Encoding without keystroke: hands-free creation of a complete video game

Dig Dog is a little fun video game. Call "Spelunky for children "- and do not think of that as a compliment to the wrong side, either. Dig Dog, which was launched Thursday on iOS, Xbox, Windows and Mac, eliminates some of the complications of the genre, smooth control and depth. It's as if the modern wave of randomly generated adventures and looking for surprises existed in the video game arcades of the early 80s. (And all this for only $ 3!)

I liked Dig Dog enough when I stumbled upon it at last year's Fantastic Arcade in Austin, Texas. But my interest in the game has gained momentum when its creator announced the start of this week to confirm something that I'm not sure that another video game creator did: code a game whole by itself … without using his hands.

Rusty Moyher, a longtime developer and resident of Austin, was diagnosed with Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) about five years ago – while he was in the middle of a project of tedious game design, and nothing less – and discovered that his only real physical relief had come complete breaks, 100% of the seizure and use of a mouse. That would not be enough, he admitted. "I always want to play games," Moyher told Ars. "It's hard to imagine a career or a job without a computer."

Moyher wanted to prove that his dream of creating legitimate video games without using his hands was possible. For him, the only real solution was to create and start a good game of work – and tell the world how he had done so that others do the same.

Fighting RSI with a dragon

The RSI diagnosis was never convenient, but Moyher's wrist and hand pain reached an unsustainable peak when he was in the middle of the least compatible conceivable project. He and two long-time collaborators in game design had come up with a $ 60,000 Kickstarter goal for a "six games in six months" project. I just read the Retro game crunch The pitch these days still hurts the wrists of Moyher: the team would take into account the suggestions of paying donors, then transform a prototype in 72 hours. A debugging process would ensue with the end of a game slamming before the end of the month, creating and developing the next game starting immediately after.

Thanks to Moyher's RSI, the team of three men did not meet these deadlines. Nevertheless, he abandoned his Kickstarter games while experiencing changes in the configuration of his office: ergonomic keyboards, desktop changes for posture reasons, mouse exchanges. Nothing worked, except for the good old days, far from the keyboard and the mouse (with drug injections directly into the skin).

"The Miracle Solution" appeared when Moyher found a video presentation of developer and coder Travis Rudd, which was posted online in 2013 shortly after his diagnosis, and which introduced step-by-step viewers across the globe. Rudd's experience. The 28-minute video shows Rudd how he customized Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a speech recognition software suite, to write code in Python language with no other means than his voice. This contradicted the wisdom that Moyher had found in the RSI and coding forums, stating that Dragon's utility for coding was limited. "Do not do it, it's impossible," was common wisdom, said Moyher.

But Rudd swore based on techniques that he had applied to Dragon's ecosystem, which Moyher eventually pulled out of the loudspeaker by harassing him via e-mail. The two sets of tools he discovered, Natlink and Dragonfly, were appealing because they could be customized to support certain key phrases that would then trigger everything from basic text input to variable names, passing by the macros. "The commands you formulate, essentially in elaborate language, are all designed to be easily and quickly recognized by Dragon," said Moyher. He also recommended "short, precise words or phrases that can be executed quickly".

The word "slap" hits the return key once; "two slaps" hits twice. Say "camel" before pronouncing a phrase such as "this is variable" aloud and it will be analyzed as "thisIsVariable". Open parentheses can be typed by saying "missing" (eg <) and "rack" (for >). Moyher was kind enough to provide the video of an average coding session, embedded below:

Some of these terms were already included in the tools that Moyher had downloaded and associated with his installation of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. But he admits that for the most part, he had to invent and train the system to accept new ones.

The old slap of Texas

"I needed to create a vocabulary suited to what I was doing and that I knew well," Moyher said. "The voice coding process is as follows: I have to perform programming tasks, as usual, then set commands and modify the system, and I have to remember these as well. [shortcut terms]. It can be very slow. I had to slowly build a library of commands that I knew well, working with my voice, which I could really remember. "

Part of his need for a custom vocabulary was that his programming choices in Visual Studio and Xcode were better suited to developing games, as opposed to the voice commands designed for Emacs that Rudd and his peers had created. By the way, his choice of programs also required a lot more cursor movement, which meant that he needed something that Rudd and others had not suggested: a real substitute hands free mouse.

Rather than jerry-rig a kind of infrared head or eye tracking, Moyher opted for what seemed like the best option at the time: a $ 500 SmartNav 4 from the Natural Point Computer Supply Company , specializing in specific needs. A sensor is placed in front of his field of vision and he fixes a small reflector on the cap of his choice. After some adjustments of sensitivity, Moyher managed to make it work with a fairly minimal head movement, about "5-10 degrees" from left to right and less vertically. The final piece of the hardware puzzle was a pedal, which he uses to control the clicks of a mouse.

As Dig DogThe only coder, designer, and artist, this head tracking solution was imperative to draw the elements of the game and the animation images, which are otherwise simple. The giant pixel of the game grows to around 220p with a maximum palette of six colors. "It's not as precise or as fast as a mouse," admitted Moyher. "I've designed the style of the game to make it more workable with this system."

Moyher's initial mission was to achieve something that would not only be designed without hands but also testable without hands, but it did not quite remove that part. Dig Dog started life with a design priority going beyond mere achievement; he wanted to create a good iOS platform game. His first prototypes were more atmospheric and unobtrusive, and they simply presented a pixilated dog wandering through a giant desert. "Then I came across digging and I realized, oh, it's obviously digging right now." (Indeed, the basic action of pressing to dig and move by hitting the edges of the screen works pretty well with the constraints of a smartphone screen, although this is also fun with a standard gamepad.)

However, as a unique designer and coder, Moyher had to endure wrist pain in the form of an exception: the prototype test. "I wanted to test the game with my tools, but the whole test was done with my hands," said Moyher. "There was no other way to get acquainted with the game and tweak the mechanisms without doing it."

Throw a bone to the community

The mission of Moyher's complete game came, in part, to give himself the time to understand a coding vocabulary from speech to speech. Unlike Kickstarter, he did not want anyone in a project, depending on his speed or skills, working on a larger project. He now thinks he has taken root to go forward as a speech coder first, alone or as part of a larger project. ("I've almost reached speed" one by one, "he said, comparing his spoken speed to a normal typing speed.) He's already looking for superior tools, including tracking technology. look, to see if he can get increased speed and fidelity thanks to the movements of the mouse with tracking of the head.

But just as Moyher was inspired by the community when he succumbed for the first time to RSI, he hopes other game makers with similar diagnoses or similar handicaps will look at his success and get into the game. realization of their dream games.

"My thought (from the beginning) was, if I could make an interesting and fun game to play, it's a fun way to promote [voice coding] as an idea, "said Moyher. The tools at this moment are quite fragile. They can relatively easily break, with regard to the installation of software, their operation under Windows, as well as various complementary modules and hardware. Just to promote the idea that there is another way of working and that these things exist? Maybe it would improve voice coding in general! "

Moyher sent some links after our interview to anyone interested, as many of his adjustments and efforts were based on information available to the public. Begin with this guide on DragonFly as a specific addition to NaturallySpeaking, as well as on an installation guide of relevant add-ons. Dive further on handsfreecoding.org.