games, many young people are not unfamiliar, there are "Peace Elite", "PUBG" and other games on the market, everyone likes to call them "eat chicken". And how can visually impaired young people participate in the game world, so that they can also feel the joy of such games? In 2021, the game "Glory Battlefield" launched by Mind Interactive filled the gap in genre games, in order to increase the social attributes of visually impaired young people, this game also openly organized e-sports competitions, which were sought after by the visually impaired young people.
"Battlefield of Glory" is the post-90s blind game master programmer Koko and team partners to use a year to develop together. Entering the game, the war sound effects around the ear make people immediately immersed in the tense atmosphere, sliding the screen to advance in different directions, in the room, the footsteps are crisp, when passing the water, there will be a treadmilling sound, and the frequency of footsteps is slightly clumsy. When turning left or right, there are faster footsteps that indicate direction. When approaching their companions, their heavy gasps can be heard. Didi's continuous alarm sound reminds the player that the enemy has entered the field of vision, the voice will announce its health status, slide the right screen to select the weapon, and you can attack it. When encountering walls, equipment, or new spaces, the system also uses voice prompts to help players find the map in the dark. As the game progresses, more urgent alarms sound overhead from time to time, prompting that a tsunami is coming and that all players need to immediately return to the "abandoned lab" to escape.
In a world of visual failure, keen hearing allows Koko to receive more information than ordinary people, and can empathize with the world heard by the visually impaired group, "for example, I can hear the sound of monsters moving in the field is not smooth, and should not jump from left to right at once; for example, if I hear some strange people walking and walking and suddenly disappear, I will bring it up to see if it can be optimized."
These all require developers to have a very strong spatial imagination, although the game world is hidden, Koko will also imagine the layout of each piece of land in the map, the orientation of the room, the slope of the hillside, the strange position, and gradually build through the code, "Because I am completely blind, I will feel that the map is black and white at the beginning, there is nothing, and when a map is done, you will see that the map has been colored." This is also how Koko reimagined color after he became blind.
To guarantee the gaming experience, Koko needs to debug the system almost every week. In the office building in Beijing's Daxing District, wearing square-framed glasses, he sat on the workstation, tapping the computer keyboard at a high speed, the speed at which he wrote code did not lag behind other programmers, after writing a line of code, the screen reading software would read the code to him at a speed of 700 words per minute, and the speed that ordinary people could accept was generally 200-300 words per minute. The reporter also experienced Koko's screen reading software, and he couldn't hear a word clearly.
Pass the level: "Every step is stepping on the pit"
The development of blind games, according to the words of Tang Monk, the CEO of Mental Interaction, is "to pass the level and cut the end, and there are still chasers behind it." Before the development of the mental interaction team, there was almost no game on the market dedicated to serving the visually impaired, and it was promoted to the "Glory Battlefield" of pure audio real-time combat, and it was even more like crossing the river by feeling the stones, "every step is stepping on the pit".
Previously, the company's team also developed another martial arts game called "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes". Tang Monk said: "Compared with "Listening to the Jianghu", the development of "Glory Battlefield" is 'much more advanced', "Listening to you jianghu" is a 'downward compatible' game that mainly promotes the plot, the battle has voice command, everyone can play, but "Glory Battlefield" is an e-sports product, technical and practical to keep up, fighting, shooting are all operated by the players themselves, in addition to no screen, 'there is no difference from the tactical competitive games we play' Visually impaired youth can also eat chicken tonight! ”
The hardest part of developing Battlefield of Glory is to make the sound realistic to "build the scene", 10 live players in the same battlefield, shooting and walking, A to the left, B to the right, these sounds to make every player feel, to give a comprehensive feeling.
The construction of a large number of sounds requires repeated trial and error, writing a battlefield code takes about 3 months, but also in the follow-up according to player feedback to continue to modify, Koko introduced, "the human ear has a spatial structure, the things heard are three-dimensional, if everyone takes the speaker to play the game is good, but in the game we generally wear headphones, the ear loses the feeling of 3D, we need to use various ways to present, restore the effect of the right, or strengthen some sound." ”
In addition, many of the pits are mostly a series of chain troubles caused by the market's neglect of the visually impaired.
