A friend of mine is making a blind horror game...

[Kherr]

I really think this concept could be great for the gaming community, let alone produce a different breed of horror games for those of us that love them. I love horror games so I'm not going to lie, this sounds interesting. Check it out!

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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/daigonite/play-blind-dark-passage-and-the-reless-audio-engin

[daigonite]

Hi, this is the developer.

I'm a coworker of Kherr's and I focus mainly in audio design. For the last 2.5 years I've mainly been focused on a Pokemon game for the blind, and I learned a lot about how the blind use audio positioning in their games. Essentially what this is, is an 3D audio emitter engine that can detect collisions, and can be customized for a variety of purposes, extending from blind accessibility and blind games such as this game to producing reverb effects dynamically.

THE GAME

The game features the main character going blind right after the opening cutscene, where he/she is involved in a plane accident and everyone else dies in the crash. You are blind after being hit on the head in the accident. You can spawn in a variety of areas depending on the user's choice before loading the map.

In order to detect your surroundings, you either can feel it, by putting your arm out and feeling out a certain percentage of the surface to identify objects, or use sound to determine vague threats and objects in the distance. As you progress, you can use a wide variety of sticks, stones, and other natural objects to survive.

While this is going on, there is a monster in each zone, that is trying to kill you in your dreams, which still have vision. You need to either escape or defeat the monster's puzzle or else you will eventually die. The monster gains more power the lower your comfort is, so the goal of the game is to manage your supplies, and either reach civilization or find help before the monster kills you (or actively go out to defeat him).

THE ENGINE

RELESS stands for "Reverb EchoLocation Emitter Sound System". It calculates how far away collisions are from an emitter, and approximates a left and right channel quantity for a reverb effect to apply this sound, so that as you approach a surface, the reverb is reduced.

Essentially this engine produces a set of surfaces to test collisions on, and sets various modifiers based on those properties. I built a (fairly buggy) demo in a week in C# to demonstrate the basic geometry behind it:

https://youtu.be/YWsiKBV_3dg

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWsiKBV_3dg&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

I apologize for the issues in recording my mic here. I will explain what is going on in detail after the demo.

Within about one week, I was able to build a simple prototype in C#. The player's initial point and the emitter are located at (0,0,0). As the player moves around the emitter, panning is applied, although it has some bugs.

The basics of the RELESS engine are in place here. As you move up and down, there is actually one defined surface there. RELESS calculates how far away this surface is from the emitter and calculates this property dynamically. In this demo I do not show this property acoustically - instead I get an average of this property and use that instead. This is a basic tinny reverb effect.

Also, notice that as you move up and down, the volume changes as you move away from the emitter.

Rotation sort of works but acoustically is buggy, but with more development time we'll fix this as well. We will be translating this system into C++ for portability.

I will provide copies of this demo on request.

The goal of the engine is to revolutionize 3D emitter sound design. The goal for the end developer is to have something that is easy to implement with a few presets but also allow for massive amounts of customization further down the line.

Feel free to drop by any questions, I'd love to hear what people think. I want to basically start a new revolution in game audio design, so yeah.

[Kherr]

Hey Daigonite, I updated your post to include an embedded video version of the youtube link you provided for ease of access. Just wanted to let you know!