Full Transcript
Jeff:
Please welcome Charlie Seligman, developer of the game Swordy Quest.
Charlie:
Here’s a piece of news hot off the press. But what’s been really lovely is the community members, when they say things like, oh, I can play Swordy Quest with my sighted son or daughter. The fact it’s the same, it’s not a game specially made, it’s far more about let’s treat everyone the same, rather than let’s discriminate against this group or let’s have this just for this group or just for that group. Let’s have it for everyone, but adapt it, so everyone can experience it in the same way.
Jeff:
Welcome to Blind Abilities, I’m Jeff Thompson. In the studio with me is Jesse Anderson. How’re you doing, Jesse?
Jesse:
I am doing pretty good. And you?
Jeff:
I’m doing good. I’m doing good. I know we’re gonna get rid of that question. We’re gonna just say welcome to the show, but we’ll save that for Charlie Seligman. He’s the developer of an adventure game, an RPG game on iOS called Swordy Quest. Charlie, welcome to Blind Abilities.
Charlie:
Thanks very much. Great to be here.
Jeff:
Oh, it’s a pleasure to have you, we don’t get to a Tech Abilities show without at least five minutes of discussing how you hunt and going for an imp or something of that nature. And Jesse on Illegally Sighted, his YouTube channel, did a segment about a month ago, and ever since we’ve covered it, and it seems like you’re responsible for a lot of lost sleep by many of our listeners.
Charlie:
[laughs] Yeah. Sorry about that, everyone.
Jesse:
That’s okay, it’s just the nature of the game, I guess. You get hooked on it and there you go.
Jeff:
Charlie, I’m sure all the listeners want to know what planted the seed, what got you started on this RPG adventure game of yours, Swordy Quest?
Charlie:
So it’s actually about two years ago, I had a heart operation coming up. And I knew that I’d be getting nervous as it got nearer. And so I wanted a real passion project. And I’d always wanted to do a game that was kind of like football manager mixed with Lord of the Rings. But I didn’t really know how I would do it. But I knew it was going to be turn-based and sort of click-based. So I started doing it, and Swordy Quest was born. And it actually ran for about a year and a half, and then some visually impaired people started commenting. And I just thought, you know what, everyone is concentrating on so many different groups at the moment, but I really feel blind and visually impaired are getting excluded. And so I thought, right, I’ll just do it. I’ll evolve my passion project now into a more accessible game. So I went down the route. Yeah, it just really went from there.
Jesse:
That’s really cool. Because that was actually my next question, is how did accessibility come into play? Like was that thought of from the beginning, when you were developing the product or thinking of the game? Or did it come in later? You said people kind of reached out to you, like, probably partially read, but not all the way?
Charlie:
Yeah, so by its nature, the game was naturally able to be more accessible than a lot, because it was using existing Apple objects. And then when blind people started reaching out to me, I was like, oh, yeah, okay. I’ll tweak that. And so I started off with tweaking. And then a chap called John posted on Apple Vis-
Jesse:
Yes.
Charlie:
That was the catalyst. And then New Deaf Gaming started YouTubing it and then Jesse, you did a YouTube. And then I was like, oh, my goodness. And the thing that shocked me the most is how little other games had been made accessible. And I was like, wow, okay, this will be my new focus now. And then I just shifted, I announced on Facebook, I said that I’m going to shift the next few releases completely different to what we had planned. And it’s all just going to be accessibility. So yeah, that was it. And it’s really interesting, learning it all.
Jesse:
Definitely.
Jeff:
One of the big things is I looked it up and I could see a shift in all the tweets and all the community, people responding to it. Like I said, they’re losing sleep. They were supposed to be doing something else, but they stuck in this game and they love it, and it’s really cool, I mean, you can find Swordy Quest on Twitter, on Facebook, it’s community driven. Can you talk to that a little bit, because Serina Gilbert who wanted to be here, so did Lisa Salinger, she wanted to be here too, but they got family things and I’m sure they’re not losing any time at night when they’re alone. They’re probably switching on Swordy Quest. But how has the community impacted you?
Charlie:
Because this was a passion project and not a financially forced product that I was looking, right, how am I going to max out on money sort of thing, I really thought, right, I’m just going to open it up to the blind community and visually impaired community because they know far more than I do. Like I used to watch some of the YouTubers going through and I’d be like, ah, and that never even crossed my mind that that would be the case. So I started doing polls on Facebook for what people wanted, yeah, I had my list of future tasks, but I just sort of scrapped that and started an accessibility list of what are the most important things. So yeah, it was mainly the Swordy Questers, who have been an amazing group on Facebook, and are always saying, oh, this would be nice, this would be better, can you make this different? And yeah, so really heavily community-based, and will continue to be going forward. So yeah.
