Pet Power Down
Pet Power Down is a desktop game designed specifically with the visually impaired in mind. In a world where most games try to cram as much vital information as they can on the screen in the cleanest way possible, gamers with visual impairments struggle to keep up with the games that don’t have them in mind. Pet Power Down tries to be an experience approachable by a visually impaired audience by taking out the visual component completely and tying it into a friendly theme. The end result was a game about a pet owner looking for their pets in the during a power outage. Everything is pitch black in game and on screen, so sight isn’t particularly beneficial, but you can still navigate using echolocation from the pets making sound directional sounds.
The end result was a really cute game! It forces you to see with your ears instead of your eyes, which hits the nail on the head for a game that is designed to be appealing for the visually impaired. However, in hindsight, my team didn’t quite hit the mark on that front. If you check out the video above or give it a download yourself, you’ll notice that there’s a small light around the player revealing some of the area. It turns out that staring at a pitch black screen makes the game really boring and hard to close out levels, so we opted to give something there, making the game easier for people who can see since getting pets when they were right on top of you and shifting around was tough. How tough? Give the game a try yourself and see… I’ll note that it feels a lot different when there’s sound involved, so the video above really doesn’t do it justice.
Pet Power Down was developed during the first semester of my freshman year in a team of 4 for an intro engineering class, and it was my first real dive into the world of game development and GameMaker Studio 2! Before that I the last time I had really touched game development was all the way back before high school with Scratch, and I don’t think that really counts… Given that I was the one that pitched the idea to the class when groups were getting made, I sort of became the default project leader, though that just meant guiding the direction of the game and helping split role delegation at the start. For the specifics, look below!
Roles & Responsibilities:
Producer:
- Concept pitching
- Team role delegation
- Game directing
- Check-in assignment turn-in
- Team meeting coordination
Programmer:
- Level terrain system
- Player movement system
- Pet movement patterns
- Level asset tiling
- Level clear condition checking
Check out the project on GitHub here!
Interested in hearing more about the development process? Click here to check out the project postmortem!