Accessiability

Mar 14 2020

Last weekend, after publishing the update, I was feeling pretty good. This game was really coming together. I was excited to see someone actually play it.

Who better than my dad.

Now, I mean no offense when I say that my dad is not the best or most experienced computer user on the planet. In fact, he may well’ve never played a proper video game before, ever. So when I asked him to give our game a try, it was treading new ground for him. And that was perfect.

Watching him get through the first few tasks was very eye-opening for me. I thought I was designing this to be accessiable to people who aren’t familiar with commonalities of video games, but it turns out I’d made some assumptions I didn’t notice, like that you should click on things, or moving the mouse is part of gameplay.

To that end, this week’s update is mostly focused on making the systems of the game less mysterious to players that maybe aren’t familiar with video games in general. There’s now a “Click to Continue” prompt that appears on dialog boxes, but only a second or so after all the text has appeared (which means players that know what to do will probably never see it). We added a small tutorial section that instructs a new player how to look around a room (by moving the mouse) and how to interact (by prompting a click). This has a secondary benefit of guiding players to the right to begin with, which will lead them right to the backpack (and the first puzzle) and almost gaurentees their mouse will go past the front door, displaying its exit arrow and hopefully prompting a click (to show players where their ultimate goal is, and how to get a reminder of what needs to be done to get there).

I think the most eye-opening thing my dad revealed during his playthrough, though, was a total design oversight on my part: when asked to find water for the branch, he found his way into the kitchen, then saw a pitcher sitting on the counter and clicked it. He was then confused as to why nothing happened. I hadn’t even considered this, but I’d accidentially introduced one of the worst possible pitfalls in puzzle desing - a solution that makes sense, but doesn’t work for no reason! This one was an easy fix (now there’s a prompt telling you the pitcher is too heavy, we might remove it entirely), but it’s also got me looking over the whole game to make sure there are no more logical solutions that we put in the game that just don’t work.

The last thing I noticed was that it was hard for him to spot the cup. I moved it down the counter, but I also added a mouse-over hint icon that highlights all clickable elements on the screen, which should make it very obvious what you can interact with to avoid that situation.

On the positive side, with the few mechanics the game has described to him, my dad actually made it through the first quest. It was very exciting to see him think through the puzzles (he gave the branch the empty cup, triggering the “the cup is empty” message and reasoned that the sink was the right place to go!), and it gave me some real confidence that this is going in a reaonsable direction.

Once we get a little more done, I intend to seek out more testers of various levels of video game experience. Hopefully we can get the whole game very welcoming to anyone who would play it; the intended audience isn’t limited to just gamers, after all.