Jesse:
And you had mentioned that there were a lot of other games, you know, or most games don’t really consider blind or other accessibility, but that is changing, actually, with the last couple of years there’s been a pretty cool, pretty good advancement with a lot more games, even considering accessibility features. And some of the games, you know, it’s the engine itself, you know, if it’s Unity, or Unreal, or whatever, that kind of gets in the way from preventing things to be accessible. But were there any particular challenges that you had, like, that you kind of ran up against when you’re like, oh, I could- you know, when you’re trying to make the game more accessible to voiceover?
Charlie:
Yeah, so the biggest, the biggest one was, so you know, with all Apple products, when you develop them, you can have what’s called a table view, an example would be, say, a list of songs in Spotify might be a table view. And when you’ve got a long list, the next header down doesn’t load. And that’s for performance. So it loads as it appears. And so when you’re using headers with the voiceover rotor, and you’ve selected headers, it can’t find any header further down the page.
Jesse:
Oh…
Charlie:
So I had a nightmare with this. I ended up doing a video that I sent to Apple, I raised it as you get two big requests a year that you can send to Apple. So I used up one of mine and just said, look, how am I going to do it and they said, look, the page doesn’t load, it hasn’t loaded the next header, so there’s no way for voiceover to see it. So then I had to implement this system where the headers became buttons that you could double click, and it would flick down to the next one, because it can scroll down, it just can’t scroll to. So yeah, that was a big challenge. But almost got there.
Jesse:
Oh, interesting.
Charlie:
You have to be a very imaginative programmer for the voiceover stuff. But that’s actually the real interest as well. It’s really fun.
Jesse:
Cool.
Jeff:
What is one of the biggest changes that you made to your passion, to your idea behind this, that you heard from the community?
Charlie:
I would say, every release since 4.2 was the big changes. I guess the infinite had always been a plan. But this sort of idea of having enemies where you could find lots and lots of different enemies, to try and sort of defeat them all, that very much came from community feedback and people saying, right, I want to be able to sort of find lots of different creatures. And that was creating procedurally generated enemies where it’s a werewolf’s head, a barbarian’s body, and a ghoul’s arms. That was really complicated, because it also had to work for sighted players. So it had to look okay on the screen, merging these different images together. So yeah, that was that was the biggest change.
Jesse:
I like that you mentioned, you know, the working both for blind and sighted players. And that’s one of the things I think that I really like to see, as far as kind of a trend in accessible games is that, you know, it’s cool to have games that are playable for, mainly designed for blind players, be it audio or text games. But it’s really great to see developers taking a mainstream game that everyone else has the same interest in playing and making that accessible to the blind, low vision audience. I mean, even as far as going, like, I love the fact that it’s not just like hitting menus all the time, or hitting buttons all the time. You know, you’ve got like the mini games for like the sneaking and gathering and things. And those are all really graphical aspects of the game. But they work perfectly well with voiceover.
Charlie:
Yeah, so the map was the biggest challenge.
Jesse:
Sure.
Charlie:
Because the map was fully designed for sighted players originally, and I redesigned it once. And still, voiceover was having problems with it. So then I just did a complete overhaul. And now you get different buttons and images appearing depending on whether voiceover is active or not. But again, that was that was really quite interesting to code that, but what’s been really lovely is the community members when they say things like, oh, I can play Swordy Quest with my sighted son or daughter.
Jesse:
Right.
Charlie:
And that was like, oh, yes. Because it’s not about positive discrimination. It’s about equality. Let’s get everyone doing the same thing.
Jesse:
Heck yeah.
Charlie:
And yeah, that was a really nice moment, when people start posting that. Yeah, it was cool. Made it worthwhile.
Jeff:
I was reading the notes in 5.0 that you fixed the correction where voiceover would speak it before, kind of give it away to the visually impaired person.
Charlie:
Yes, the sharing of enemies. Yeah. I had in the storybook, if the enemy’s hidden, so sighted players get a grayed-out box, they have no idea. But voiceover players, they hear “This enemy has not been defeated yet.” So they have no idea either. But when you then clicked on the details, and then clicked Share, it would voiceover what the enemy was.
Jesse:
Oh no…
Charlie:
And this is where the coding for visually impaired and sighted players, with- for sighted players coding, you can often just scan the page and check it looks okay. But with voiceover you almost have to speak the whole page.
Jesse:
Right.
Charlie:
To get an idea. So that’s been quite a challenge.