Koko and Tang Monk introduced that there were several pits stepped on by game developers. The first pit stems from frequent system upgrades of the official engine linked to the game. At present, when the engine system on the market is upgraded, the main evolution direction is to make the vision more and more gorgeous, so that the game vision from 2D to 3D, and then to virtual reality, "it often does not tell us what the system does for accessibility, for screen reading." Many system descriptions tell developers how to debug the sound, follow the instructions to the blind game, and then find "My God, the difference is too much". Therefore, patching the game with the system has become an important task for the maintenance of Koko games, "we have to find our own way, the official upgrade once, follow them to change and test."
The second pit is the official system upgrade of the linkage, the engine is expected to have an effect of 100 points, only 60 points in the blind game side, the game designer does not want to sacrifice the effect, Koko will have to shoulder the heavy responsibility. After the discussion, the team's solution is often to take apart the program and split the original simple task into 5 tasks to ensure the original game effect. This greatly increases the complexity and stability of Koko's improved game, "for every program changed, a lot of changes are made" in many places.
The third "huge pit" lies in the "non-standardized characteristics" of the team's game development. Tang Monk pointed out that accessibility is not the mainstream of mobile phone system upgrade considerations, and a large number of users are facing problems with games after mobile phone upgrades, "each mobile phone client is not the same." What the team is trying to achieve is to maximize game compatibility without abandoning any blind players. Therefore, after receiving a lot of feedback from blind people, the team needs to trace the source of the problem step by step, and then adjust it by Koko to "do a lot of non-standard reforms."
In addition, Koko mentioned that the number of games in a game was also finalized in repeated trials, "At the beginning, for fun, we thought about whether we could play with 30 people, and then found that 30 people had too many voices, the amount of information was too large, and it could not be processed", and finally set the game scale of 10 people per game. From development to launch, the game has been debugged and maintained every week.
The path of study for the creators of visually impaired games
This year marks the 14th year of Koko's blindness.
Because of congenital eye disease, Koko experienced a long period of vision decline. In the first year of junior high school, Koko entered the blind school, and in the second year of junior high school, his vision dropped sharply, "he could not see things clearly, he could only feel light and bright objects", and in the third year of junior high school, his vision dropped to 0, and the color and light withdrew from Koko's world, "completely invisible".
During the period when he was completely blind, Koko was completely unable to accept himself. But the blind school is a "healing" harbor, "there are many students around who have worse vision than me, they are already fully blind or congenitally blind, seeing their optimistic and positive life conditions, including the encouragement and help of school teachers and parents, I slowly came out."
Out of the shadow of blindness, the future livelihood has become a problem for all blind people to consider from junior high school, "There are two choices for junior high school graduation, one is to go to high school to go to college, at that time, you could not participate in the ordinary college entrance examination, you can only participate in the single-trick single test of the targeted school; the second is to choose to go to vocational high school, graduate directly out of the work, do blind massage", Keke recalled, 19 people in the junior high school class, most of them choose to go to vocational high school, he laughed, their statement is, "Anyway, you read college out is also to do massage, Why waste three years in high school? ”
In the end, only two people in the class chose to continue their studies, Keke and a low-vision classmate who could see Chinese characters. "There were only two people, the school couldn't open, and that year it was just in time for one person to turn around from outside." In this way, a high school class of 3 people was started.
After being admitted to college, Koko helplessly found that blind massage is really the only way out for most people. The majors offered to the blind in universities are still very limited, "there are only two, one is Chinese medicine massage, and the other is music performance", which is another major that requires talent. This "no choice" made him feel resistant, and Koko tried to find his way out.
In 2012, Android and other touch-screen mobile phones exploded in the domestic market, koko felt the advent of a new era, but also learned that the school opened computer courses for hearing-impaired students, and developed a strong interest in computers. Koko became the only blind person in the school to learn computers.
Since there is no matching curriculum, Koko can only teach on its own. "The most important direction is to read books", undergraduate textbooks, C language textbooks, and various electronic computer books. Since there is no Braille teaching material, find e-books, Keke will use screen reading software to read out the text, if there is no resource on the Internet, go to buy a paper version in person, scan and read the screen with a scanner. Koko absorbs complex codes of numbers, words, and symbols by ear, and if he encounters special symbols that cannot be read, he asks his friends. In addition, he occasionally rubs the classes of his hearing-impaired classmates, but because he can't see, "the pressure is relatively high."
