Messages

1

General Discussion / Re: Exploring Unreal World as a Totally Blind Player

« on: March 12, 2026, 02:33:16 PM »

Just a short update on this;

I got a "hello world"-style test working, so that I can generate visual buttons and text labels recognized by a screen reader. And also the UI reacting to button clicks generated by the screen reader.

So, I think I have the very bare minimum basics of interacting with assistive technologies. I hope to have more time later on, to expand on this to try making a little game or a demo. That can easily take months, as it lot depends on how much I need to work for money, and how I divide my indie hours between different on-going projects.

2

Suggestions / Re: forum availability

« on: March 12, 2026, 01:56:56 PM »

Thanks for the tip!

We have forum and wiki software maintenance scheduled at the last week of the month. Before that we will monitor the situation and read and think about alternative approaches to improve the situation.

Thanks for your patience, folks!

3

General Discussion / Re: Exploring Unreal World as a Totally Blind Player

« on: February 26, 2026, 09:25:32 AM »

Anyway. I hope this is somewhat helpful

Yes, it is. Thanks for the SRAL link!

For me it is helpful to get a better idea of different options available.

Sorry for the delay in getting back to this!

Absolutely no problem! I've anyway been slowed down because of working for money to pay my bills. I hope next week I will have more time for indie development activities.

Most screen reader users have strong opinions about voices.

Can you tell me more about this?

Are there screen readers which are generally felt to be more convenient, and others with bad reputation? Or is it heavily mixed, like some people having a strong opinion in favor of a screen reader which is strongly dismissed by other people?

In my earlier searches I read someone saying that dedicated voice acting is always better than a screen reader - is this outdated info, or how big is the gap between generated speech and pre-recorded audio of a real human speaking the game texts?

4

General Discussion / Re: Exploring Unreal World as a Totally Blind Player

« on: February 20, 2026, 08:41:56 PM »

I think it is good to continue the general discussion on the forums. Over the years we had questions and suggestions by blind players, so chances are that there are other people who are also interested in this. And when it gets to discussing very practical details, we can hop over to Discord direct messages.

My current understanding is that there are two main approaches:

1. making a game which includes text-to-speech functionality in itself. Everything is handled by the game code. The good side is full control and customization, the downside is no integration with other possible accessibility features. I'm under the impression that there are things like braille-pads, and an idea of braille-roguelike sounds really interesting to me !

2. taking care that a game does the right thing, so that the accessibility options chosen by the user can interpret and communicate the game messages. But I have no idea how to start working with this. I know that when writing a web page we can give specific tags which help screen-readers to parse the page in an accessible manner. And I'd guess a screen-reader can capture console output. But somehow I'd guess that in 2026 we have other options as well, so I just need to learn more about these.

So, to get started with learning more about it, my question is if you happen to have more insight about the point 2. Or, if you feel that I've completely misunderstood the very basics, then I need to know what web resources to read to clarify my thoughts.

EDIT: Thinking from a programmer's point of view, today my web searches led me to read about AccessKit. Tomorrow I will read more about it.

EDIT2: I really should to go to bed now, but before hitting the hay I wanted to try the built-in screen reader on my Linux. Oh boy, this sounds like the Commodore 64 speech synthesizer back in the 1980's !

For me accessibility is an interesting world to explore!

5

General Discussion / Re: Exploring Unreal World as a Totally Blind Player

« on: February 20, 2026, 02:50:51 PM »

Hello Elwin, and welcome to the forums!

This is Erkka from the Enormous Elk team. I am not sure how easy it would be to make UnReal World more compatible with screenreaders. But that is definitely something I'd love to learn more about.

Are you using a screen reader software, or a dedicated piece of hardware? Today I've been doing a few searches to find out if there is a cross-platform accessibility library suitable for making indie games, but didn't find an obvious solution. Still, I've been thinking about making a simple "hello world" test, and I'd guess first I need to learn that if in addition to console output there are other ways for a game to communicate with a screen reader.

Also, I saw you made a visit at the UnReal World players' discord channel. If I'd ask you more detailed questions, do you prefer direct messages at Discord, e-mail, or simply continuing here on the forums?

yours
 Erkka from Enormous Elk

6

General Discussion / Back after a technical problem

« on: November 23, 2025, 08:12:02 PM »

As many of you probably noticed, the forums were down for several days. There was a small but fatal error lurking in an unexpected place. But once spotted, it was rather easy to fix. So here we are, up and running again.

