SoundMind is a game much like MasterMind™ only it uses sounds rather than colored pegs. The game should be completely accessible to blind users with a screen-reader. The resulting evaluation of how many were the right sound and in the right place, as well as how many were the right sound but in the wrong place is simply reported in a read-only text-box which should give no trouble to screen-readers like Jaws. Likewise the winning summary is a simple message-box which should work fine. It works with Windows Narrator, so it better work with Jaws or WindowEyes (grins).
Guessing the correct answer will report the number of tries it took you to get the solution, along with the correct solution. If you opt to play again, it will randomly generate another sequence.
Back to TopThe game begins with a difficulty of four, and with the "generic" theme, which uses various cartoon sound effects. You build your sequence of sounds by using the associated letters on the keyboard (for the "generic" theme, this is A through F). If you make a mistake, you can use Backspace, just as you would when typing. To clear the entire sequence, use the Escape key. To hear your current sequence, use Space. To make a guess with your current sequence, use the Enter key. After making a guess, your current guess will be cleared out so you can make a new guess.
You can review previous guesses by using the up and down arrow keys (or left and right arrow keys). To replay the previous guess that you have selected, use the "Question Mark" key.
Difficulty can be adjusted by changing the number of slots to be
used. The game defaults to the same as
MasterMind™—four. However, using the menu (or the
Const statements
at the top. However, less than three is a rather boring game,
and more than 10 is suicide. Note that changing the
difficulty causes the game to rebuild a new sequence, in effect,
starting a new game. Both the difficulty and the current theme
are preserved in the registry on a per-user basis, so the next
time you start the game, it will use your previous settings.
The game starts up with the last difficulty and theme settings, which default to the "generic" theme (6 sounds, "A" through "F") and a difficulty of 4. To make your first guess, use the letters "A" through "F" to select four sounds for your first guess at the secret pattern, then press enter for the results. The results will contain both the number of sounds that are correct and in the right place, and additionally, the number of sounds that were correct (in the sequence) but in the wrong place in that sequence.
Thus, if the master sequence was randomly assigned as "A B C D" and your first guess was "A D F F", it would report that you had one right and in the right place (the "A" in the first position) and that you had one right, but in the wrong place (in this case, the "D"). However, as you do not know which of the items in your guess was in the correct position
You might try a second guess of "B C D F" in the hope that it was the terminal "F". However, in this guess, the results come back that none of them are both the right sound, and in the right position. However, you now have three that are the correct sound, simply in the wrong place. Armed with this information, you know that by adding "B" and "C", you now know two of the sounds. You just need to figure out where they go, and what the remaining sounds and positions are.
This process continues until you deduce the correct sounds in the correct sequence, at which point you have won. It will report back the number of tries it took you. In theory, there's a scheme by which you can guess any sequence of four sounds from a pool of six sounds in no more than five guesses. I'm not quite that good at it.
Back to TopThe game is themeable, and a simple theme package is available as well. Simply unzip the theme package into your desired location, and use the File → Theme menu option to point at one of the theme directories. The current extra themes include major ("mandolin") and minor chords. These are more difficult than the generic theme, as there are eight (rather than six) possible items for each position. When creating your own themes, keep in mind that the more sounds you have, the more difficult the game will be.
New themes can easily be created by pointing the theme at a folder that contains WAV files named A.WAV, B.WAV, C.WAV, etc. Thus, there can be up to 26 sounds, compounding the difficulty as more sounds are available for each slot. In addition, the folder needs two files named bad.wav and success.wav. The file bad.wav is played as an indicator that is played when a bad guess is made (either too short, you've tried to put in more sounds than there are slots, or your guess is not the correct solution). The file success.wav is played when you finally guess the correct answer.
Back to TopThe main program and the source-code both unzip into the location you put them, not a sub-folder. I may change this in the future to make it a little cleaner. Additionally, you may need the VB6 runtime DLL files, though I'm not sure.
Future enhancements for the app include adding in support for self-voicing abilities, using the Microsoft SAPI.
If you have any feedback, bugs, ideas, suggestions, or the like, feel free to email me with your thoughts. It's just a little game I cranked out in an evening, but it may be easily improved.
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