Audiotwine

I’m considering finding a way to make a Twine game work as an audiobook – that is, including recorded audio narration with each screen.

I’ve found these two approaches, but am yet to dig into them to see how they work:

Some questions, technical and aesthetic and theoretical. I’m interested in all answers, but I’m also particularly interested in hearing from blind and visually-impaired twine fans, and folk with experience of text games and accessibility.

  • Do you know of other technical ways to use audio in a Twine? Any advantages and drawbacks for any of these?

  • Audio only, or audio and text presented together – which is better?

  • Would it be better for narration to play automatically, or for it to be an optional press play thing? What are the advantages and drawbacks here?

  • What ways are there of dealing with returning to nodes? Replay the narration, or not? Can we imagine ways of skimming audio the way we skim new screen text? Should we indicate that something has changed in the node in the audio version, to recommend listening again?

  • What non-visual ways are there of selecting a link? Giving each link a number and using keyboard input, perhaps?

  • Are there other good places to discuss this?

  • Any other thoughts?

AND the big one:

  • Would anyone be interested in collaborating on this?

See Codename Cygnus to see an example of choice based radio drama.

I love this idea, particularly for accessibility purposes, but I will recommend having text available as well. For the aforementioned accessibility purposes.

I use glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/5061 it’s always been the easiest for me

Hi,

Free For All to Play had a kickstarter campaign for their audio-only project Grail to the Thief (GTTT). It was released in September. I don’t know what system they used to make it. For development, they visited a school for the Blind and found out what visually-impaired players would want to do and how to do it.

– I’m also particularly interested in hearing from blind and visually-impaired twine fans, and folk with experience of text games and accessibility."
I can help you with this.

  • Audio only, or audio and text presented together – which is better?
    I think GTTT is completely audio, but the choices are numbered and also displayed as text.

– Would it be better for narration to play automatically, or for it to be an optional press play thing? What are the advantages and drawbacks here?

GTTT plays narration automatically with the option to replay the scene and choices on their own. I thought this worked well, but I think it restricts how much can be said; we can’t just listen to a single line if we want.

  • What ways are there of dealing with returning to nodes? Replay the narration, or not? Can we imagine ways of skimming audio the way we skim new screen text? Should we indicate that something has changed in the node in the audio version, to recommend listening again?

There was very little real choice in GTTT, probably because of a difficulty with the above. The puzzles are basic, and you could solve them without knowing why you were offered certain actions. I don’t think you were allowed to leave certain locations until you listened to the appropriate text and choices. GTTT would play revised narration automatically.

  • What non-visual ways are there of selecting a link? Giving each link a number and using keyboard input, perhaps?
    That’s how GTTT does it. It worked well for me.

  • Are there other good places to discuss this?
    Twine has a discussion board, I think.

  • Any other thoughts?
    I didn’t particularly like GTTT for many reasons. I’m sure I wasn’t the target audience, though. The story was silly, simple, and juvenile. Maybe I’d like it if I was 10. The interface seemed to work well, but I wonder if it restricted the complexity of the game. Maybe the developers didn’t have time to do more. It was professionally done, though, using voice actors. I’m not sure why, maybe because of the length, the game state couldn’t be saved.

  • Would anyone be interested in collaborating on this?

Yes. If you want to talk offline, you can PM me.

Neil

Just to say, I really appreciated all these responses. Having to hold off on dev for a month or two while I wrap up some other projects, but coming back to it :slight_smile: