Hi my name is Ayden, i want to be able to make games that disabled people can play, i wanted to ask your help on how to make a maze game that uses the arrow keys as well as voice recognition. as well as a audio queue when you run into a wall. the reason i am starting off with a maze game is because i am not too experienced and i dont have too much spare time right now as i am a student in high school. it would be amazing if you could help me make a game as ive described with multiple levels.
Hello, Ayden. I think that you have a very noble goal with your game’s vision, and I wish you luck on your endeavor. I hope you are able to make it work.
The first thing I would do is choose an off-the-shelf game engine like Unity or Unreal to build your game with. The wonderful thing about game engines like that are that lots of people have already built lots of useful tools that you can use in your own game projects, rather than having to build them all yourself. That includes tool suites like voice recognition packages. Unity has a variety of options depending on your platform - you can use Google Voice for an Android phone game and you can use Microsoft’s UDP Voice recognition for Windows 10 (but not 7, unfortunately). Unreal engine has some options for speech recognition plugins as well.
Whenever you’re planning and designing a game, it’s very important to break down the tasks you’ll need to do in order to finish the game. Speech recognition is only one part of a very large whole. For example, for your maze game, you’ll need:
Some way to build mazes
Game rules for starting, navigating, and finishing a maze
A control scheme
A mapping of voice commands to controls
A user interface to show any other relevant information
A front end user interface for the player to start or continue the game, change options, set controls, etc.
Create sound effects and get music for the game and set them up to play at the appropriate times
As you can see, there’s a lot of big tasks to complete. Each of these bigger tasks should be broken down into smaller tasks - “Create a front-end user interface” is comprised of tasks like “create art for buttons for the front end user interface”, “place the buttons in an intuitive location in the user interface”, “write code that displays sub menus properly when you go from the main menu to the options menu”, etc. As you complete each of the smaller tasks, you’ll make progress on the larger tasks until they’re done. Building a game is a large undertaking for one person. If you want to do it alone, you’ll need to learn how to art, code, and design content. If you’ve got friends who are interested, you can try recruiting them to join your development team. Good luck! I hope you can provide progress reports with your project as you proceed!
The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work.
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