Jesse:
Yeah, ‘cause voiceover, what it does is it really doesn’t look at what’s visually there. It looks at the actual code, like the labels and things. And that’s how it gets the information to read aloud a lot of times.
Charlie:
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah.
Jesse:
I have to ask, I really do enjoy the music in this game. It’s really catchy. Like it just, like the exploration and the battles and things and like, just the music is really kind of catchy, like, and the boss battle music-
[boss battle music plays]
Jesse:
Any idea what they’re singing about? Or any idea what they’re saying? One of our other co-hosts was curious about that. I’m like, yeah, I don’t know.
Charlie:
You see? This is where a better man than me would come up with some story about how it was a chorus that had originally been used to defy swords and sent from above and all this sort of stuff. But no, the website I use for the sounds, because they’re all copyrighted, and so forth-
Jesse:
Okay.
Charlie:
-they had this play, and I scoured through so many songs. And I was like, for the boss fight, I need something impactful. And I heard that choral song. And I was like, this is the one, this is gonna be the one-
Jesse:
Yeah, it’s catchy, I like it.
Charlie:
I have no idea, no idea what they’re saying. And I really must find out. I hope it’s nothing like “Swordy Quest is rubbish.” But no, no, it’s really good, really good song, love it.
Jeff:
In developing this, this is like you have an idea. You said, you know, from football coaching to Lord of the Rings to bring that to fruition, you must have had a lot of coding experience before this to take this adventure and then to jump into the voiceover accessibility aspect of it. When did all that start?
Charlie:
So I used to do marketing. And I used to have the Sunday blues like everyone else, I used to run projects in the evenings to try and sort of do more things. And I just finished a project and I was projectless, I was like oh, I’m so bored, I need to do something, I need to do something. And I thought, oh, maybe I’ll learn to build apps, because it was iOS three, it had just come out. And so I looked to buy a Mac, but it was like 1000 pounds. And I was like, I can’t justify spending 1000 pounds for a hobby that I may not enjoy. So I put it off for three months. And then finally I thought, I really think I might like it. So I went out and I bought a Mac, a secondhand one, and started coding. And that was it. Six hours a night, I disappeared for two years. And that was about 10 years ago. It was my vocation. So then I switched my day job to be the same. And now, yeah, I just, I love what I do. And so the accessibility has just been a really exciting, interesting part to learn about. It is more complex, because of that thing I was saying earlier that it’s not just a case of converting everything on the screen to speak it, you’re having to code this extra way so that it pronounces it correctly, so that it doesn’t just have an image of a gem, it tells you “You have five gems,” but if you only have one gem, then it must be gem, not gems. And it goes on and on and on. So that’s a really interesting challenge to overcome.
Jeff:
When you say interesting, but you’re gaining this knowledge, so it makes tomorrow a little bit better than yesterday.
Charlie:
Yeah, absolutely. And once you’ve learned something, like even learning, so the biggest accessibility switch for me was there’s a point where the spirit guide comes down in the game, and people were having real problems because they could still access everything in the background
Jesse:
Right.
Charlie:
Now, for a sighted person, it was like, well, this thing that’s taken up half the screen, it’s obvious not to press anything on the background. But from a voiceover point of view, it’s not at all obvious. It’s just an extension to the page. And then there was one line of code where you could convert a view into a foreground, an accessibility foreground. It hides everything behind it.
Jesse:
Yep.
Charlie:
And I was like, oh, thank goodness. Yeah, I mean, Apple really have done some great stuff with accessibility.
Jesse:
They have.
Charlie:
They really have.
Jeff:
Little 3D voiceover there.
Charlie:
Exactly, exactly, making the page 3D. That’s exactly it. Yeah.
Jesse:
Cool, cool. This kind of dives into like one of the, I don’t want to say mechanics. But one of the discussions that we’ve had and some of our discussions on, you know, on the podcast, or just kind of in our group messaging back and forth, we’re talking about those pesky dragons, man. They’re really cool. But one thing, because I played it for quite a while, and I’ve beaten a few of them, I haven’t still unlocked the new realm yet. I haven’t quite gotten enough for that. But one of our other players was asking, am I doing something wrong? Because even if you have, let’s say, the highest level equipment, it’s still really does seem a little bit grind-y, like, you know, you have the one attack button, but you maybe get off, let’s say, two, three attacks, and then you got to chow down on a whole bunch of food, you know, it’s kind of like attack, attack, attack, and then heal a bunch. And then there’s really not really a lot of variety, so it’s really kind of grind-y.
Charlie:
Yeah.
