Driving in my car to work this morning and thinking of how bored I was and how I wished I could play some kind of game on my iphone while commuting (not that I would - too dangerous!) I started thinking of Papa Sangre. I haven't played it yet but I've read about it and the concept of sound-based gameplay seemed intriguing. I started thinking about the old old text based adventure and rpg games from the 80's and my MUD days from the 90's and the idea dawned on me: Are there any games that exist right now that are SOUND only and voice controlled? So the input is your voice and the output is only sound - NO graphics at all (or at least, graphics would be solely optional). So, you could maybe have an RPG where you use a voice command to enter a command - say "look" and then the game tells you what you see in the "room" or area. Combat rounds could either be turn based ("Goblin hits you for 4 damage. What do you do?" "Attack goblin" or "Go south", etc) or could be more real-time - such as every 10 seconds the enemy automatically attacks. You could use standard text commands such as "inventory", "status", "north", "south", "use <whatever item>", "cast <spell name>", etc. Or it could be a text-based adventure using commands like "Pickup jar", "Put jar in water", etc with no combat. Kind of like Zork or something. Maybe for an improved audial experience sound effects could be added and they could maybe even be positional - for example if you're standing next to a cave and the cave's entrance is south, then you'd hear a light "whooshing" noise. The size of the program could perhaps be decreased by incorporating decent text-to-speech capabilities but a good narrator's voice describing everything with personalized character or monster speech would be ideal. I could see games like this being useful for people who want more of an audial experience or those that have hard times with trying to view graphics on their iphone or don't want to have to fool with virtual controls, etc. So - do any games like this exist or are in development? I wonder what anyone else thinks of this idea?
Sounds like a fun game I would play that. But do you think such a game would have great appeal on the appstore? I think that right now there's no specific releases, and most people that play text-based adventures on the iphone do so with an emulator. Zork's available like that.
I think it's a great idea, and would really only need a tweaked version of frotz to support voice recognition and text-to-speech. Not that it would be super easy, but definitely possible.