Hey again, Steam!
We’re back with more insights about how our team at Nakama Game Studio develops games, more specifically Coloratura. Ready? Here we go!
For us, but with us
From the moment we started working on Coloratura, there was something very clear for us - we didn’t want to design and develop this game from a purely theoretical way, and we didn’t want to fall into a paternalistic tone. It was important to make the experience as realistic as possible, to really portrait the experience of a person adapting to blindness.
To achieve that, we collaborated directly and constantly with blind people during the development process, especially with Sergio Vera from Videociegos. We talked about his everyday experience, and he tested and iterated constantly through the development process. This not only allowed us to make sure the journey Alex, our protagonist, goes through was believable and felt realistic - it also helped us understand and learn which game mechanics worked and which traditional aids or adaptations that usually are implemented in games designed for blind people actually ruined immersion.
Unlearning Conventional Design
The majority of videogames we play are heavily reliant on graphics and visual aids. This obviously wouldn’t work for a game like Coloratura, so one of the challenges the team faced was shedding those traditional, sight based design biases where the visuals certify the actions. Instead, we had to learn new techniques, get creative and focus on solving spatial and tension mechanics through interactive, haptic sound design.
Extreme Iterative Validation
We decided that a development process based on producing the whole game and testing it at the end wouldn’t work well for Coloratura. Instead, we took the approach of working on sprints with very narrow objectives, validating each technical and sound interface system step by step through testing of our own, with our collaborators we mentioned earlier, and also through playtests at public videogame events around Spain.
And that's all for today! See you next week with another article about the world of Coloratura - this time we'll talk about the lore and the story you'll experience in the game, don't miss it!
Oh, by the way! If you want to stay up to date and even chat with us a bit, we have a Discord server you can join. We'd be happy to have you!
Have a great week,
The team at Nakama Game Studio.
