Longtime game dev Rusty Moyher chats with Gamasutra about exactly how (and why) he created his new game Dig Dog almost entirely without using his hand
Losing the use of your hands can be a devastating blow to both your career and your lifestyle.
However, there are people out there who face that very issue every day and are able to persevere and adapt. Austin-based developer Rusty Moyher is one such person. A voracious coder, Moyher faced a repetitive strain Injury (RSI) diagnosis five years ago that threatened to derail his career and passion as a game designer.
This is a real concern for game makers, for whom using a keyboard and mouse can be one of the most efficient ways of creation and communication. But for someone with RSI, the two peripherals become an almost insurmountable obstacle, making the prospect of using a computer an intimidating task.
However, Rusty was determined to learn how to create a game without using his hands. It took him a year and a half and learning an entirely new way to interface with a computer, but Dig Dog, the fruit of his labor, debuted last month on PC, console and mobile devices.
Moyher still technically has the use of his hands, but his injury means that spending hours hammering away at code with a keyboard and mouse is a no-go; to get back to his passion he had to completely change his approach to interacting with a computer. In the beginning, he tried multiple types of non-traditional peripherals, with no luck finding one that fit his needs.
“I had tried a lot of different ergonomic devices. I’ve actually spent way too much money on ergonomic things only to find out that they just wouldn’t help,” Moyher tells Gamasutra. “Like vertical keyboards, [and] mice that are vertical. I have this roller mouse that was like $250, and it was okay, but I think the human body is different for everybody, so it’s hard to find something that really works for you.”
Moyher’s first breakthrough was when he found a video on coding by voice (embedded below) published by Travis Rudd in 2013. Rudd is a coder and developer that also has RSI, and his video shared how he customized the voice recognition software Dragon NaturallySpeaking for use as a tool to write Python via voice commands.
Through contacting Rudd, Moyher learned about the NatLink and Dragonfly toolsets that allow users to use custom key phrases as triggers.
If you’re not familiar with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, by default it focuses on translating a person’s voice to standard text. Without additional toolkits and programming, coding with Dragon would be a time-consuming nightmare of a task.
By using Dragon in conjunction with Natlink and Dragonfly, Moyher was able to begin developing a set of triggers in a made-up language that allowed him to use vocal commands, yet utilize the syntax required by programming languages simply and effectively. However, it wasn’t exactly an easy adjustment according to Moyher.
“It took a while for me to actually solidify the toolset,” says Moyher. “That was even before the project was set up about a year and a half ago. I was just researching these tools, trying to build things that would work for me.”
According to Moyher, much of the work came down to simplifying the input process so he could work without worrying that one piece of the chain wouldn’t fail and cause him to lose work.
“Some of the examples I had seen people using with this kind of voice coding, [they] would set up relay boxes…they would run all of Windows and all of Dragon inside a virtual machine, like Parallels, and they would use that to communicate to their operating system of choice from the outside,” Moyher recalls.
“This added even more complication to the whole toolchain process, so I ended up simplifying it. I just used Windows directly so that there were less pieces of the chain. It means that less things could go wrong. Once I was able to shrink that, it became a little bit more manageable for me to kind of build up from there.”
Another issue Moyher experienced was that he couldn’t just take the commands for Python that Travis Rudd had developed and use them as-is, since Moyer’s integrated development environments (IDE) of choice are Visual Studio and Xcode. Not only did he have to develop new voice commands, but because of how much more mouse-intensive these environments are he needed a new way to input cursor commands.
Although Moyher had tried a host of different peripherals, none of them really clicked until he tried the SmartNav 4 from Natural Point. The SmartNav works by tracking a reflector attached to Moyher’s hat. The sensitivity is such that he only has to move his head in small increments to propel the cursor across the screen. However, Moyher admitted that the SmartNav 4 wasn’t entirely ideal.
Stock image of the SmartNav 4 in action
“The SmartNav 4 was something I found online that made sense immediately, because I knew for me the best thing I can do is take breaks and just use my hands less,” he says. “It ended up being a good mouse replacement, or at least good enough. I think it can be a lot better. It’s very rough around the edges. The software is old, and it’s kind of a finicky USB device.”
“I guess after having used it I’m more grumpy around it,” he adds. “I’ve gotten a lot of good suggestions from other people about eye trackers and things that I haven’t actually tried before, so I’m interested to dig deeper and see what other things are in this area.”
Of course, figuring out how to move the mouse without his hands only solved part of the problem. Moyher needed to be able to input mouse clicks as well. The solution for that problem was a lot simpler than eye-tracking or voice recognition, though: “I’m using a foot clicker, which is relatively cheap. just as mouse clicking replacement, and that actually kind of works with just a little bit of tweaking to some sensitivity stuff.”
Making games is hard work, but it’s even harder when you’re facing the sort of limitations Moyher was. Dig Dog started as a simple game centered around a dog walking around a desert. Moyher was interested in a platformer, but once he introduced digging, the game became more centered around that mechanic.
Incidentally, Moyher says Dig Dug was not the inspiration for the name.
“[Dig Dog] it’s not a Dig Dug reference. It was something that, I guess, it started as sort of a desert walking dog game. I was really interested in doing an iOS platformer at first, and it kind of grew from there,” he says. “At some point discovered digging, and then it became a game about digging, and at one point I think I had the name as Dig A Dog A Bone, but in the end, Dig Dog was just too good of a name to pass by.”
To code Dig Dog, Moyher had to rethink his approach not only on how he input code, but the way he laid out code in general. Even things as simple as vertical scroll speed proved to be a factor in just how the game was laid out.
“The process that kind of changed a lot for me as I was building it is I became more of a foxhole coder as I was building the code,” says Moyher.