Jesse:
Have you thought about like kind of balancing that a little bit differently, or even possibly having like, instead of just an attack, like a lot of turn-based RPGs might have, let’s say, if you have a sword and a shield or whatever, you might have a light attack or a heavy attack or kind of a different, like a rock, paper, scissors, sort of a thing where oh, the enemy does this, and oh, maybe they’re more susceptible to this, or you know, that kind of more variety in the combat instead of just like one attack button? Can you speak about that a little bit?
Charlie:
Yeah, sure. So we’ve done rock, paper, scissors in the PVP side of things. So I don’t plan to bring that into the fighting. But as you guys are doing the interview, I will let you into a little forward plan that is coming up in the future. And that will be enchantments. And the first enchantment that I’m going to do, I’m going to do one enchantment to start with, and then I test it to see what the players think. And then I’ll do it, accordingly, depending on what the community decides, but the first enchantment is going to be a sword enchantment, it will auto-attach to your strongest sword that you own.
Jesse:
Right.
Charlie:
And that will start by, it’ll have a percentage between zero and 99, which will be factored down to become a percentage of critical hit charts. So I will be bringing in critical hits, which will help with the grind-y nature.
Jesse:
I mean, I don’t have too much of a problem with a lot of the other enemies. But those dragons, boy.
Charlie:
Yeah, I mean, the purebreds are the same. So the last release, I brought in the battle snacks, because I suddenly realized that for sighted players, flicking across to eat some food and then quickly eating food and flicking back was a non-issue. Whereas for voiceover users, it’s actually quite a lot of effort.
Jesse:
Right.
Charlie:
Especially as going to the food in the inventory, you then have to scroll down. So I brought along battle snacks, which, when you’ve got battle snacks, so the idea is the battle snacks take one of each dragon part to make. So you have your grind-y battle with the dragon, then you go and get your battle snacks. And then the last item you’ve eaten, provided you’ve still got that food, that button is on the fight page. So that massively helps.
Jesse:
I don’t think I’ve actually seen that yet. Maybe I haven’t tried it since that particular update, because I don’t remember. I’ve beaten I think two or three dragons so far.
Charlie:
Okay, you may have enough. Yeah, so the battle snacks are in the magic menu, that’s in the [unintelligible]. Certainly New Deaf Gaming, that’s made a massive difference. And about three or four videos on he’s still mentioning it as what a difference, what a difference.
Jesse:
I bet.
Charlie:
And certainly on the Facebook group, I think people are saying what a difference, what a difference. And that’s been a key part of the game, is that visually impaired people should not be disadvantaged versus sighted players.
Jesse:
Sure.
Charlie:
And therefore you have to code it slightly differently, if voiceover’s active, versus if it’s not, like for instance, in the sneaking, the sneak bar moves slightly slower, because if you’re just using auditory it’s a lot harder than if you’re using auditory and visual cues.
Jesse:
Yep, I did notice that because I’ve tried it with both, mm-hm.
Charlie:
Yeah, yeah.
Jesse:
Even the fishing I think to a degree, because in fishing, they don’t move, the fish don’t move.
Charlie:
Yeah, it’s completely different. The fishing for voiceover users versus non voiceover users is completely different.
Jesse:
Right. But I love that though, you still have the mechanic and it’s still really close enough to the primary site of the mechanic that it’s essentially the same, just modded a little bit differently. And so you still have that other interaction instead of just not having it at all, which I definitely appreciate.
Charlie:
Yeah, I think the aim is to have it similar, as close as possible to the original but also because that then reduces future bugs, because if you’ve got two sets of code for the same fishing, it becomes very complex to remember to update both and all that sort of thing.
Jesse:
Oh, I’m sure.
Charlie:
So you want to keep it as close as possible to that, but you equally want to make it as different, that the difficulty is the same for both groups.
Jesse:
Yeah. Battle snacks. I’m gonna have to look into that.
Charlie:
Yeah, yeah, they’ll change your life, Jesse, honestly.
Jesse:
I think it will, ‘cause I want to unlock that new area, but I’m like, oh man, I’ve got to do another dragon?
Charlie:
Yeah.
Jesse:
Yeah, I am definitely gonna investigate that here at some point in the very near future.
Charlie:
For the future I have thought about adding, and I may get the demon shark to drop this, because at the moment it drops an auto-sleep button, there’s another secret for you that I’m announcing today, because no one’s yet killed it. But it drops an auto-sleep function, but I was thinking of having it to maybe in the future drop an additional auto-fight that will also auto-eat. But I don’t know about that, I need to think about that, I don’t want to completely take it all away, but I like your idea of the hard attacks and the soft attacks. Yeah.
Jesse:
Yeah, ‘cause one might have like, you know, maybe if you’re doing like a quick attack versus a heavy attack, because maybe you have a better chance of doing a fast attack, but you’ll do more damage if you do like a big attack, you know, just something to kind of mix it up a little bit kind of a thing.