7

Development News / Re: UnReal World released on GOG.com

« on: October 21, 2025, 06:47:08 PM »

Thanks for the info, McKwack. I went to the dreamlist entry and clicked the button to notify GOG staff that they could connect the entry with a freshly released game. Let's see if that has the desired effect.

8

Development News / Re: UnReal World arrives on GOG

« on: October 14, 2025, 12:21:31 PM »

Do we happen to have anyone who knows how the GOG dreamlist works?

At the moment UrW has 1832 votes on the dreamlist - I wonder if the GOG system automatically connects the dreamlist entry with the actual UrW entry? Do all the 1832 voters get a notification that one of their dream games has been added?

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General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo 0.9.15 released

« on: October 04, 2025, 09:35:16 PM »

The Enormous Elk side-project game is alive and evolving. And available at itch.io and Steam

The freshly released version 0.9.15 improves the simulation of hunting and fishing, and adds different hues of blue for different depths of water.



Full changelog for version 0.9.15

• ADDED: new animal types squirrel, fox, lynx, mallard, and grouse. Also new fish; pike and zander.
• IMPROVED: The seasonal routine now simulates fishing and hunting with greater detail. Active hunting takes into account the availability of bows and arrows, and occasionally a missed arrow will be lost. The size of animal populations now properly affects how likely it is to spot this or that type of animal, and all active hunting affects the population size.
• ADDED: There now is basics of wild animal seasonal behavior patterns. For example mallards are migratory, so they are completely absent in winter. In summer they scatter around on wide area. In late autumn they gather to form a sord, so a lucky hunter can catch many of them at one spot.
• ADDED: There is now a details view for every activity of the seasonal routine. In the routine management dialog click the seasonal routine to see a summary, then click any of the item rows to see details. For example, clicking 'active hunting' row will show the types and numbers of animals caught, also telling if any arrows got lost.
• IMPROVED: The interactive hunting story now includes notifications about fatigue and possible ailments of the hunter(s).
• IMPROVED: The engine parsing textual elements now does better at handling English grammar. For example, it chooses different words when referring to one or many people; 'he is' or 'they are' This logic is designed to be moddable, so when translations are added new grammar rules can be defined in text files without modifying the game source code.
• IMPROVED: Pelts and furs now have four grades. In the summer animals yield inferior pelts, they are mostly good for making leather. In winter when animals have thick warm fur they yield ordinary, fine or excellent pelts. Ordinary pelts are called simply pelts, and they make utility furs, good for making clothing and other everyday items, but they don't have particularly high barter value. Fine pelts make furs which are the all-around basic barter item. Excellent pelts make luxury furs with very high barter value. The grade depends on the type of animal - for example hare fur is nothing exceptional, but lynx fur has interesting color patterns, making it more valuable at the market.
• ADDED: When tanning pelts to get furs there now are separate sliders for each pelt quality grade, and you can choose to process multiple grades at one go.
• ADDED: New item category VALUABLES. The items in this category are pearls, furs and luxury furs
• ADDED: Game difficulty can now be adjusted mid-game using a slider in the SETTINGS dialog.
• ADDED: When planning task MARKET there now is an option to choose which animals (if any) to take to the market.
• ADDED: There now are lighter and darker variation of the lake tile, to indicate shallow and deep water.
• CHANGED: When looking at traps it showed the average daily yield, calculated for past 30 days. That is now changed to displaying the total catch for past 7 days.
• FIXED: The gained, consumed and wasted items per week report got messed up when loading a saved game. This is now fixed.
• FIXED: Generating geography metadata sometimes got water depth and other values wrong. These are now fixed - unfortunately the fix doesn't affect existing maps, so it is recommended to start a new game to get a freshly generated map.
• FIXED: At least on Mac there was a crash on 3D map when enabling the helper grid. This is now fixed.
• FIXED: After returning home from the market your domestic animals could just disappear for no reason, sometimes also leading to the game crashing. These are now fixed.
• FIXED: There were various vague problems after a hunting trip. Traps stopping to catch anything and such. These are now fixed.

