For user accessibility reasons, I always follow the game design rule for myself when doing game design. (A good thing that comes out would be, if a game is enjoyable without sounds, it could potentially be BETTER with sounds. )
I just wanna bring up this issue just to bring some attention to accessibility in games. Especially when it comes to accessibility for the disabled. A number of people still don’t know about this subject, or simply don’t bother
Sound comes in as a second layer to the game design, to enhance the game experience, make everything feel good, creates the atmosphere, provides additional information…
For story-telling, voice acting, (and sometimes even sound effects), we need to have subtitles for them, just for the player to be able to catch up with the story and enjoy the game more.
Thats the most basic rule that I follow, its not hard to do, and at least it caters to and enhances the gaming experience for the hearing impairment audience.
There might be people that could say that they are a small group in the market, I won’t fight with them, I don’t go by figures for issues like this. If there is something that could be done, and it is within our ability to do, then just do it. It might not make a difference to the indifferent, but to that person whose experience is enhanced by it, it could mean just that little bit more.
Do I always follow this rule? Well, that is balanced by my personal philosophy :p
Rules might be broken, but only if its really worth breaking
It really just depends on the situation, there are always more than one way to handle a situation, always assess the requirement, yourself, your situation, and the time required to come up with the best solution.
A little bit of history…
I have never thought of this issue before, until I got a request during the development of Anomaly Racing by a disabled player. He was disabled from neck down, and can’t use his arms.
His request was to allow the use of mouse as one of the control means to steer the vehicle because of the device he is using to interact with the computer.
We didn’t do it, not because we wanted to ignore him, but because we are, for most part of the development, just 2 guys in the dev team working on Anomaly Racing. (Also, this could have significant impact on the balance between the 2 types of control schemes.) Anyway… I still feel pretty bad when I think of this even now.
I still don’t know much in this subject, but this incident made me aware about some user accessibility issues. It is impossible, and I can’t cater to all accessibility issues for Lone Wolf and for future projects (keeping my fingers crossed…) but I try to where generally possible.
ANOMALY: RESURRECTION
For my personal project, I’ve already worked out a control scheme to handle the 2 different control scheme issue, looking forward to testing them out, should be soon, because Ced already has some plans for some custom player controls for the kjAPI engine đŸ˜€