Because keyboard typing is a compulsory course in blind schools, blind touching the keyboard is not a problem for koko. After mastering the basic principles, Koko began to operate, and after writing a line of code, he would let the screen reading software read it out and check if it was correct. In the first few months of study, frustration was difficult to avoid, "I couldn't write a window for months, it was always a black window". At that time, the programming technology did not have an automatic alignment function, and Koko could only rely on imagination to "fill in the coordinates", and then find a clear-eyed person to see, "He will tell me that you are left of this button, the distance between these two is too large, I will make adjustments, and now that I have the alignment settings, I don't need help from others."
In his sophomore year, Koko wrote the first decent little program, an auxiliary tool for converting electronic versions of Chinese characters into Braille, which helped most of the students in the class to review the final review. By his senior year, he was able to take on some programming tasks online. Of course, blind massage, Koko did not hide when looking for a part-time job in winter and summer vacations. After graduating, Koko did software testing for a while and became an independent game developer, developing a game platform.
In 2020, through the introduction of friends, Koko came to Mind Interaction, became a formal programmer, began to work regularly for 8 hours a day, and participated in the development of "Glory Battlefield" and the post-debugging of "Listening to the Rivers and Lakes".
According to Tang Monk, at present, there are 6 blind people who often work offline with mental interaction, and with the addition of employees working from home, the proportion of blind people has reached 1/3. In the company, everyone's communication is not hindered, but also formed a set of their own communication culture, when Koko is demonstrating code programs for reporters, a colleague naturally reminds him that the window on the screen is too biased to the right, and opens the mouse button to help debug.
Construct a world that the visually impaired community can understand
When he was a young boy, Koko had already been exposed to some blind games through the computer, and the games at that time were particularly simple, "the audio was only a racing car, it was still advanced, and the others were single-player mini-games, playing with themselves, and the games they played when they could see were completely different."
Before coming to mind interaction work, Koko was already a loyal player of Listening to the Rivers and Lakes. After chatting with many visually impaired players, Koko believes that "'Listening to the River' really understands us, and it can make us feel that this is the game that blind people want." Today, "Listening to the River" and his own development of "Battlefield of Glory" have built "a world that blind people can understand", whether they like to fight or socialize, there is no obstacle to understanding the game.
Inherently blinded players have different worldviews and receptivity from normal players, and it is difficult for them to imagine the concept of an item without touching. Koko pointed out that making games to adapt to various types of visually impaired groups relies on "empathy", although visually impaired players have different feelings about space, "but we will have a common point, as close as possible to this point, that is, the scene we have constructed."
Koko talked about the development of gunfire, "Everyone's understanding of guns may be different, but we have feelings for gunshots." Sniper rifles and assault guns are not the same, the recoil is relatively strong guns, the sound will make a dull, heavy effect, the recoil is relatively light fast gun, the sound should be crisp, the strength is relatively thin. "After we have an understanding of the sound of the gun, we will have a general construction in our minds about the gun, although we don't know what it looks like, but we know that it must be very heavy, it will be more pressing, and what kind of strength is needed when shooting."
Outside of work, Koko will also join the game's fight, "playing and playing will think, here to change, the sound here is not appropriate, the expression of this place is problematic." He made a lot of friends on the platform, "knowing that I was a friend of the developer, he would hit me harder, thinking that I had stronger fighting skills." In fact, the best gamers are not on the development team, and before they can react, they are already out. At this point, Koko and Tang Monk both laughed.
Recall that in the early days of developing blind games, Tang Monk did not start a business with the love of "moving himself". But in a few years of practice, he gradually realized, "Close your eyes, in fact, your brain will be more empty, thinking more", blind people are us who have been closing their eyes, their lives need to be filled equally, and the game happens to be one way.
For Battlefield of Glory, Koko was pleased that the game's sense of substitution and shock "broke down the barriers of the discerning and blind.". When he heard the reporter say that "the world is built by yourself", he only modestly said: "I think it is better to make a little contribution to this group." In the future, he hopes to make audio into higher sound quality, and also make more efforts in program stability.
After the interview, Coco returned to his workstation, put on red wired headphones, tapped the keyboard, and blended into the discussion and chat throughout the office. Here, Koko will not receive more care and affection than others. Because in the eyes of the company team, everyone will encounter obstacles, "visual impairment" is just a window closed by the heavens, we can all contribute to our own barrier-free field, "we are all the same" I hope that you and I in the society can work together in more "invisible" places.
Text/Intern Li Tong
Text/Beijing Youth Daily reporter Wang Lei