Game Accessibility

Game accessibility is about making games playable or accessible to everyone especially people with certain disabilities. For example, for mobility impaired players, the option to remap the controls, which means to assign a function to a different key or button, can help them to be able to play the game. Another example, subtitles in games with dialogue can help people who are deaf to know what they are talking about and the option to make the text larger can help make the text more visible.

Recently,

as part of our PBL(Project based learning) which is the final project in our school, we were grouped into 5 groups with 5 members each and we were tasked to create a game while answering the driving question which is

“How can we make games more accessible to everyone, regardless of impairments or disabilities?”

My groupmates and I decided to make a game that can be played by people with colorblindness. Our game is called Color Crusade which is a computer based platformer.

Menu of the game

Story of the game

The story of our game is about teenager named Alex who has a type of colorblindness called monochromacy which means that he can only see shades of black and white. He has longed to see colors. Fortunately he meets a wizard who is willing to give him the ability to see colors but only if Alex can prove his worthiness by meeting the wizard at the top of his castle by jumping from platform to platform.

Mechanics

The objective for the player is to control the character to jump from platform to platform and enter each of the door at the top of each level until reaching the wizard

This is a one player game wherein the player controls the characters movement from left to right using the arrow keys while the spacebar makes the character jump.
There will be 3 levels for the player to play on.

In each level, there are corresponding functions for each colored platform based on the what level the player is on. There are red, green, blue, yellow, black and white platforms.

For all the levels, Black, Green and Blue are merely platforms for the character to step on in order to jump up. The only difference among them is that the black colored ones allow the character to jump through it from beneath going up.

A section of the 2nd lvl of our game

For the red and yellow platforms, in the first level, the red colored platforms kill the character, while the yellow ones are just a platform for the character to step on as he goes up. However, on the second and third level, both the red and yellow platforms kill the character.

In the third level, there will be a white platform that moves from side to side.
If the character dies, the player has to restart the level.

The Feature

We added a feature in a form of text that labels the color of the platform. That way players who are colorblind can distinguish the difference of the platforms.

Awareness

Because of this project, I realized the importance of making games accessible. By making games accessible to people with certain disabilities more people will be able to play and enjoy games.