Charlie:
Yeah, one of our great community people, Bo, they actually have written me a long list of suggestions for a fighting dynamic that they sent through about two days ago. And it’s along the lines of what you were saying as well, with the different types of attacks. So there does seem to be that appetite. So, yeah.
Jesse:
Okay. Very cool.
Charlie:
Just prioritizing it all. That’s, that’s-
Jesse:
Absolutely. Absolutely, I totally get it.
Charlie:
The poll has voted it quite highly. So I keep a big poll in my announcements always, which is what do you want to see next? And I think number six is more dynamic fighting. So yeah, it’s coming soon.
Jesse:
Cool, cool.
Jeff:
How can people access that poll and your community?
Charlie:
If you go onto Facebook, and search for Swordy Questers, then we’ve got a group there. And it’s one of the announcements. I think there’s about five announcements at the moment. And the poll is one of the five. So yeah, just go there and add to it. And that’s what I’m using as my focus for what to do next. And then obviously, bugs and accessibility sort of jumped to the top, they sort of cue-barge everything. And that’s, yeah, that’s how it kind of works moment, which seems to be quite a good balance.
Jeff:
How’s it feel to be working on this and developing this and see the excitement? I mean, from the blindness community, I can’t go onto my Facebook or Twitter without seeing some references to Swordy Quest here and there. What’s it like, the feedback that you’re getting, how’s that feel?
Charlie:
I’m so glad you asked that question, because all the hairs on my arms have actually just gone up. It’s a dream come true. Anyone who builds apps, and I’ve been building them for about 15 years, or 10 years or so, dreams of that app that starts going crazy. And I’ve had apps that have done well in the past, but I’ve never had a community appreciate it like this. And they say the secret to happiness is purpose, and I now have such a purpose, thanks to the Swordy Questers and everyone else who’s been playing the game and sending feedback and stuff that, yeah, it is a dream come true. It’s a dream come true.
Jesse:
Kind of on a similar note, like, do you have any idea, like, I don’t know if he had the app tracks anything or anything like that. But like, can you tell what percentage of your userbase might be more sighted players versus voiceover players?
Charlie:
No, no. So I can’t see how many are, but I get the feeling from the Facebook group that it’s about 80%-
Jesse:
Oh, wow.
Charlie:
-visually impaired and blind. I think so.
Jesse:
Okay.
Charlie:
That’s a guess.
Jesse:
Sure.
Charlie:
So yeah, no, I don’t know. It’s just from a number of posts that go up, ‘cause certain things I know will be only voiceover. And I’ll see like a lot of people saying, oh, that sort of thing. So yeah, I get that sort of feeling.
Jesse:
Well, yeah. And I think like you said, people who, you know, voiceover users, blind, low vision players are kind of starving for, you know, as popular as video games are, just, you know, mainstream everywhere now, that it’s just if they don’t have as many options as just you know, and when you get something that really works, that’s really like a solid experience, that’s one heck of a way to build a loyal community, I think.
Charlie:
Yeah, I think also when I did the shift and thought, right, when I did the shift to make it far more accessible, because I work in mobile development during the day for companies as well, I’d seen all the effort that goes into banking apps to make them accessible, and how much effort goes into, say, shopping apps and all that sort of stuff.
Jesse:
Yeah.
Charlie:
But people sort of think, well, we focus on the necessities, so that’ll do, let’s move on, and it’s like, well, I’ve got a real opportunity here to create a past-time that will be really- really make a difference to some blind and visually impaired people.
Jesse:
Oh, yeah.
Charlie:
And that sort of area, it’s starting, as you said, it’s starting to be picked up on. But it kind of feels it’s been sort of forgotten a bit, in the past. So yeah, so that was that was a really keen thing. And so I put the post on Facebook and said to all the sighted players, I am still going to be doing updates that we relevant to you, but there is going to be a shift now, and I hope you appreciate that, because you have lots of games, and these guys don’t have as many, so let’s do it.
Jesse:
I mean, yeah, as a legally blind gamer, I’ve been a gamer all my life and like, I don’t know, I’d go insane if I didn’t have, like, video games. It’s just, it’s been such a big part of my life. You know, I’m glad I have enough vision to play some of the mainstream games that I do. But you know, like, I have friends who like, god, I would love to be able to play that, but I can’t, and you know, now that, like I said, the last few years with game accessibility becoming more of a thing, and if you’re really interested in game accessibility, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the game accessibility conference, GA-Con?
Charlie:
I think one of the YouTubers went to it. Was it the one about a month ago or two months?
