Timeline: Mar 2024 - May 2024
Role: Interaction Designer
Sightless Steps is a top-down dungeon crawler game that provide an immersive experience for players to learn how visually-impaired individuals navigate the world.
Helena is a visually-impaired teenager who suddenly wakes up at the top of an otherworldly castle. In order to escape, she has to keep walking down the stairs to reach the bottom. Because she has limited sight ability, she has to rely on what she feels, smells, and hears to avoid traps and escape.
The 3 core game mechanics are Touch, Smell, and Sound.
The player uses WSAD keys to move, and use the mouse to paint the surroundings bright. This mechanic mimics how visually-impaired individual uses "touch" to explore the surroundings.
We have to visualize "smell" because we cannot actually let the players smell. We designed a smell indicator on the top-left of the interface:
The smell indicator is located below the life indicator. The emoji represents how the smell feels to Helena, alongside a bar that indicates type and strength of smell.
Besides the smell indicator, different colored ambiance in the game environment also represents different smell. In this demo, Helena smells flower in the garden, so it is purple:
Background sounds are also indicators of Helena's surrounding. In this case, Helena is near a fountain, so the background sound is running water. The volume increases as she steps closer to the fountain.
This demo also shows the smell mechanic using blue ambiance that represents the smell of water (petrichor).
The traps add to the fun of the game by incorporating all the core game mechanics and give players a purpose in each game loop.
Sometimes, the players may need cost items such as potions to add health, or obtain keys that unlock rooms in the dungeon, so we designed an inventory as well.
Here is a demo of the swinging axes trap. The player has to rely on the sound effect of "whoosh" and the visual representation of the wind that Helena feels to judge their distance to the trap.
The inventory navigation is similar to the "touch" core mechanic. The player has to use mouse to uncover the items. The items disappear in about 3 seconds to mimic how visually-impaired individual cannot always "see" what they possess.
By playing this game, players will gain awareness of the challenges faced by visually impaired individuals and learn how they rely on hearing, smelling, and touching to navigate the same world we all share. Players will be able to empathize with blind individuals by utilizing these gameplay mechanics to progress through the game. People who play this game will become more socially aware of the decisions and mental processes that a blind person has to make and the types of limitations they experience in their daily lives.
Based on our interview with 3 visually-impaired individuals with different type of sight loss (1 eye legally blind, central vision loss, and blurred vision) and 1 ophthalmologist, along with online research, we learned about how visual impairment impact individuals, which informed our design process.
1. Visual impairment is a spectrum: Visual impairment varies widely, from light perception to complete blindness, with different causes requiring tailored aids like colored lenses or white canes.
2. Most of visually impaired individuals do not know braille: < 10% of visually impaired individuals use braille, with technology like screen readers becoming more prevalent. Therefore, we did not end up incorporate braille into our gameplay at all.
3. Dreams and Sensory Focus: Blind individuals dream in non-visual senses like touch and sound, highlighting the importance of spatial and sensory elements in gameplay design.
At first, we envisioned Sightless Steps to be a game with 1st-person point of view like Minecraft. We believed that a making the game 1st-person point of view is the best way to create an immersive game experience, as we convey how visually-impaired individuals explore.
Then 2 challenges arises:
1. Design Clarity: It was difficult to effectively represent the experience of visually-impaired navigation in a first-person perspective. The idea of gradually revealing spaces as players encountered obstacles proved confusing and less impactful than intended.
2. Technical Difficulty: Implementing a first-person perspective was resource-intensive and time-consuming, making it impractical for our team given the project's constraints.
Therefore, we decided to shift to a top-down perspective. This approach offered clearer design feedback by allowing players to progressively reveal their surroundings with mouse movements, naturally reflecting the mechanics of exploring unfamiliar spaces. The top-down view also streamlined gameplay by integrating the navigation interface directly into the game environment, eliminating the need for separate map systems.
2 things I learned from this:
1. Flexibility is crucial in design: pivoting early can lead to better outcomes when facing challenges.
2. Constraints can also be opportunities: In this case, the technical limitation encouraged us to rethink about the game format. The limitation inspired creative solutions that enhance both functionality and player experience.