Blog two: Start! Last time we left our valiant devs, they had just received production funding for The Vale. Now that we had the money, we needed to flesh out our ideas for our all-audio Adventure game.
Two years ago when we started The Vale, there wasn’t this explosion of accessibility in both indie and mainstream gaming. You had some colourblind and key binding accessibility, and surely a few standouts that I’m not mentioning, but aside from that the only place to get accessible content for the BLV community was in audio games.
Just because there weren’t many accessible games in the marketplace that did not mean that there wasn’t a demand for them. For years, many hobbyists, community members, and a small handful of developers have dedicated themselves to crafting audio games - games that allowed those in the BLV community to have similar experiences to mainstream gamers.
Most of these games attempted to take gameplay experiences and translate them in an accessible fashion. For example, Swamp is a multiplayer shooter that is blind accessible and can be played as an all audio game. Swamp has explorable environments, narration, a complex action set, and is by and large and very fleshed out game. The design choices in Swamp were immediately a little jarring to me, but not without good reason.