Jesse:
No, there was a European one, this, what was it, this spring, this summer, I forget exactly when it was, that was a European version. And they’re having the North American version, it is a free registration, but it’s a two-day conference. We’re on like, what is it, the fourth year now? I was a panel member in 2019 for one of the sessions. It was a one-day conference, and it’s a two-day conference now where there’s all these different sessions on different aspects of game accessibility. And I was just thinking that might be something you might be interested in, the North American one is October 11th and 12th, I believe, and you can just go to the GA-Con website.
Charlie:
GA-Con.
Jesse:
Yep. Game Accessibility Conference.
Charlie:
I’m writing that down. Thank you very much.
Jesse:
Yeah, I’m, I can’t wait. That’s my one of my favorite times a year now.
Charlie:
Okay.
Jesse:
And they’re streaming it, so.
Charlie:
Okay.
Jesse:
I will be there.
Jeff:
I’ve heard other people coming out with games that are basically designed for the blind, but for you to take this and still have it, you know, 80/20, at this point, that’s really good. I think it’s really something to speak of that you’re doing this and you’re feeling a passion, that if you go to the Game Accessibility Conference, that it’ll be as contagious as you’ve spread it throughout the community. I just think that’s a start. It’s something that I hope catches on a little bit more.
Charlie:
Yeah, yeah. No, definitely, thank you. I think more and more developers are starting to get more and more into it. And I think Apple has really kind of led the way for the likes of Unity and Android and everyone else. Yeah.
Jeff:
Yeah.
Charlie:
They’ve done a pretty good job.
Jeff:
I just thought it was really a surprise. Here’s Charlie, and he’s coming into the blindness world sandbox to play. And it’s like, huh, but he’s got some neat toy here.
Jesse:
And that’s the really neat thing is because now even with, you know, mainstream gaming, you know, you have a few games that are accessible on the PC, you’ve got both of your Xbox series X and S consoles, and your PlayStation Five, have native screen readers on them now. So if people were to, oh, I don’t know, make an audio game, say, that came out on Xbox or make a mainstream game that has accessibility features like The Last of Us 2, it’s fantastic. And now, you know, blind players can kind of be a part of that and have the same, you know, can navigate the store and buy the thing and play it, and it’s just cool.
Charlie:
And that that’s the thing I love, the same. The fact it’s the same, it’s not a game specially made, it’s far more about let’s treat everyone the same, rather than let’s discriminate against this group, or let’s have this just for this group, or just for that group, let’s have it for everyone, but adapt it so everyone can experience it in the same way.
Jeff:
Well, you’re responsible for us losing about 15, 20, 30 minutes on different podcasts.
Charlie:
I’m really sorry, not sorry. No, I’m very sorry about that!
Jesse:
No, don’t be sorry about that, I wouldn’t be. Yeah.
Jeff:
It really shows there’s a need for all these people to be using it. I mean, some people say, oh, you’re wasting time, blah, blah, blah. But just like everybody else in the world, we do our jobs, we do our tasks and chores and stuff, and we have some time to kill, whether we spend it doing one thing or the other. This just happens to be an option there. But you made it accessible. So you created an option for people to use, and they’re using it, so good for you, Charlie.
Charlie:
Yeah, thank you, thank you.
Jesse:
You’ve kind of given us a couple of little hints already. That’s really cool. Anything you can speak to as far as future plans for updates or possible future ideas you might have for future titles or something?
Charlie:
Yeah, the future title thing, a friend, because I actually train people how to build apps as well. And one of the girls, Michelle, who’s been training, she was like, oh my goodness, I really want to do a space version of Swordy Quest.
Jesse:
Oh, heck yeah, totally.
Charlie:
And there’s actually, I had to show her, I said no, I think that’s a great idea and go ahead with the space thing. But there is this person who’s actually suggested it about two weeks ago, and I really liked the idea. So maybe in the future, we will have a space version.
Jesse:
That would be cool, you’d go to like different planets and galaxies, and you could like trade or attack, or, oh, I can just think of all kinds of ideas.
Charlie:
Well, the trading in Swordy Quest is kind of similar to the old elite trading.
Jesse:
Oh, yeah.
Charlie:
Where you would buy stuff cheap, and then sell it somewhere else, which, admittedly, is just bog-standard trading. But it was playing that when I was a young kid that probably-
Jesse:
Space Battles, heck yeah.
Charlie:
Yeah.
Jeff:
I want to warn you, though, you talked about table view. Now you’ll have to come up with spherical view.
Charlie:
[laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Multi-dimensional. That’ll be interesting.