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General Ancient Savo discussion / Ancient Savo 0.9.13 released

« on: June 26, 2025, 08:34:47 PM »

Oh, it's a while since I last posted Ancient Savo release news here. This is the Enormous Elk side-project game, exploring ways to simulate a family and multiple generations in a survival game context.

The latest version 0.9.13 got just released at itch.io and Steam.

Also, on 50% discount for the Steam summer sale.

11

Mod Releases / Re: BAC 3.86

« on: April 30, 2025, 06:00:00 PM »

i get a error message of more than 256kb.

Ah, OK. I adjusted the settings. Can you please try again?

12

Mod Releases / Re: BAC 3.86

« on: April 30, 2025, 06:32:06 AM »

Thumbs up and a big cheers for carrying the torch of the BAC mod!

File will be available only one week so i would appreciate if a moderator could upload to forum server.

I'm fairly sure that you've now made enough of legitimate posts so that the forum automation considers you a real user not a spam bot - which should automatically grant you the rights to post links and to upload attachments. You can try it by replying to this thread - look under the message editor box, is there a "Attachments and other options" dropdown menu there? Expand the menu and there should be a field which allows you to upload an attachment.

13

Off-topic / Re: I am the new one

« on: March 30, 2025, 06:29:14 PM »

Unfortunately, this newcomer has been so far having a rather typical spam-bot bevarior. So, just muting the account before we get a spree of spam links. And, in case this happens to be a false positive of me misjudging the situation, I'm confident that a real human can easily figure out who to contact or where to send e-mail to resolve the issue.

14

General Discussion / Re: Where from comes myth from the game's intro?

« on: March 05, 2025, 07:37:06 PM »

The first winter is an adaptation (and combination) of "stealing of the Sun", and "Sampo" myth. The idea that a long long time ago there was an age of prosperity, when earthly life was somehow free of trouble. And then something happened (the sun went down and didn't rise up the next morning), things got difficult. But the humanity coped, and eventually the Sun returned - but somehow it was no more the same, things were different, something had changed permanently.

I remember that about the same time when UnReal World turned from a more generic "sword and magic" phantasy to Finno-Ugric mythology, Sami was also considering changing the title of the game. But a considerable number of players resisted, saying that they had grown attached to their mental images of a phantasy world which is somehow "unreal".

So, we took these ingredients and cooked a fictional mythology which both keeps the original name of the game, explains it, and still draws from Finno-Ugric mythology - not being a direct reference, but an artistic adaptation of the age old themes.

EDIT: Hmm, so I think that the theme of "unreality" as such isn't a theme in Finno-Ugric mythology. But there is this idea of world being made of various layers, most of the layers being unseen to the normal waking consciousness, but those unseen layers oftentimes being the most influential. So, the "unreality" is an adaptation from that idea, thinking that once humans had a direct contact and communication with all the unseen layers, but then they lost it - humanity survived, but the direct contact with the unseen world became more like a rarity, something for trained professionals, and rare occasional supernatural encounters experienced by common folks, and a loose collection to beliefs and rituals to manage these relationships.

15

General Discussion / Android remote controller updated

« on: February 20, 2025, 11:11:24 AM »

The remote Android controller for UnReal World has been lingering in some sort of limbo; at Google Play, but not available for modern phones. Until today. I finally upgraded the source code to meet the current Android requirements, and after a little bit of juggling the upgraded version got approved by Google.

So, this is an experimental helper utility for irregular players who have trouble remembering the key bindings, a smooth landing for newcomers, a quality of life improvement for anyone who feels more comfortable with gently tapping a touch-screen button which says "eat", an alternative to wireless keyboard for those who wish to play from the couch with a big monitor (or anything else you come up with - these are the use-cases I've heard of. Just trying to say that if you are familiar with the keybindings then there hardly is a need to try the remote controller, this app is just an optional alternative for those who might find it useful.)

There is a free version, so it is safe to test with no financial risk.

The paid version gets rid of the in-house ad banner, and enables custom layouts - you could import your own XML files to make a virtual keyboard layout to match your liking. It is also possible to chain a sequence of commands under a single button, sort of macros.

(still no iPhone version - developing and publishing for iPhone is a bit more tricky to get started with. But that remains a future possibility, as with Ancient Savo development I've been experimenting with some possibilities of deploying to iPhone - but that will still take me time to learn, and it is not on the top of my priority list)

If you are interested, take a look at Google Play