Half-baked Wii game idea

[prog]

* Using only your TV's stereo sound, and aural/tactile feedback from the controller as you wave it around, feel your way through some challenge. (Obstacle course? Blind combat?) The TV picture is blank and won't help you.

* Multiplayer variant: as above, except that the TV has useful visual imagery on it. However, the Wii controller input is flipped left-to-right. This is because you are meant to face away from the TV to play. You instead face your gathered friends, who can see exactly what you're not seeing, and are encouraged to shout advice at you.

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

I think you have it backwards. Unless I'm mistaken, many people aren't good with pitch-matching, but almost everyone can hear where sounds are coming from. (Or be tricked into it through a stereo sound device.)

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you're right, but managing the stereo field of sounds is tricky programming. Perhaps just saying "%70 left and %30 right" for the volume of a particular sound will be good enough for a game, but I think the implementation will be harder than that to create a truly "virtual aural space" (tm).

That's just what my experience tells. Programming audio effects are tricky to do right.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

They've done some very surprising studies on the pitch accuracy of lay people. They're not spot-on, but relative pitch (of the X is higher than Y variety) is very good, and if you ask them to sing their favorite pop song chances are quite good they'll be within a few semitones of the right key. (I can't recall where I read this, but I think it was a <1 month old BBC or New Scientist article.)

I imagine an audio game like that would be very popular with the right crowds. Alternately, put some flashy imagery on the screen that has little or nothing to do with the game play, just to engage the visual centers while your brain figures out the sound-controller mapping.

Dang. Now I want to write something like this for desktop machines. Too bad the Java sound libraries still suck dry rotting flesh.

[kahuna-burger.livejournal.com]

I agree about some sort of imagry, even distracting imagry.... as part of a larger dungeon crawling sort of fantasy game, a section where you face an illusionist with all sort of dragons and flames that you have to ignore and use the other cues to hit the real threats?

[doctor-atomic.livejournal.com]

Actually, people are good at both.