Jesse:
I’m thinking of like the mining screen that you have now. You ever play Mass Effect? And they do the little planet mining?
Charlie:
Yeah. Yeah. Good idea. Good idea. I might write that down actually.
Jesse:
You can have that one for free.
Jeff:
You should have requested a sword!
Jesse:
No, it’s all good.
Jeff:
Yeah. Well, Charlie, I want to thank you so much for taking your time away from Swordy Quest, just like all the listeners that they would just set the game down for a minute and listen to this podcast. They’d enjoy it, too. So thank you so much for coming on, and Jesse, thanks for being here. And it was great. I mean, you’re the inspiration of basically doing this because that’s your game. Illegally Sighted on YouTube.
Jesse:
Yep, YouTube and Twitch.
Jeff:
And you can get Swordy Quest from the Apple App Store. It’s so weird to say Apple and app right after each other. The App Store, download it for free. Tell us about the purchases you can make on there.
Charlie:
So you can, now actually here’s a piece of news, hot off the press. So it used to be that you had to pay $5.00 to go beyond the first map, Fanatasia, into the beyond and then the infinite. But I was preaching all about inclusivity. And I was putting a $5.00 paywall in effect at the top of the first map. And I’ve had long discussions and listened to lots of feedback. And everyone has a different view on how they want it to work. But what struck me was let’s let everyone play the full game. And if people want to buy stuff, it will be for extras, or for short cuts, if say they’ve got other things going on, like maybe a crazy busy job, childcare, whatever. So that is the new business model now. So it’s free to get the in-app purchase for the beyond and the infinite, you can purchase an in-app purchase to remove ads, access some hints and get some customizations, and then you can purchase or pick up gems in the game. And then the gems, there’s a gem shop. So you can use gems for items events.
Jeff:
Yeah, out of our five hosts on the show of Tech Abilities, three of them play it religiously, in a sense, but they all said support him, he’s active in the community. I think that’s really something, that you’re active in the community, there on Facebook, Swordy Questers. And that really stuck out when I was listening and editing the podcast. I just nodded like, wow, he’s involved, you know?
Charlie:
Yeah, I think it’s because I’ve dreamt of this moment happening for 10 years. When it does happen you grab it by the horns. And I actually realized, some of my friends the other day were like, Charlie, we never hear from you anymore! That’s because I’m spending literally- now when I pick up my phone, I used to pick up my phone and scroll through my wall to see what my friends are up to. Now I pick up my phone and go to search and it’s always Swordy Questers at the top and I click on it and I realized that was a really significant difference. So yeah, my, I guess the community are my new friends. So sorry to any of my other friends who are listening to this!
Jesse:
And that’s just it too, is like, I love how active the community is. And like I always tell people, whether it’s a game designed for blind, visually impaired, or whether it’s a game like Swordy Quest where you know, it’s designed for everybody, sighted and blind alike, when these things come around, definitely support them. I mean, even financially, throw ‘em a few bucks, you know, buy some gems or buy, like I for sure bought a couple of different things, I bought the unlock, you know, the ads, the ad free upgrades and a couple things because, you know, as much as it’s a passion project, I totally appreciate, you know, developers got to eat too, you know. And so like, I hope that you’re able to continue to be successful and everything, and I admit, I’m not really a Facebook guy, so like, you know, if you’re really active on Twitter, that’s kind of my jam, but…
Charlie:
Okay, yeah, Jesse. So the Twitter sharing has actually worked far better than the Facebook sharing because Facebook doesn’t let you share, like, pre-share anything.
Jesse:
What is your Twitter? I just want to make sure that I’m- I think I’m following it, but I want to make sure.
Charlie:
Yeah, sure. So it’s SeligmanVentures, but, let me just, because I’ve been trying to change as much as I can to Swordy Quest, rather than the company name, which is Seligman Ventures but I [unintelligible], and I can’t remember if I managed it on Twitter.
Jeff:
I did search my Google for Imp to define it. It’s a little devilish critter.
Jesse:
I see Swordy Quest, yep, you’re on here.
Charlie:
Swordy Quest, yeah.
Jesse:
And I am indeed following it, although I really wish they would have, I don’t like the way they changed their following button on Twitter, I don’t like the new look. I liked it when it glowed blue.
Jeff:
Turn on your voiceover.
Charlie:
Yeah, the enemies has been a lot of fun creating, actually. The Infinite enemies has been the most fun because of the challenge of morphing different enemies into each other. That has been, that’s been really interesting.
Jesse:
I noticed that like in the second world, a lot of the castles, they just had like, quests. And I don’t think they, like the first one had a boss. But then I came back later, I’m like, oh, now these other ones have bosses now.
