Audio Game

[sam89]

I am doing an audio game for the visually impaired players. Is it possible to create audio game in HTML5 with narration and sound cues? The game will not have any visual. 

[alex_h]

WebAudio is pretty capable of doing quite sophisticated stuff with sound. How will the player respond back to the sounds, ie what form does the player input take? Touch?

[sam89]

The player's input will be the keyboard and mouse. The narration will guide the player if the player selects the wrong or correct input from the keyboard or mouse.

[alex_h]

Ok cool, well you need to consider which browsers you are planning to target in order to decide whether you can use WebAudio. If you want to support Internet Explorer then unfortunately you can't use WebAudio, although I think I heard that the next version of IE will have WebAudio support.

There's a useful reference of which browsers do or don't support WebAudio here:

 

http://caniuse.com/audio-api

 

Trying to build something in the browser in which sound was an integral feature without having the WebAudio API available would be a very painful and largely fruitless experience I think! Going on my own experience I'd say you might find you have some small degree of success in some browsers but in many others you'd find the audio performance completely inconsistent and unpredictable with massive lag.

But in any case it would be worth looking at one of the commonly used javascript audio libraries such as Howler.js. This will use WebAudio if it is available but otherwise fallback to basic HTML5 audio.

 

http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/104/howler.js-Modern-Web-Audio-Javascript-Library

[sam89]

Okay thank you Alex.    How about narration?

[alex_h]

Well narration is just another piece of audio, so all of the above still applies. Generally speaking, timing is still going to be quite important with narration in most cases so you'd likely still want to use web audio for it if possible. The other important restriction I forgot to mention is that in many mobile browsers you can only play one HTML5 Audio sound at once, which is another big reason why you need to be looking at Web Audio not HTML5 audio. Although by the sound of it you are targeting desktop not mobile. But even on desktop you'll probably find that if you try to control playback several sounds simultaneously with HTML5 audio you are not going to have much joy.

[sam89]

Thanks Alex. Now I'm much clearer on what to do. If there is anything else,I will update here about it. Thanks again for the help.