Howdy! Let’s talk about accessibility.
Accessibility in games is close to our hearts at myTrueSound. It has always been a part of our studio’s values ever since its start a few years ago when we started doing audio games. Why is it then that Kilta, our next game, is launching into Early Access without any accessibility features? Let’s go over some accessibility-related topics and the reasoning behind our decision to implement it later.
The age-old slogan of myTrueSound. Might be a good time to change it...
Many people coming from the blind and visually impaired community might be familiar with AudioWizards. AudioWizards is an audio game developed by us, which initially was launched on mobile platforms and later got ported to PC. In AudioWizards, the audio game experience was the main development focus: fun to play and fully accessible. Now, I'm using AudioWizards as an example because it's important to differentiate between the arcade-style mobile game and a fully-fledged strategic RPG game meant for PC. The scope of the game correlates with how challenging it is to implement accessible functions.
Gameplay footage of AudioWizards. Visually, the game may not look so exciting, but plugging in headphones produces a whole different experience!
The accessibility in AudioWizards can be divided into two main parts: the menu navigation and gameplay interactions. The menu navigation was quite straightforward as most of the menus were handled with buttons and maybe some sliders here and there. The gameplay interactions were also relatively easy to implement because we only needed to give the players information about the selected spell, the number of lives left, and the super spell timer.
Menu navigation in AudioWizards. With the built-in accessibility features on, you move from element to element by swiping left and right.
In comparison, the accessibility in Kilta can be divided into three main parts, where each part is multiple times harder to tackle than anything found in AudioWizards. The three main parts would be menu navigation, guild management system, and battle mode.
Let's start with the navigation-related challenges. The biggest issue is just the sheer size of the user interface dedicated to navigating around the game. There are progress screens, new game screens, dialogues, recruitment overlays, help pop-ups, many different types of tooltips, and a multitude of custom graphical elements to display, all containing varying amounts of relevant information. Actually, there is more source code for the user interface alone than all the source code in AudioWizards! And each time a menu element is altered in any way, the accessibility of the said element will need to be tested and, in most cases, re-implemented. Even though Kilta is utilizing this ready-made plugin called UAP (Unity Accessibility Plugin), most of its features are designed for the mobile market. Adding accessibility to the more dynamic UI elements found in Kilta is going to be a very time-consuming process.
Kilta has a lot more menus compared to AudioWizards.
The second set of challenges is found in guild management system. The main design principle for the system was to make it as easy as possible to use for the sighted audience. The way you manage your heroes and items is handled via mouse drag and drop. The player can also see all the details of an item or hero when you hover the mouse over the draggable graphic. This system is completely custom-built. Since it doesn't utilize any of Unity's default UI navigation components, I had to manually create all the accessible navigation for those components. During the early development time, we considered a second option of making a completely different user interface for the guild management system, which would be utilized only when accessibility is enabled. But the downside of that option (and the reason why we didn't go with it) was that it would've essentially doubled the required work when a new feature is implemented to the game. I like my code to be efficient, therefore programming the same thing two times is horrifying. Implementing accessibility to the guild management system is definitely one of the main contributors to the fact that the Early Access launch will be without accessibility. Some of the new gameplay mechanics that we implemented during the last weeks were additions to the guild management system.
Drag and drop. The bane of accessibility.
The remaining roadblocks accessibility-wise present in the current state of the game are located in the battle mode. First off, there is a completely custom-built system where the player has the ability to position their heroes inside a 3x3 grid at the beginning of each battle. The gameplay takes place in this environment and uses pixel art sprites to indicate hero and enemy units. Once again, the accessibility had to be tied to this select/deselect system implemented for the sighted audience, which ended up taking quite a lot of development time to get it working right. Once the battle starts, it's not yet fully clear how much we want the text-to-speech to deliver information about abilities, unit incapacitations, status effect timers, and everything else happening on the screen. We do want to share and express everything that is going on during battles with a set of different accessibility features. However, there is just so much going on simultaneously that we have to create the features effectively and not just resort to using text-to-speech tools. Most of the information during battles will be decipherable through sound design because, for example, there are different sound effects for different damage types and how severe the hits are. Although, there are still multiple additional events taking place that will require some sort of text-to-speech solution.
Imagine if every time a character is hit in battle, a number would pop up and a robotic voice would say the number out loud. ... Yep, not ideal.
All in all, I hope that this post gives some insight about the decision as to why we decided to release the Early Access version without any accessibility features on. There is still a certain amount of work left to do for our compromise to make Kilta fully accessible to preferably all audiences. While considering the size of our company and resources, I hope this helped you understand why the main development focus has been to simply release a stable version of the game. I also wish that you still continue to support us during the Early Access period even though the accessibility features will arrive late. Nevertheless, I’m sure you will have the chance to play this game sooner or later. I promise to bring you further updates on accessibility after the Early Access release.
Written by Joonas Muukkonen, the lead programmer at myTrueSound.
Thank you for reading! If you have any thoughts on accessibility and/or Kilta in general, feel free to come to chat with us on our official Discord server or send us a message on Steam.
If you want to hear more about Kilta, follow us and wishlist the game now on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1401560/Kilta/