Charlie:
Yeah, yes. They’ve all got flame bosses now, which were added on the last release. I need to work more on the Infinite.
Jesse:
Haven’t got there yet.
Charlie:
Yeah. Well, I asked the community, I did a poll. And I said, do you want the Infinite to be done iteratively, where I’ll do a basic Infinite, and get your feedback and then improve it? Or do you want me to just do everything and then launch it? And the majority were saying no, do it iteratively. We want to carry on doing it as a community.
Jesse:
Okay.
Charlie:
So I’ve just put that out there. And so now this next release really has to start focusing on beefing that out a bit.
Jesse:
Cool.
Jeff:
I really liked your last update, the show notes. Usually I just tap on it and listen for a little bit and it’s over. But you just kept on going, all the different improvements. And that was, I believe that was 5.0?
Charlie:
Yeah, yeah. 5.0. That was the massive release. It was actually, the release notes I had to cut short because the Apple documentation when you upload an app, only lets 1000 characters. For the first time ever, I had to cut short my release notes. So yeah, that was a big old release, 5.0.
Jeff:
You mentioned the YouTuber New Deaf Gaming. He’s quite excitable. So it’s really neat that even Jesse’s show, Illegally Sighted, that they’re taking the time and putting out these videos about the gaming and the excitement and all that. So that’s good.
Charlie:
Yeah. On that point, Jeff, having people like Jesse with Illegally Sighted and having New Deaf Gaming do the YouTube videos, they were invaluable, because I don’t get to see blind and visually impaired people playing the game, except when there’s a YouTube.
Jesse:
Sure.
Charlie:
And so when people are like, why do I know what I’ve looted? It’s like, oh, god, of course. I didn’t think of that part where loot comes out. And so it is so helpful with YouTubers covering it.
Jesse:
Oh, I bet.
Charlie:
That’s been really good, really cool.
Jeff:
Clue me in here, if I do on screen recording, and play the game a little bit, that’ll give you information, right?
Charlie:
On what, on Apple screen recording?
Jeff:
Right.
Charlie:
No.
Jeff:
Oh, you don’t get everything.
Charlie:
No, but if you did screen recording, and then you uploaded the video onto YouTube with your voiceover, explaining what you’re thinking and what you can’t see or what you have found. That’s the key, when it gets, when the YouTube is- like what Illegally Sighted did.
Jesse:
Yeah, the way I do it is I use an app to mirror my iPhone, iPad to my computer. And then I just record everything that’s on my computer, audio, video, and then just upload that video to the internet. So that way you have the voiceover mic, and you have the game visual and audio itself.
Jeff:
Good, good news. Good information. Well, Charlie, thank you so much for coming on and taking the time.
Jesse:
Yeah, thank you.
Jeff:
This is great. We’ll post this and we’ll get it out there as much as we can.
Charlie:
Great. Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you so much, Jesse. It’s been a pleasure. Really good fun.
Jesse:
Absolutely.
Jeff:
And Serina and Lisa send a big shout out to you, because I know they- luckily, they’re employed and they wanted to worry about that.
Charlie:
Thanks very much to you too. Amazing.
Jeff:
Take care, Charlie. Thank you.
Charlie:
Alright, bye. Take care, guys.
Serina:
And then cue our funky music, right?
Jeff:
And for more podcasts with the blindness perspective, check us out on the web at www.blindabilities.com, on Twitter @BlindAbilities, and give us a call at 612-367-6093. Leave us a message and let us know if we can put your voice on the next podcast. Drop us an email at info@blindabilities.com and download the Blind Abilities app from the App Store and Google Play Store. That’s two words, blind abilities. And from all of us here at Blind Abilities, through these challenging times to you, your family and friends, stay well, stay informed and stay strong. I want to thank you for listening, hope you enjoyed and until next time, bye-bye.
[Music] [Transition noise] -When we share
-What we see
-Through each other’s eyes…
[Multiple voices overlapping, in unison, to form a single sentence]
…We can then begin to bridge the gap between the limited expectations, and the realities of Blind Abilities.
Contact Your State Services
If you reside in Minnesota, and you would like to know more about Transition Services from State Services contact Transition Coordinator Sheila Koenig by email or contact her via phone at 651-539-2361.
Contact:
You can follow us on Twitter @BlindAbilities
On the web at www.BlindAbilities.com
Send us an email
Get the Free Blind Abilities App on the App Storeand Google Play Store.
Give us a call and leave us some feedback at 612-367-9063 we would love to hear from you!
Check out the Blind Abilities Communityon Facebook, the Blind Abilities Page, and the Career Resources for the Blind and Visually Impaired group